Matthew Clarke has written a book that is at once as familiar as it is surprising, one that is filled with echoes of the known and with explorations of the new. The theme – that education is a means of both individual and social transformation – is a familiar one; as is the underlying pull in that transformation between the values and perceptions of the present and future on the one hand and those of the past on the other. And in terms of learning processes, tracing the development of new teachers' practices and identities through their preparation and onwards into schools is a recognizable trajectory in the search to understand how professional learning takes place and how contexts of place shape the exercise of that learning. Further, within that trajectory, the demands that preparation in curriculum and in classroom pedagogy must induct these new teachers into different ways of thinking and teaching than their predecessors is also usually a given.

Amongst these many markers of familiarity however, Clarke's argument and design stand out as different and distinctive. What makes them new is the degree to which he is able to expose what is often invisible in the processes of individual and social learning, and the resources that seem to shape these processes. The context of his work brings together a unique constellation of gender and professional identity with the learning and exercise of pedagogy and subject matter, all within a newly transforming society.

In an almost eerie way, the voices of these Emirati women who are becoming new teachers at the beginning of the 21st century in a country recently united from separate states, or emirates, echo those of their sisters of another time and place. Two centuries earlier, in the first half of the 1800s, as the colonial United States was expanding westward, public education took on a central role in promoting social cohesion.