Schools are pivotal social institutions for the present and future of the communities that they serve. Students attend schools in order to learn to better their lives and the lives of all that surround them. Within schools, teachers are central to this learning. While there are many inputs that structure work in classrooms, it is teachers who are the orchestrators of what students do. Increasingly, though, the work of teachers is strongly influenced by curriculum standards and accountability systems created by external authorities. The results are displacing: teachers and their students are positioned to grow disconnected from the communities in which they work and live. Although teachers are positioned as displacing agents in this educational setup, they have been strongly shaped by particular places. Indeed, all people possess a living course of learning experiences--a living curriculum--that has taken place. Learning is inherently embedded in a social context. As place is constructed by one's relationships to one's social surroundings (social, political, cultural, ecological, etc.), learning is a product of place. Across a lifetime, then, people undergo a course of learning in places. A segment of this living curriculum that a teacher possesses is a teaching curriculum, which is a living course that is specific to learning to teach. Experiences in various places, from the schools in a teacher's youth to the school at which a teacher teaches in the present, shape this teaching curriculum. Experiences outside of schools also influence it. Even if asked to teach a displacing content curriculum, a teacher has experienced a course of learning in places. In this study, I examine how three teachers are emplaced in their lives and in their teaching. Each is a public school teacher in a different region of the U.S., and each teaches at a different grade level and in a different subject area. In a chapter on each teacher, I first story the teacher's living curriculum, and then, narrowing my focus, story the teacher's teaching curriculum. I pay particular attention to the ways in which these curricula intersect and, ultimately, shape the teacher's work in school, with students. I worked closely and collaboratively with each teacher, across a series of interviews, and I participated in the teachers' lives at school and away from it. Stories that the teachers shared, alongside the stories of my experiences with the teachers, structure the stories that I tell here. I find that each teacher in this study underwent a process of rooting in the places where they live and teach. Although they possess different living curricula, especially up to the points at which they began teaching, they all became, and continue to be, rooted in their current communities. Comparing those processes of rooting to their work as teachers, I find strong parallels between their lived experiences and their purposes in teaching. As they became rooted in their adult lives, they began to help their students learn to cultivate roots. Theorizing "rooted teaching," I argue that teachers who are rooted in their home and school communities teach their students about forming roots in their own places. This teaching not only teaches students to be active and productive citizens, it is an act of citizenship on the part of the teachers. At a time when schools increasingly displace students, I posit that rooted teaching serves students and their communities.
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