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The construction of teaching and learning subjectivities in tertiary education institutions takes place within postcolonial dynamics, where desires, emotions and conscious and unconscious processes need to be read against the particular social and historical conditions of Kenyan material and political realities. Curiously, Indigenous language texts could be argued as constituting the ‘difficult knowledge’ (Britzman, 2003a, p. 31) of the Kenyan education aims. Britzman’s concept of difficult knowledge refers to knowledge that helps to deal with traumatic history. In the Kenyan context, traumatic history would include dealing with remembering and forgetting imperialism, reconciliation (tribal and/or political violence), loss and death, and the ambivalence of re-imagining the notion of Being in an interconnected global community. Therefore, in order to present a viable analysis of the extent to which teachers’ reading positions (perspectives and perceptions) in Kenya have never been fully appreciated or fully incorporated in teaching and learning, there is a need to explore in-depth studies in this area. This will act as a starting point to an understanding of complex intricacies of preparing teachers in tertiary education institutions in Kenya. The focus in this chapter includes rethinking meaningful culturally responsive pedagogy in tertiary institutions from a global perspective (Svetelj, 2018). The chapter explores the shifting and complex relationship between theory and practice with regard to preparing teachers in tertiary education for a changing world. It reviews and reflects on teaching and learning of English language and literature in postcolonial contexts. Using personal insights, both as an insider (former secondary school teacher in Kenya) and outsider – teacher trainer at a tertiary institution, what Kenyan teachers want from the teaching of English literary texts will be discussed. The contestations regarding best teaching practices, the effects of teaching on the development of self, and resistances in teaching and learning also emerge as issues of relevance to teaching and reading English literary texts in Kenyan education and are useful as departures for critical analysis.

In these uncertain and risky times, the work that educators and educational researchers carry out may feel inconsequential. In preparing young people to live well in a world worth living in, educators must consider, firstly, what roles they can play in a global environment riven by volatile economic, social, and environmental contexts, and secondly, the responsibilities they bear as researchers to produce forms of understanding, modes of action, and ways of relating to one another and this world.

In this chapter, we introduce the pedagogy, education, and praxis (PEP) network and how it is that we, as researchers from around the world, came together to discuss our researching practices in coming to know and explore educational research problems concerning equity, diversity and social justice within and across different cultural settings. We share short stories of ourselves to reveal how it is that we have come to know, be, and act as researchers in our projects and how working alongside each other – our mutual relatings – have generated further understanding about our own and each other’s researching practices.

This chapter establishes the purpose of the book, where we share empirical work through the lens of practice architectures. For instance, what is considered to be an educational equity problem across international or cross-cultural sites? What are considered acceptable forms of evidence of coming to understand educational inequity in its diverse forms in different sites? How are taken-for-granted research practices enabling and/or constraining different forms of understandings about educational inequity, including the issues to be researched and/or the direction of the research project? We then provide an overview of the remaining chapters.