This book inspires educational practitioners with special regard to the way how practice in the frontline service is able to inform leadership and policy decision. It empowers them to identify what features are counted as professional and how they could be turned into sources for developing wise judgment and eliciting creative acts in teaching, lesson planning and course design, collaboration, and knowledge excavation to shape policy decision and planning. In addition, for those who are used to conceive the world and their practice from a positivist tradition may find the insights of this book illuminating particularly when they are looking for a paradigm shift in understanding their practice. Last but not least, educators and teacher educators in particular will find the ideas in this book more promising in escalating the awareness of teachers of the next generation towards what is ‘good’ (phronesis) in terms of their professional attitude and actual performance (informed byboth techne and episteme) in their relevant settings.    

Ronald Wai-yan Tang earned his M.Ed. and Ph.D. in education from The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He received his M.A. in Literary and Cultural Studies from The University of Hong Kong. Among his many interests are dialogic or relational pedagogy and ethical leadership, implications of jazz as a metaphor for organizational studies, dialogic hermeneutics, discursive policy analysis, and teaching as a performing art.