International Teachers’ Lived Experiences: Examining Internationalised Schooling in Shanghai (International and Development Education) 3030786854, 9783030786854

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INTERNATIONAL AND DEVELOPMENT EDUCATION

International Teachers’ Lived Experiences Examining Internationalised Schooling in Shanghai Adam Poole

International and Development Education

Series Editors W. James Jacob, Collaborative Brain Trust, American Fork, UT, USA Deane E. Neubauer, East-West Center, Asia Pacific Higher Education Research, Honolulu, HI, USA

The International and Development Education Series focuses on the complementary areas of comparative, international, and development education. Books emphasize a number of topics ranging from key higher education issues, trends, and reforms to examinations of national education systems, social theories, and development education initiatives. Local, national, regional, and global volumes (single authored and edited collections) constitute the breadth of the series and offer potential contributors a great deal of latitude based on interests and cutting-edge research. The series is supported by a strong network of international scholars and development professionals who serve on the International and Development Education Advisory Board and participate in the selection and review process for manuscript development. SERIES EDITORS W. James Jacob, Vice President of Innovation and International, Collaborative Brain Trust, and Fulbright Specialist, World Learning and U.S. Department of State Deane E. Neubauer, Professor Emeritus, University of Hawai‘i at M¯anoa and Adjunct Senior Fellow, East-West Center INTERNATIONAL EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD Clementina Acedo, Webster University, Switzerland Philip G. Altbach, Boston University, USA N’Dri Thérèse Assié-Lumumba, Cornell University, USA Dennis Banda, University of Zambia Carlos E. Blanco, Universidad Central de Venezuela Sheng Yao Cheng, National Chung Cheng University, Taiwan Evelyn Coxon, University of Auckland, New Zealand Edith Gnanadass, University of Memphis, USA Wendy Griswold, University of Memphis, USA Ruth Hayhoe, University of Toronto, Canada Yuto Kitamura, University of Tokyo, Japan Jing Liu, Tohoku University, Japan Wanhua Ma, Peking University, China Ka Ho Mok, Lingnan University, China Christine Musselin, Sciences Po, France Yusuf K. Nsubuga, Ministry of Education and Sports, Uganda Namgi Park, Gwangju National University of Education, Republic of Korea Val D. Rust, University of California, Los Angeles , USA Suparno, State University of Malang, Indonesia Xi Wang, University of Pittsburgh, USA John C. Weidman, University of Pittsburgh, USA Weiyan Xiong, Lingnan University, China Sung-Sang Yoo, Seoul National University, Republic of Korea Husam Zaman, UNESCO/Regional Center for Quality and Excellence in Education, Saudi Arabia Collaborative Brain Trust 45 W South Temple, #307, Salt Lake City, UT 84010, USA Asian Pacific Higher Education Research Partnership East-West Center1601 East-West Road, Honolulu, HI 96848, USA

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14849

Adam Poole

International Teachers’ Lived Experiences Examining Internationalised Schooling in Shanghai

Adam Poole Independent Researcher Beijing, China

International and Development Education ISBN 978-3-030-78685-4 ISBN 978-3-030-78686-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78686-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © MirageC/Moment/gettyimages This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Series Editors Introduction

We are pleased to introduce another volume in the Palgrave Macmillan International and Development Education book series. In conceptualizing this series we took into account the extraordinary increase in the scope and depth of research on education in a global and international context. The range of topics and issues being addressed by scholars worldwide is enormous and clearly reflects the growing expansion and quality of research being conducted on comparative, international, and development education (CIDE) topics. Our goal is to cast a wide net for the most innovative and novel manuscripts, both single-authored and edited volumes, without constraints as to the level of education, geographical region, or methodology (whether disciplinary or interdisciplinary). In the process, we have also developed two subseries as part of the main series: one is cosponsored by the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawai‘i, drawing from their distinguished programs, the Professional Development Program and the Asia Pacific Higher Education Research Partnership (APHERP); and the other is a publication partnership with the Higher Education Special Interest Group of the Comparative and International Education Society that highlights trends and themes on international higher education. The issues that will be highlighted in this series are those focused on capacity, access, and equity, three interrelated topics that are central to educational transformation as it appears today around the world. There are many paradoxes and asymmetries surrounding these issues, which

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include problems of both excess capacity and deficits, wide access to facilities as well as severe restrictions, and all the complexities that are included in the equity debate. Closely related to this critical triumvirate is the overarching concern with quality assurance, accountability, and assessment. As educational systems have expanded, so have the needs and demands for quality assessment, with implications for accreditation and accountability. Intergroup relations, multiculturalism, gender, health, and technology issues comprise another cluster of opportunities and challenges facing most educational systems in differential ways when one looks at the disruptive changes that regularly occur in educational systems in an international context. Diversified notions of the structure of knowledge and curriculum development occupy another important niche in educational change at both the pre-tertiary and tertiary levels. Finally, how systems are managed and governed are key policy issues for educational policymakers worldwide. These and other key elements of the education and social change environment have guided this series and have been reflected in the books that have already appeared and those that will appear in the future. We welcome proposals on these and other topics from as wide a range of scholars and practitioners as possible. We believe that the world of educational change is dynamic, and our goal is to reflect the very best work being done in these and other areas. This volume meets the standards and goals of this series and we are proud to add it to our list of publications. W. James Jacob Collaborative Brain Trust Deane E. Neubauer University of Hawai‘i at M¯anoa and East-West Center

Preface

As a teenager, I was obsessed with the Beatles. I knew their music inside out. My ear became so attuned to their sound that I could name any of their songs within the first few beats. However, when the Beatles released a collection of outtakes and rarities as part of their Anthology series, it felt like I was listening to them again for the first time. I was struck by how clear the initial performances were. Often, the first take would consist of drums, guitar, and bass. When listened to in this form, the music was vibrant. It had a warm, resonant live sound to it, as if you were in the room whilst it was being played. The music was rough: You could hear the mistakes, the fingers fumbling for the chords, a guide vocal leaking into the drum microphones, takes breaking down, false starts. It was honest. However, once the recordings had been overdubbed and the mistakes corrected, that live sound was gone. It no longer felt as if you were in the room with the band. It did not feel honest. Suddenly, those recordings that my ear had grown so accustomed to felt like imitations. The reader may very well be wondering what the Beatles have to do with International Schooling and International School teachers. The Beatles’ example serves as an analogy to show what I am trying to do in with this book. I am listening for the resonant live sound of International School teachers’ lived experiences. The International School arena was once considered to be somewhat anomalous (Pearce, 2013) and something of a well-kept secret. Traditional International Schools, or Type

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A schools (Hayden & Thompson, 2013), were designed for the children of a global trans-national elite whose children required schooling that would enable them to enter a university in their home countries. However, in the last ten years or so, a new type of International School has emerged. Rather than catering to the children of transnational elites, these new schools, referred to as Type C non-traditional schools (Hayden & Thompson, 2013), are frequented by local middle-class students. Within China, these Type C schools have been referred to as Chinese bilingual schools, or, as I like to call them, Chinese Internationalised Schools. Chinese Internationalised Schools typically follow the Chinese National Curriculum until the end of grade 9, with students transitioning to some type of international curriculum (such as IGCSEs/A’ Levels or the IBDP) for the remainder of their high school years. Along with this shift from traditional to non-traditional international schooling, we can also see the emergence of a new type of international schoolteacher. Typically, teachers in Type A schools will be licensed practitioners back in their home countries and/or have experience of teaching. Whilst this type of teacher can be found in Type C schools, the vast majority (at least in Chinese Internationalised Schools) are not career teachers. Rather, they are what Bailey and Cooker (2019) call ‘Accidental’ teachers. These teachers may not necessarily be qualified teachers. Yet, they still find employment in Chinese Internationalised Schools, if not always due to their professional capital, then certainly as a result of their embodiment and performance of ‘western whiteness’. I was an ‘Accidental’ teacher. I did not set out to be a teacher, but by happenstance, I became one. I spent ten years teaching in Chinese Internationalised Schools. To return to the analogy of the ‘live sound’, I was in the room improvising alongside the teachers. I saw mistakes. I made mistakes. It was all live, raw, and raucous. In a colleague’s words, teaching was a ‘messy business’. However, when I undertook my doctorate research, and in writing this book, I found that the studies I was reading just did not have that same organic resonance or crude earthiness. The immediacy and messiness was absent. I felt this most keenly when reading about the different types of teachers as theorised by teacher typologies. I was reading about ‘the Maverick’ (Hardman, 2001), a global traveler or someone seeking to escape from national constraints and other issues in their home country. It is likely that we all know a teacher who fits this description. I was reading about ‘Type A’, ‘Type B’, and ‘Type C’ teachers

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(Bailey & Cooker, 2019). Type A teachers see their job as supporting travel and mobility. Type B teachers see their jobs in ideological terms. Type C teachers have a primary attachment to the locale in which the international school is situated. I read about the ‘adventurer’ (Rey et al., 2020)—young teachers who, to escape the debts they have accrued in their home countries, often due to university fees, flee to teach overseas. But, I was not reading about me or my colleagues: Teachers who fell into teaching though happenstance or necessity. Teachers who had very little to go back to in their home countries, or who, for various economic or political reasons, could not return to their home countries. We were teachers who were part of a precariat, a group of individuals whose lives are characterised by uncertainty and insecurity. We were teachers who, despite the precarious situations we found ourselves in, still managed to survive and even thrive. To return to the analogy of recording, I could not hear the resonant live sound of our lived experiences. This absence was partly due to the novelty of Chinese Internationalised Schools, but also due to a paucity of work that critically engages with the International School Teacher experience. The typologies could be thought of as a form of quantizing that renders the contradiction and messiness of the lived into a processed experience. Quantizing is used in music production and transforms performed musical notes, which may have some imprecision due to expressive performance, into an underlying musical representation that eliminates this imprecision. The labels I was studying were too neat. They rendered the lived experience into a processed experience. The ‘Accidental’ teacher label came close to capturing the complexity of our experiences, but it was not sufficiently nuanced to capture the heterogeneity within our group. We may all have become International School teachers through chance, but our motivations, experiences, struggles, and strategies for surviving and thriving were all very different. Researchers need to listen to the voices of teachers, whilst also capturing the resonant live sound of lived experience. They need to listen to the outtakes, the rehearsals, the unprocessed voices of the teachers before being saturated in a river of theoretical reverb. This book re-frames the traditional researcher-participant hierarchy by offering a new assemblage: that of the practitioner-researcher-participant dyad. This is no easy task, and I am mindful of the need to find a balance between my roles as practitioner and academic. If the participants voices are left to just speak for themselves, the result is a lack of academic integrity. However,

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if the participants’ voices are silenced by the symphony of theory, then it is the researcher’s voice that becomes privileged. In this book, I wish to retain the energy and vibrancy of teachers’ lived experiences, but in a form where theory complements ambivalence and contradiction rather than concealing them. Theory is used to capture the resonant live sound of lived experience. This book, therefore, is written for practitioners and academics. Beijing, China

Adam Poole

References Bailey, L., & Cooker, L. (2019). Exploring teacher identity in international schools: Key concepts for research. Journal of Research in International Education, 18(20), 125–141. Hardman, J. (2001). Improving recruitment and retention of quality overseas teacher. In S. Blandford, & M. Shaw (Eds.), Managing international schools (pp. 123–135). Routledge Falmer. Hayden, M., & Thompson J. J. (2013). International Schools: Antecedents, current issues and metaphors for the future, in R. Pearce (Ed.), International education and schools: Moving beyond the first 40 years (pp. 3–23). Bloomsbury. Pearce, R. (2013). International education and schools: Moving beyond the first 40 years. Bloomsbury. Rey, J. Bolay, M., & Gez, Y. N. (2020). Precarious privilege: personal debt, lifestyle aspirations and mobility among international school teachers. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 18(4), 361–373.

Acknowledgments

It is impossible to thank everyone who directly or indirectly assisted in the writing of this book but let me try. Thanks to the participants, Daisy, Tyron, Sophie and Robert, whose generosity and candidness made this book a reality. Thanks to Professor Bob Adamson who supervised the doctoral thesis from which this book emerged. Thanks to Linda Braus at Palgrave Macmillan for your positivity and timely assistance in seeing this book through to publication. Thanks to Jessica Cohen for proof-reading this book and your insightful comments and suggestions. Thanks to Giovanna Comerio, who has always ready to answer my innumerable questions about all things academic. Il miglior fabbro. Finally, I reserve the biggest thanks and eternal gratitude to my wife, Maggie, and my beautiful son, Henry. Without your love, support, and understanding, I never could have mustered the courage to begin this book or summoned the willpower to finish it.

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Praise for International Teachers ’ Lived Experiences

“This book is a timely and valuable contribution to research on Chinese education mobilities, especially on international teacher mobility in China. Poole provides vivid phenomenological details about the precarious yet resilient, the surviving while also thriving lived experiences of ‘accidental’ international schoolteachers in China’s internationalised schools. Poole’s theorisation of the ‘sur-thrival’ of these international schoolteachers is innovative and carries tremendous analytical promise for the field. This book would be of great interest to scholars and students of teacher education, international and comparative education, China studies and migration studies. I highly recommend this book.” —Cora Lingling Xu, Assistant Professor in Education, Durham University, UK “This fascinating book shines a torch on hidden treasures and profoundly enriches our understanding of teacher identity. Through carefully elicited biographies and painstaking analysis of teachers on the periphery, Adam Poole vividly captures the messiness, precariousness and resilience embedded in the lived experiences of westerners in international schools in China.” —Bob Adamson, Visiting Professor, University of Nottingham Ningbo China

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PRAISE FOR INTERNATIONAL TEACHERS’ LIVED EXPERIENCES

“This book is truly original. It delves deep into an under-researched and under-theorised world. The lived experiences of those who ‘accidently’ end up teaching in the emerging arena of non-traditional international schools in mainland China offer a fascinating insight into coping within a complex field of insecurity and precarity. The ‘Chinese Internationalised School’ is a growing beast and hearing the voices of some who work in them is a fascinating treat. What we discover is that they not only survive but seemingly thrive, building up reserves of experience and resilience.” —Tristan Bunnell, Lecturer in International Education, University of Bath, UK “This is a must-read book for those interested in the lived experience of teachers in China’s rapidly changing international school landscape.” —Ewan Wright, Assistant Professor, Department of Education Policy and Leadership, The Education University of Hong Kong

Contents

1

Introduction 1.1 Interlude # 1 1.2 Introduction 1.3 Purpose of This Book 1.4 Defining Lived Experience 1.5 Background to This Book 1.5.1 Methods 1.5.2 Relational Ethics as a Guiding Methodology 1.6 Situating This Book Theoretically 1.7 Outline of Chapters References

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Mapping the International School Landscape: Situating Chinese Internationalised Schools 2.1 Introduction 2.2 Conceptual Difficulties of Defining the ‘International’ in International Schooling 2.3 Defining the International School 2.4 Metaphors for Understanding the International School Landscape 2.4.1 Arena 2.4.2 Field 2.4.3 Landscape 2.5 The Changing Landscape

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2.5.1 Geography 2.5.2 Demography 2.5.3 Function 2.5.4 Legitimacy 2.6 Making Sense of the Changing Landscape 2.7 Chinese Internationalised Schools 2.7.1 Curriculum 2.7.2 Students and Parents 2.7.3 Teachers 2.8 The Research Context: ‘automobile, Suburb, Empty’ 2.8.1 The Curriculum 2.8.2 The International Curriculum: The IBDP 2.8.3 The Enacted Curriculum 2.8.4 Students and Parents 2.8.5 Teachers 2.9 Summary of Chapter References 3

International School Teachers: Motivations and (Mis)conceptions 3.1 Interlude #2 3.2 Introduction 3.3 Who Are International School Teachers? 3.3.1 Motivations for Relocating, and Staying Overseas 3.3.2 Narrative # 1: To See the World (or Seeking Out Greener Pastures) 3.3.3 Narrative # 2: To Escape Financial and Personal Issues (or the Wild West of International Education) 3.3.4 Narrative # 3: To Find Employment (or Riding the Gravy Train) 3.3.5 Narrative # 4: To Escape the Tyranny of Performativity (or, Out of the Fire and into the Frying Pan) 3.3.6 Narrative # 5: Why Teachers Stay in the Field (or ‘a Lot of Them End up Staying Overseas Because They Have no Good Reason to Go Home’)

35 35 36 37 37 39 41 44 45 46 48 49 50 50 51 52 53 59 59 60 61 62 62

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3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7

International School Teacher Typologies Critical Response to the Typologies Metaphysical Critique Ethical Critique 3.7.1 Relational Ethics 3.8 Summary of Chapter 3.9 Introducing the Participants 3.9.1 Daisy 3.9.2 Sophie 3.9.3 Tyron 3.9.4 Robert References

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68 71 72 73 75 77 77 77 78 80 81 82

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The (Inter)cultural 4.1 Interlude #3 4.2 Introduction 4.3 Traditional Accounts of the Intercultural 4.4 Critical Interculturality 4.5 Getting Critical About Critical Interculturality 4.6 Teachers’ Experiences of the (Inter)cultural 4.7 Cultural Chauvinism? 4.8 Cultural Insider 4.9 Cultural Mediator 4.10 Summary of Chapter References

87 87 88 91 92 94 95 96 99 102 104 105

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The Precarious 5.1 Interlude #4 5.2 Introduction 5.3 International School Teachers as a Global Educational Precariat 5.4 International School Precarity 5.5 International School Teachers as a Global Middle Class 5.6 Teachers’ Lived Experiences of Precarity 5.6.1 ‘I Left Without a Fight, like Most International Teachers Do’ 5.6.2 ‘If You don’t Perform, They’re Going to Send You Home’

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5.6.3

‘I don’t Know What Kind of Thing is the International Way of Teaching’ 5.6.4 ‘You Are just a Foreigner Who doesn’t Get Anything’ 5.7 The Emergent Picture of Precarity in Chinese Internationalised Schools 5.8 Summary of Chapter References 6

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The Resilient 6.1 Interlude #5 6.2 Introduction 6.3 Precarious Privilege 6.4 Resilience 6.5 Deepening Resilience from the Perspective of Perezhivanie 6.6 Teachers’ Lived Experiences of Resilience 6.6.1 ‘What I Realised Was All That I Could Do Was Things That I Could Control’ 6.6.2 ‘I Did Achieve Some Personal Growth and Also Professional Growth’ 6.6.3 ‘It Also Comes with Emotional Consequences’ 6.7 Summary of Chapter References Conclusion 7.1 Introduction 7.2 Sur-Thrival 7.3 Implications for Research 7.4 International Schooling 7.5 The Emergence of an Internationalised School Landscape in China 7.5.1 American-Style International Schools 7.5.2 British-Style International Schools 7.5.3 Canadian-Style International Schools 7.6 Mapping the Typography of the Internationalised School Landscape in China 7.6.1 Comparing Teachers’ Experiences of Precarity, Resilience, and Interculturality Across Multiple Chinese Internationalised Schools

122 126 129 132 132 137 137 138 139 141 143 146 146 152 156 162 163 167 167 168 170 175 179 180 180 180 181

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Exploring Different Types of Chinese Internationalised Schools 7.6.3 Developing the Continuum of Internationalised Schools 7.7 Summary of Chapter 7.8 Epilogue: International Schooling and Covid-19 References

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7.6.2

Index

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List of Figures

Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

4.1 5.1 6.1 6.2 7.1 7.2

Sophie’s identity artefact: Student art exhibition Conceptual confusion Robert’s kayak on Moturoa, and the Bay of Islands Tyron’s slush fund Multimodal approach to resilience Continuum of Internationalised Schools for Chinese host country nationals

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List of Tables

Table 2.1 Table 2.2 Table 2.3 Table 2.4

Overview of type A, B, and C international schools in Shanghai Typology of type C schools Overview of Chinese internationalised schools in Shanghai Typology of Chinese internationalised schools

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

1.1

Interlude # 1

I had expected the university to resemble the universities in the UK: green, modern, and vibrant. What I found, instead, was a concrete campus on the outskirts of the city: drab and devoid of any personality. I also found the teaching a shock. I was hired to teach conversational English to second—and first-year Chinese students. However, there would be sixty students in each class. Needless to say, there was plenty of talking, but mostly from students conversing with one another in Chinese whilst I frantically tried to get them to listen to me. When I approached a senior member of staff who had been assigned as my mentor, I was informed that I had signed the contract and, therefore, had agreed to teach large classes. Another shock was the location. The university was on the outskirts of the city, which made the trip downtown arduous. There was one bus that ran from the campus, but this was always completely full. The other option to get downtown was to take a mian bao che (or a bread van), an illegal taxi service. This was the quicker option, but the drivers would not leave until they had crammed as much human bread into the van as possible. Once downtown, the struggle continued. There were beggars, and on one occasion, a young girl, who could have been no more than six or seven, latched her arms around my friend, refusing to let go until © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Poole, International Teachers’ Lived Experiences, International and Development Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78686-1_1

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we gave her some money. On another occasion, when visiting a Buddhist temple, I was chased by a one-legged beggar. Then, there were the disfigured and disabled forms lying in the gutter, a begging bowl in front of them. A dismembered man (he had no arms) was on a trolley, begging by the side of the road. The old man who sat in the subway, his face seemingly eaten away by disease or fire (I could not tell which of the two it was), had two scabbed sockets for eyes. I later found out that these individuals were deposited into the gutter by family in order to elicit sympathy and money. My initial response was to pack up and leave. However, I felt I had something to prove to myself, the world and, most of all, to my family. Their parting words as I boarded the plane back in London had been: ‘You will be home in a month for two’, and these words still haunted me. Despite the hardships, the experience was mostly affirming in nature. Firstly, it taught me that I enjoyed teaching and that I could teach. The first few months had been a struggle, but over the course of the two years, I had managed to have some success at teaching. Secondly, it revealed that I had reserves of resilience that I had not thought I possessed. If I could survive that city then I could surely survive anywhere. Despite not having a teaching qualification, I was able to use my two years’ experience at the university, as well as my Master’s degree, as a springboard to secure a job at a Chinese Internationalised School in Shanghai.

1.2

Introduction

The opening interlude describes my unconventional route into International School teaching. It was not exactly the glamorous picture of the globe-trotting expatriate that often springs to mind when one thinks of an international educator. Whilst the majority of International School teachers enter the arena of International Schooling from a position of experience and advantage (they are qualified teachers and/or have teaching experience), I had to work my way up the ladder, as it were, starting out in a third-tier city in China and using that experience as a kind of metaphorical back-door into International School teaching. Since then, I have spent my International School teaching career in Type C Nontraditional International Schools (Hayden & Thompson, 2013) or, as I have come to refer to them, ‘Chinese Internationalised Schools’, that is, private fee-paying schools that offer some form of international curricula

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to, largely, Chinese middle-class students (Poole, 2020a). Chinese Internationalised Schools are characterised by the (often uneasy) collocation of national and international orientations (Poole, 2020a). My experience is not unique. Increasingly, teachers from nontraditional backgrounds are entering the arena and finding themselves employed in Type C Schools (Hayden & Thompson, 2013). Such teachers have been referred to as ‘Accidental’ teachers (Bailey & Cooker, 2019; Tomlinson, 2011). In their study of non-qualified teachers in International Schools, Bailey and Cooker (2019) found that for the vast majority of their participants, becoming a teacher was something that had happened to them, and their agency in this process was purely reactive. Many of the teachers I have worked with over the last ten years fall into this category, as do all of the participants in this book1 : Tyron: I came to China because of practical reasons. I came because I had no work. Sophie: My main goal is to do something in art, to continue to make art. The best combination I think to continue to make art is to be an art teacher. Daisy: Because my major is teaching Chinese as a second language, during my major I get in touch with lots of foreigners, and I feel like I like English more than Chinese so I decided I wanted to be an English teacher. Robert: I went teaching in China because I couldn’t find suitable work in New Zealand. I continued to do it mainly because I had nothing to go back to. These teachers represent a distinct group, whose lives are characterised by mobility, precarity, and a lack of security. As they have little or nothing to go back to, it is imperative that these teachers make a go of it within the arena of International Schooling. However, as the arena itself is highly precarious (Bunnell, 2016), characterised by short-term contracts that lead to high turnover, success is never guaranteed. Aside from Bailey and Cooker (2019), little attention has been paid to this group, despite their growing numbers (Bunnell & Poole, 2020). This book addresses this gap by exploring the lived experiences of four ‘Accidental’ teachers (Bailey & Cooker, 2019), Tyron, Sophie, Daisy, and Robert in a Chinese Internationalised School in Eastern China (WEST). At the time of this

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study, WEST was a recently opened private boarding school in Shanghai that offered an ‘internationalised’ curriculum combining aspects of ‘Chinese’ and ‘Western’ approaches to learning. The school promoted an international perspective by offering international curricula such as the IGCSE (International General Certificate of Secondary Education) and IBDP (International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme) and employing a range of educators (native/non-native speakers, qualified/non-qualified teachers) to deliver these courses. The small sample allowed the participants’ individual voices to come through more strongly. Whilst the relatively small sample makes generalisation problematic, the study was designed to be idiographic in nature, indicative of a particular bounded instance. Moreover, the small sample facilitated rich description and verisimilitude due to the prolonged nature of the interviews, which created a snowball effect, whereby more data was generated through the member-checking process. Ultimately, the aim was to explore the intercultural, precarious, resilient, messy, complex, and ambivalent nature of the teachers’ lived experiences, something which required breadth to be sacrificed for depth. Until recently, International School Teachers were under-reported and under-represented in the literature (Bailey, 2015; Gardner-McTaggart, 2020). I recall during my doctorate trawling through the literature for anything on teachers’ experiences in International Schools. Aside from a few papers (Garton, 2000; Hardman, 2001; Hayden & Thompson, 1998; Joslin, 2002), there was sadly little available. Moreover, the literature that I could find did not reflect the lived experiences of ‘Accidental’ teachers. In the last few years, however, there has been something of an International School Teacher turn in the field of International Education research. Some of the key areas of research include exploring reasons for why teachers enter the field (Bailey & Cooker, 2019; Rey et al., 2020), teachers’ experiences of intercultural adaptation (Poole, 2019a; Savva, 2017), micro-politics (Blyth, 2017; Caffyn, 2018), precarity (Bunnell, 2016; Poole, 2019b), and resilience (Bunnell & Poole, 2020; Poole, 2020b). Bailey and Cooker (2019) offer three lenses for understanding International School Teachers. In addition to the ‘accidental teacher’ touched upon above, they also offer the ‘third-culture teacher’ (teachers who see themselves not as professional teachers in their country of origin or in their country of residence, but as belonging primarily to a third culture of teacher identity—that of the teacher in an international school) and a

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typology of International School Teachers comprised of Type A (teaching supports travel), Type B (teaching makes a difference in students’ lives), and Type C teachers (teaching due to personal connection to the local context). International School teachers have also been conceptualised in terms of a Global Middle Class (GMC). The GMC is defined as a ‘new’ class, identified by their being servants of capital, rather than being owners of capital as exemplified by the more established Transnational Capitalist Class (Sklair, 2001). Understanding teachers in International Schools as part of a GMC focuses on the more positive aspects of being a globally mobile teacher, such as the accumulation of cosmopolitan capital. In contrast, Bunnell has argued that, despite the advantages afforded by International School Teaching, International School Teachers can be seen as part of an emergent precariat, a term developed by Standing (2011) to denote an increasingly large group of workers suffering from precarity, a condition of existence without predictability or security. Short-term contracts (Poole, 2020b), micro-politics (Caffyn, 2018), and unfair dismissal (Blyth, 2017) are all examples of International School precarity. Bunnell (2017) further develops the theorisation of International School Teachers by conceptualising them as a ‘middling’ (Tarc & Tarc, 2015) group who have features of both the corporate expatriate and the precariat. More recently, International School Teachers have been conceptualised as embodying features of both the global middle-class and the precariat (Poole, 2020b). The ‘Accidental’ teachers of this book can thus be thought of as a subgrouping of International School Teacher that complements the concepts of an International School Teacher precariat (Bunnell, 2016) and the ‘middling’ expatriate (Tarc & Tarc, 2015). In the case of ‘Accidental’ teachers, our lack of agency and teaching experience/qualifications would suggest that we embody characteristics of the precariat whilst lacking the agency of the Global Middle Class. Whilst this is true to an extent, this book also shows that despite our experiences of precarity, we are able to survive, and in some cases thrive, due to the development of ‘resilience capital’ (Poole, 2020b).

1.3

Purpose of This Book

This book develops the notion of the Accidental teacher, an emerging yet under-researched group, by focusing on four teachers (five, including myself) who belong to this group and exploring their lived experiences.

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This book also develops the theorisation of the context in which many Accidental teachers work, namely, Type C schools or ‘Chinese Internationalised Schools’ (Poole, 2020a). A few notable studies notwithstanding (e.g. Kostogriz & Bonar, 2019; Young, 2018), little research has been done on Chinese International Schools. This may strike the reader as strange considering that Type C schools are now ubiquitous the world over and, in China, are fast becoming the most numerous type of International School (Gaskell, 2019). Moreover, Chinese Internationalised Schools, have been positioned as incomplete International Schools (Poole, 2020a). However, this book argues that they should be decoupled from normative models derived from a western-centric perspective and taken on their own terms. This book also develops the theorisation of Chinese Internationalised Schools. Chinese Internationalised Schools are characterised by a number of international and national orientations that are often at odds. These orientations include beliefs about teaching and learning, the nature of ‘international curricula’, organisational structure, and professional identity (Poole, 2020a). This tension feeds into and exacerbates what is already a precarious working-environment, characterised by insecurity brought about through short-term contracts, unfair dismissal, early termination of contracts, and the marginalisation of professional identities. This tension emerges due to (mostly expatriate) teachers’ inability or unwillingness to adapt to the field of the school, which is fundamentally national in orientation. However, rather than becoming defeated by this insecurity, the teachers in this study developed strategies for dealing with their precarity. These strategies were rooted in the development of what I call ‘resilience capital’ (Poole, 2020b), a metaphorical storehouse of previously overcome crises and lessons learnt that teachers draw upon when encountering new difficulties. These strategies include transitioning from one school to the next, synthesising national and international orientations, and using past experiences as a map for negotiating the uncertainties of the future. Finally, this book interrogates and interrupts the tendency for International School Teachers to be explored from above or from the outside, which positions us as the researched. This book offers an alternative, and complementary, perspective that is grounded in our lived experiences. This approach is best described as ‘polyphonic’. In musical terms, polyphony refers to a complex interweaving of melodies associated with

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counterpoint, musical lines (or voices) which are harmonically interdependent yet independent in rhythm and melodic contour (Williams, 2015). Developed by Bakhtin (1981) in relation to the novel, polyphony refers to a diversity of simultaneous points of view and voices in which contradictory voices emerge to create a polyphonic whole (Williams, 2015). I employ three voices or melodies in order to explore Accidental teachers, Chinese Internationalised Schools, and the positioning of teachers as the researched. There is the academic voice of ‘the literature’, representing an etic, or an outsider’s, perspective. For me, the development of teacher typologies represents what Bakhtin referred to as monologism or ‘homophony’ where characters are the author’s mouthpiece and exist solely to transmit the author’s ideology (Williams, 2015). This reduction or positioning is as much an ethical issue as it is a metaphysical one, something I return to later in Chapter 3. There are the personal voices of the participants representing an emic, or an insider’s perspective. It is their voices for which I searched in vain during my doctoral research and give voice to in this book. Finally, there is my own autobiographical voice, which represents a synthesis of the teacher and the academic. My narrative is not told in a linear fashion in one chapter. Rather, it is spread across the book, popping up here and there at the beginning of some of the chapters. My own autobiographical account could be thought of as a counterpoint to the academic discourse. These chapters open with part of my own narrative, which adumbrates the theme under investigation, which is then followed by what the literature has to say about the topic. Finally, I draw upon the participants’ interviews in order to explore the lived reality of working in a Chinese Internationalised School. At times, these melodies will harmonise. At others, they will clash. The dissonance between these three melodies highlights the gap between emic and etic perspectives and compels us to situate our analysis somewhere between these two extremes, in the shadowy realm of lived experience. Although the emic is privileged in this book, it requires a polyphony of perspectives in order to capture and articulate the complexity of lived experience, hence why I devote considerable space to establishing the context in which teachers work (Chapter 2).

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1.4

Defining Lived Experience

The lived experiences of ‘Accidental’ teachers are far more complex than their label suggests, taking on three inter-related dimensions: the intercultural, the precarious, and the resilient. These dimensions were emerging during my doctoral research and are expanded upon in this book. Lived experience enables us to move beyond simply parsing the International School experience into either ‘positive’ or ‘negative’, which, as I show in Chapter 3, has been the tendency of existing research. Moreover, there is currently an over-emphasis on the negative side of International School teaching, what has been referred to as ‘the negative discourse on International Schooling’ (Bunnell, 2019). This discourse tends to view International Schools as inherently precarious. Whilst it is necessary to posit a more positive discourse on International Schooling as a counterbalance to the prevailing negative discourse, we must exercise caution lest we inadvertently move to the other extreme. What is needed is a way to bring the negative and the positive into dialogue, which becomes possible through the notion of lived experience. What do I mean by lived experience? Why not just focus on the teachers’ experiences? Simply put, experience and lived experience represent two very different states of ontology. Whereas experience insists on the correlation between situational (the environment, such as the school) and personal features (the individual’s personality and character traits), lived experience gives priority to the meaning or interpretation of the subject herself (Blunden, 2016). The phenomenological dimension of experience is captured in Vygotsky’s concept of perezhivanie. Perezhivanie is a theoretical concept specifically related to the process of development, the role of the environment, and the laws of development (Veresov & Fleer, 2016). The social may be a priori, out there in the world, but the relationship between self and society becomes dialectical in nature. We may internalise the world around us, which creates frames of reference which mediate our understanding of the world. Yet these frames also change as a result of our interactions with the world. The environment mediates our minds, but our minds also mediate the environment. As Vygotsky explains, ‘it is not any of the factors in themselves (if taken without reference to the child) which determines how they will influence the future course of his development, but the same factors refracted through the prism of the child’s perezhivanie’ (Vygotsky, 1994, pp. 339–340). Lived

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experience could be thought of as a prism through which social experience is refracted. Developing Vygotsky’s idea of perezhivanie (1994), Blunden (2016) situates perezhivanie within a Deweyan tradition which understands experience as being comprised of countable experiences—that is, selfcontained episodes, ‘each with its own plot, its own inception and movement toward its close, each having its own particular rhythmic movement’ (Dewey, 1939, p. 555). A perezhivanie, or a critical episode, can be seen as a process that involves reflection, catharsis, and, finally, integration. Development occurs once an individual has ‘worked through’ a perezhivanie and the inchoate identity has become ‘integrated within and demarcated in the general stream of experience from other experiences’ (Dewey, 1934, p. 35). It is in this sense of working through and struggling that lived experience is used in this book in relation to teachers’ experiences in Chinese Internationalised Schools. Lived experience from a Vygotskian perspective allows us to focus on the significations that individuals ascribe to experiences, without losing sight of the environment. One limitation of a phenomenological perspective is a tendency to refine the environment out of existence, leaving nothing but environment as it appears within consciousness. At the same time, adopting a positivist approach commits the same sin but in the opposite direction. We end up with things out there in the world, but no way of accessing how these things are perceived by individuals. Lived experience enables us to bring the self and the environment together. It also replaces the notion of consciousness, which for me is ineffable and, therefore, unknowable, with the idea of self, which is constituted by and through language and discourse, and is therefore empirically knowable. Of particular value is the observation that the self or the mind cannot be separated from the environment (in this case, The Chinese Internationalised School). Rather, the two form an irreducible unity. A Vygotskian approach to lived experience as a reciprocal and dialectical process allows for a more nuanced picture of the Chinese Internationalised School to emerge. Significantly, whilst International Schools, and Chinese Internationalised Schools in particular, are ‘tense’ and ‘messy’ spaces (Bunnell, 2019), it does not necessarily follow that all teachers perceive the school in the same way. Some teachers are able to thrive despite the precarity. It has been noted that whilst turnover is

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high teachers do not exit the arena of International Schooling but move from school to school (Poole & Bunnell, 2020). Therefore, something is keeping the teachers ‘on the circuit’, aside from the economic benefits. Based on the participants’ interviews, this ‘something’ is the development of resilience, which is derived from both positive and negative experiences. This argument leads to the proposal of two concepts: ‘resilience capital’ (Poole, 2020b) and ‘sur-thrival’.

1.5

Background to This Book

This book was born out of my doctoral research, which explored how teachers in a Chinese Internationalised School in Shanghai, China, negotiated cross-cultural identities (Poole, 2019a). Once completed, I realised that the most significant contribution that the thesis made was its exploration of the lived experiences of teachers. The data for this book has been collected over a four-year period in a somewhat piece-meal and fragmentary fashion. Initial data collection was collected as part of my doctorate from 2017–2019. Further interviews were conducted with Tyron after completion of the doctorate. Finally, new interviews were conducted for the writing of this book. Except for Sophie, with whom I sadly lost contact, I have managed to remain in contact with the participants via email, social media, and WeChat, a popular social messaging app in China. Collecting new interview data has enabled me to revisit the participants’ experiences at WEST multiple times. Each pass produced something new. Staying in contact with the participants thus enabled me remain a part of their world. 1.5.1

Methods

Interviews were employed as the main method of data collection. The interview has traditionally been seen as the go to method for exploring the subjective significations that individuals ascribe to their experiences. The qualitative interview is also described in metaphorical terms as a conduit or window that gives the researcher access to the ‘unmediated mind’ (Hughes et al., 2020b) of the individual. This level of experience might be thought of in terms of a stream of consciousness—experience as it is experienced. Underpinning this belief is the assumption that there is a correspondence between what is said during the interview and

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the unmediated ‘inner’ experiences, perceptions, and ‘lifeworlds’ of the participants (Hughes et al., 2020b). However, this prevailing assumption that the interview offers an ‘authentic gaze into the soul of another’ (Atkinson & Silverman, 1997, p. 305) has been challenged as part of the so-called ‘radical critique’. This critique highlights the growing tendency in qualitative research to treat interviews as encounters in which an authentic voice is permitted to speak, typically in ways that ignore the biographical and narrative work involved in such interview talk (Hughes et al., 2020a). It also questions the ontological status of the interview, arguing that the interview tells us something about what people do in interviews rather than anything beyond the actual interview context (Atkinson, 2015). Despite this critique, there have been attempts to reclaim the qualitative interview, albeit in modified form. The aim is to facilitate a shift from focusing upon interview ‘data’ as an unmediated product and towards interview ‘talk’ as a form of action (Hughes et al., 2020b). With this critique in mind, I retain the interview, which for me still offers researchers a unique perspective on lived experience, but in an augmented form. Mixing metaphors, the interview, as traditionally conceived, might be better thought of as a delineating frame or a kind of cookie cutter: it marks out the terrain and establishes boarders. It is the subsequent research process that paints the detail, as it were. Hughes et al. (2020b, p. 542) articulate this in terms of the ‘processual character of research’ where the interview as ‘encounter’ is but one aspect of a broader set of processes that include, amongst other things, transcription, analysis, the development of findings, and published outputs. Although there are numerous approaches to the qualitative interview, I considered phenomenological interviewing to be most commensurate with lived experience as an ethical and open-ended endeavour. As developed by Seidman (2013), phenomenological interviewing makes the following assumptions: human experience is temporal and transitory in nature; individuals understand their experiences subjectively, thereby leading to lived experience; meaning is not reified or abstracted, but needs to be understood in context, which also draws attention to the role of language and discourse in meaning. According to Seidman (2013), in order to achieve the depth required to explore meaning in context, it is necessary to conduct separate interviews, with each interview fitting into the other like a Russian Doll. The first interview focuses on an individual’s life history, exploring early

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experiences of family, friends, school, and university. The second interview concentrates on the participants’ present lived experiences, focusing on details rather than opinions. The third interview involves participants being asked to reflect on the meaning of their experience, focusing on how the factors in their lives interact to bring them to their current situation. Adapting Seidman’s approach, the participants in my study were each interviewed three times over a nine-month period, from 2016 to 2017. The first round of interviews was designed to provide rich background information about the participants’ formative learning experiences in order to provide a context in which to situate the second and third interviews. The second round of interviews were designed to elicit more specific responses about the participants’ current experiences of working at WEST. The final round of interviews was undertaken on an ad hoc basis over two years, from 2018 to 2020. Alternative tools for interviewing, such as voice messaging via the Chinese app, ‘WeChat’, were used because some of the participants had left the school. 1.5.2

Relational Ethics as a Guiding Methodology

Respect for the authority of the lived experience of the individual, which demands understanding not just explanation, also called for an alternative approach to ethics, one that was more nuanced and flexible than the seemingly monolithic credo of ‘do not harm’. This understanding can only come about through prolonged interactions with participants and coming ‘alongside’ them (Clandinin, 2016, p. 45) in the research process. Whilst my relationship with the participants as a colleague enhanced validity by providing rich data, it nevertheless created some potential ethical issues. For example, although I was not a superior to any of the participants, I was in a position of perceived power over them due to the fact that I was a male researcher (two of the participants were female) and the chosen language for conducting the interviews was in English (all but Robert spoke English as a second language). I was also conscious of the potential ramifications that the research might have for the participants in WEST and also on our working relationship. Kvale (2006) underscores the fact that interviewers have a power position in terms of setting the stage and ruling the interview in accordance with their research interests. Moreover, gender has been identified as playing a significant role in the construction of power relations in the interview context (Vähäsantanen

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& Saarinen, 2013). Researchers note that cross-gender researcher interactions can affect the building of rapport and data collection, as male and female participants respond differently to the gender of the researcher and vice versa (Sallee & Harris, 2011). Within the cross-cultural context my own study, this situation could have been compounded due to the potential added power differential of language (the interviews were conducted in English) and race (Daisy was Chinese). In order to mitigate the issues highlighted above, the study was founded upon relational ethics where ethical decisions/actions were made within the context of a relationship that involved mutual respect, engagement, embodied knowledge, environment, and uncertainty (Pollard, 2015). Mutual respect informed analysis of the interview data. The interviews were initially analysed inductively, generating codes from the data rather than imposing pre-existing themes or codes onto the data (Cohen et al., 2011). This led to the generation of three over-arching themes which form the spine of this book: the intercultural, the precarious, and the resilient. The transcripts and emerging analyses were shared with the participants, who were encouraged to edit or change their responses, as well as contribute to the analysis of their interviews. Engagement meant that the participants should be as involved in the project as much as they felt comfortable. Engagement also meant that I was engaged in what the participants said. I was not just an interpreter, but, most crucially, an empathetic listener. In listening to the participants’ stories, I attempted to display ‘positive universal regard’ (Rogers, 1995), that is, listening empathetically without judgement. Embodied knowledge involved recognising that lived experience is more than simply a construct—teachers work and teach through the body. It is also involved continually returning to the teachers themselves: Not the teachers as abstracted and reified through their representation in the interview data, but the actual, physical teachers themselves—the teachers as living human documents (Gerkin, 1984). Remaining in contact with the participants and knowing what was going on in their lives enabled me to bring their physicality back into the picture. The environment was significant because it undergirded so much of the research process. Although my focus was on lived experience, it was essential to keep the research context firmly in view, as many of the issues discussed by the participants originated in structures out in the world, rather than within the mind. The environment was also significant because it informed researcherparticipant roles. I may have been a colleague to the participants, but

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my role as a researcher also introduced asymmetries of power into the relationship that complicated the research process. It was necessary to reflexively address these issues and, to a certain extent, resolve them by nurturing a relational ethics, which placed care and collaboration at the forefront of the research process. Finally, uncertainty took on multiple dimensions within the project. There were many unexpected turns in the research process. These turns involved my transition from international schooling to working in academia, Robert and Daisy leaving WEST, and falling out of contact with Sophie, whose voice has ended up being somewhat under-utilised in this book as a consequence. Despite these changes, I have been able to remain in close contact with Daisy, Tyron, and Robert, which has enabled me to update my interpretation of their interviews by using their current insight into their past experiences. There is also the uncertainty of knowledge. The knowledge that we produce is never final but always provisional. The construction of teacher typologies belies the open-ended and indeterminate nature of knowledge. At best, researching teachers’ lives can tell us where a teacher currently is in their lives or where they want to be. It offers a snapshot. By returning to the participants and seeing where they were in relation to their ongoing life projects, I was able to fold their deepening understanding of their time at WEST back into the project. The prolonged nature of the research also enabled me to make numerous detours from the project, from which I returned with a new insight into the nature of the project and its aims. Some of these detours were hermeneutic in nature. I initially began the project with a clear sense of my researcher role in terms of an interpreter of the participants’ experiences. However, as the project progressed, I came to view my role as one of the editor. Some of the detours were ethical in nature, as touched upon above where I described having to continually return to the teachers as living humans rather than in their reified state in the interview data. Ultimately, these detours have enabled me to return to the participants and their interviews with fresh eyes and to gain new insights into their experiences. By repeatedly circling around and coming back to the participants’ experiences, certain themes and tropes gradually emerged that took on the form of leitmotifs. For example, Robert would continually discuss learning as a journey. Tyron would come back to the emotional impact of living apart from his family. Daisy would talk about discovering a ‘real’ form of international education. These motifs became the bedrock on which I built my interpretation of the interviews.

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In a sense, this recursive and iterative method of interviewing had something of a grounded approach to it. It came to the stage where it was not possible to get anything new from the participants because everything had already been said. The resulting responses were variations on a theme. This became apparent to me in the final interviews for this book, conducted in early October of 2020. Whilst a few new insights did emerge, I was struck by how familiar the responses were. The research process had reached ‘saturation’, to use the term from grounded theory (Strauss & Corbin, 1998). Or, it had reached saturation in terms of the topics I was investigating—precarity and resilience. Despite the many detours, I kept returning to the same issue: the tension between theory, representation, and verisimilitude. My aim was to offer a more authentic account of teachers and Chinese Internationalised Schools, but within an academic framework. Yet, how to capture this authenticity academically without diluting it through the over-use or mis-use of theory was no simple task. To the best of my knowledge, there were only two books, aside from blogs, that presented the voices of international school teachers in their raw state, unmediated by theory. These collections are entitled, The new normal: Tales from international school teachers (Duncan & Minor, 2017) and The new normal vol. II: More tales from international school teachers (Duncan & Minor, 2019). The books are a collection of short narratives from international school teachers from around the world. Whilst these books present the voices of international school teachers authentically, they literally do just that—we get voices without any interpretative context. At the other extreme, the international school typologies developed by Hardman (2001), Bailey and Cooker (2019), and Rey et al. (2020) represent, for me, the over-dilution of teachers’ voices. This is something I explore further in Chapter 3. Clearly, it is necessary to find some middle ground between these two positions. In order to create this middle ground, it is necessary to embrace multiple theories and approaches, which are described next.

1.6

Situating This Book Theoretically

As will become evident to the reader, whilst I situate this book firmly within a qualitative/interpretative paradigm, I roam freely, perhaps even irreverently, across numerous academic disciplines and fields, such as international education (my starting point and main field), sociology, cultural psychology, interculturality, teacher identity, critical and positive

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psychology, narrative inquiry, autoethnography, and the bricolage. The reason for this eclecticism is two-fold. In order to capture the ontological complexity of lived experience, it is necessary to draw upon multiple theoretical perspectives. The theoretical constructs that have come to dominate the study of international schooling—such as a sociology of International Schooling (Resnik, 2012)—and related constructs—such as the precariat (Bunnell, 2016; Poole, 2019b), the global middle-class (Tarc et al., 2019) and Bourdieu’s capitals (Bunnell, 2017; Khalil & Kelly, 2020)—are by themselves insufficiently nuanced to capture the lived experiences of Accidental teachers and the schools in which they work, namely, the Chinese Internationalised School. These existing concepts bring into focus the wider, structural nature of the field, but do not necessarily offer us an insight into how individuals relate differentially to these structures. This is particularly the case for older teachers, whose life experiences are significantly different from those of younger teachers but which remain under-acknowledged in the literature (Koh, 2020). In order to get at ‘Accidental’ teachers ‘differential capacities’ (Koh, 2020), it is necessary to draw upon a range of concepts in order to unite structural and subjective phenomena. Whilst I do draw upon the concepts of the precariat, the global middle-class and Bourdieu’s capitals, they are a means to an end: capturing the teachers’ lived experiences. Moreover, these tools are not always commensurate with the kind of teacher authenticity I am trying to present in this book. They represent, and therefore reproduce, the researchers’ gaze, hence why I utilise a bricolage of approaches, which enables me to assemble from the fragments a bespoke approach that is commensurate with a burgeoning academic position—that of the International School teacher as researcher. By adopting an oppositional identity, I am able to forge a liminal positionality, somewhere between teacher and researcher. The reader will find that this identity necessitates the deployment of a range of registers and forms. In places, the register is very much formal, academic, and detached, whilst in others, the register lurches into the personal, the informal, and even the poetic. Once again, these shifts in register are by design: they help to create verisimilitude and also disrupt accepted academic narratives that position International School Teachers as receptacles of answers.

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Outline of Chapters

Chapter 2 offers the reader information about the context in which international school teachers work, namely, international schools. As there is a great deal of contestation concerning the definition and purpose of these schools, it is necessary to unpack this complexity for the reader. Moreover, many of the struggles that the participants talk about in their narratives are a result of structural issues related specifically to international schools (i.e. a clash of national and international orientations, such as teaching staff, curricula, and pedagogical approaches). Therefore, it is necessary to rehearse the definitions and purposes in this chapter in order to situate the narratives within a context. The chapter also explores the concept of the Chinese Internationalised School and offers more contextual information about the research site, WEST. Chapter 3 zooms in and explores the actors who work in International Schools, namely, the teachers. It explores a number of typologies that have been used to understand International School teachers. These typologies identify different types of international school teacher. Early endeavours focused on classifying teachers according to contract types (Garton, 2000) and personality traits (Hardman, 2001). The main limitation of these typologies is that they paint a rather static picture of teachers’ identities and experiences. The critique takes on two dimensions: metaphysical and ethical. From a metaphysical perspective, the typology assumes that individuals embody a core identity that remains the same over time and place. Following this metaphysical assumption, teachers become objects for research. They are akin to receptacles of answers. For me, identity and ethics go hand in hand. To not engage in the ethics of identity is to miss a fundamental aspect of teachers’ experiences in Chinese Internationalised Schools. It is akin to symbolic violence. This critique sets up the rest of the book and provides further justification for focusing on teachers’ lived experiences. This chapter also introduces the participants using an autoethnographic approach—that is, they will introduce themselves in their own words with very little interpretative gloss from the author. This section is designed to ‘give voice’ to the participants and also to establish significant biographical details that help to frame subsequent chapters. Chapter 4 explores the first dimension of International School Teachers’ lived experiences, namely, the intercultural. This chapter explores the intercultural dimension by problematising the assumption that teachers develop intercultural identities as a result of working in transnational

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spaces. It does this by drawing upon the notion of ‘critical interculturality’ as articulated by Fred Dervin (2016). Hence, the use of parenthesis in the chapter title ‘(inter)cultural’ is designed to draw attention to the fact that Chinese Internationalised Schools tend to be monocultural in nature (they are comprised predominantly of local teaching staff and dominated by Chinese organisational logics). Similarly, the use of ‘inter(cultural)’ in relation to teachers’ identities relates to the prevalence of ‘solid’ or ‘cultural’ identities that emerged from the findings, which can also be attributed to the monocultural nature of Chinese Internationalised Schools. Chapter 5 explores the second dimension of International School Teachers’ lived experiences, namely, the precarious. This chapter utilises the concepts of the precariat and precarity to highlight the struggles that teachers face working in International Schools. It then mobilises the concept of the Global Middle Class to bring into focus the affordances and benefits that working in International Schools brings to teachers. Having established these two concepts, this chapter next returns to the lived experiences of the participants, which clearly shows the need to bring multiple sociological lenses into play. The participants’ experiences show that it is also necessary to explore the complex, messy, murky space between them, which gives rise to the notion of resilience and sur-thrival, which are explored in subsequent chapters. Chapter 6 explores the third dimension of International School Teachers’ lived experiences, namely, the resilient. This chapter situates itself within Bunnell’s call for a more positive sociology of International Schooling. The chapter begins by framing the literature on precarity in International Schools in terms of a more general discourse within Sociology that focuses on the negative. This sets up the next section, which draws upon the work of Bunnell (2019) in order to problematise this tendency to focus on the negative. Bunnell argues that whilst it is true that International Schools are precarious in nature, most teachers do not leave the arena of International Schooling but rather transition from one school to the next. This indicates that despite the difficulties teachers face, they are able to survive and thrive—what I refer to as ‘sur-thrival’. Taking Bunnell’s argument as inspiration, I develop a complementary perspective, rooted in positive psychology.

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Chapter 7 draws together the ideas developed in Chapters 5 and 6 in order to flesh out the idea of sur-thrival. This concept combines notions of precarity and resilience in order to develop the theorisation of International School teachers’ experiences in International Schools. The aim is to move beyond understanding international school teachers’ experiences simply in terms of survival. As the interview data clearly shows, there is more going on than coping. Despite the precarity, or perhaps because of it, teachers are able to develop and grow. The concept of sur-thrival is then used to sketch a new research trajectory. This chapter also raises implications for researching Chinese Internationalised Schools. It draws upon the notion of ‘legitimacy’ and ‘primary institutional purpose’ (Bunnell et al., 2017) in order to develop the idea introduced in Chapter 2 that Chinese Internationalised School should be ‘decoupled’ (Poole, 2020a) from normative models of the ‘Traditional International School’ (Hayden & Thompson, 2013) derived from the global North. Finally, this chapter proposes a number of research trajectories that future research could develop. The chapter ends by speculating on the impact that Covid-19 is likely to have on the International School landscape.

Note 1. Although the focus of this book is on teachers who viewed teaching as a means to an end, there are undoubtedly many teachers who view teaching as an end in itself. A former colleague who proof-read this book observed that: ‘It seems like many of the teachers in your sample were teaching for some “other” factor. Teaching was a means to ___ instead of teaching for the sake of impacting students’ lives and playing a role in their lives. Indeed, it takes a certain type of person to leave home and go off into the world of international education, but I don’t think that means that the teacher’s purpose and intent are necessarily erased or absent’ (J. Cohen, personal communication, January 9, 2021).

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Bailey, L. (2015). Reskilled and ‘running ahead’: Teachers in an international school talk about their work. Journal of Research in International Education, 14(1), 3–15. Bailey, L., & Cooker, L. (2019). Exploring teacher identity in international schools: Key concepts for research. Journal of Research in International Education, 18(20), 125–141. Bakhtin, M. (1981). Discourse in the novel. The dialogic imagination: Four essays (Trans. M. Holquist and C. Emerson). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 259–422. Blunden, A. (2016). Translating perezhivanie into English. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 23(4), 274–283. Blyth, C. (2017). International schools, teaching and governance: An autoethnography of a teacher in conflict. Palgrave Macmillan. Bunnell, T. (2016). Teachers in international schools: A global educational ‘precariat’? Globalisation, Societies and Education, 14(4), 543–559. Bunnell, T. (2017). Teachers in international schools: A neglected ‘middling actor’ in expatriation. Journal of Global Mobility: The Home of Expatriate Management Research, 5(2), 194–202. Bunnell, T. (2019). Leadership of ‘messy, tense international schools’: The potential scope for a fresh, positive lens of inquiry. International Journal of Leadership in Education, 1–13. Bunnell, T., & Poole, A. (2020). Out of the fire and into the frying pan? The British Journal of Educational Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/00071005. 2020.1853673. Bunnell, T., Fertig, M., & James, C. (2017). Establishing the legitimacy of a school’s claim to be “International”: The provision of an international curriculum as the institutional primary task. Educational Review, 69(3), 303–317. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2016.1213224. Caffyn, R. (2018). ‘The shadows are many…’ Vampirism in ‘international school’ leadership: Problems and potential in cultural, political, and psycho-social borderlands. Peabody Journal of Education, 93(5), 500–517. Clandinin, D. J. (2016). Engaging in narrative inquiry. Taylor and Francis. Cohen, L., Manion, L., & Morrison, K. (2011). Research methods in education. Routledge. Dervin, F. (2016). Interculturality in education: A theoretical and methodological toolbox. Springer. Dewey, J. (1934). Art as experience. Perigree. Dewey, J. (1939). Having an experience. In J. J. McDermott (Ed.), The philosophy of John Dewey, two volumes in one (pp. 554–573). University of Chicago Press. Duncan, K., & Minor, M. (2017). The new normal: Tales from international school teachers. Independently Published.

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Duncan, K., & Minor, M. (2019). The new normal vol. II: More tales from international school teachers. Independently Published. Gardner-McTaggart, A. (2020). Washing the world in whiteness; ‘international schools’ policy. Journal of Educational Administration and History. https:// doi.org/10.1080/00220620.2020.1844162. Garton, B. (2000). Recruitment of teachers for international education. In M. Hayden & J. J. Thompson (Eds.), International schools and international education: Improving teaching, management and quality (pp. 145–157). Kogan. Gaskell, R. (2019, April 22). The growing popularity of international K12 schools in China. ICF Monitor. https://monitor.icef.com/2019/04/gro wing-popularity-of-international-k-12-schools-in-china/. Gerkin, C. V. (1984). The living human document. Abingdon Press. Hardman, J. (2001). Improving recruitment and retention of quality overseas teacher. In S. Blandford, & M. Shaw (Eds.), Managing international schools (pp. 123–135). Routledge Falmer. Hayden, M., & Thompson, J. (1998). International education: Perceptions of teachers in international schools. International Review of Education, 44(5–6), 549–568. Hayden, M., & Thompson, J. (2013). International schools: Antecedents, current issues and metaphors for the future. In R. Pearce (Ed.), International education and schools: Moving beyond the first 40 years (pp. 3–24). Bloomsbury Academic. Hughes, J., Hughes, K., Sykes, G., & Wright, K. (2020a). Beyond performative talk: Critical observations on the radical critique of reading interview data. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 23(5), 547–563. https://doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2020.1766757. Hughes, K., Hughes, J., & Cocq, F. P. L. (2020b). Introduction: Making the case for qualitative interviews. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 23(5), 541–545. https://doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2020. 1766756. Joslin, P. (2002). Teacher relocation: Reflections in the context of international schools. Journal of Research in International Education, 1(1), 33–62. Khalil, L., & Kelly, A. (2020). The practice of choice-making: Applying Bourdieu to the field of international schooling. Journal of Research in International Education, 19(2), 137–154. https://doi.org/10.1177/1475240920954045. Koh, S. Y. (2020). Disrupted geographical arbitrage and differential capacities of coping in later-life: Anglo-western teacher expatriates in Brunei. International Migration Review. https://doi.org/10.1177/0197918320926910. Kostogriz, A., & Bonar, G. (2019). The relational work of international teachers: A case study of a Sino-foreign school. Transitions: Journal of Transient Migration, 3(2), 127–144.

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Kvale, S. (2006). Dominance through interviews and dialogues. Qualitative Inquiry, 12(3), 480–500. Pollard, C. L. (2015). What is the right to do: Use of a relational ethic framework to guide clinical decision-making. International Journal of Caring Sciences, 8(2), 362–368. Poole, A. (2019a). How internationalised school teachers construct cross-cultural identities in an internationalised school in Shanghai, China, Doctoral thesis, University of Nottingham, UK. Poole, A. (2019b). International education teachers’ experiences as an educational precariat in China. Journal of Research in International Education, 18(1), 60–76. Poole, A. (2020a). Decoupling Chinese internationalised schools from normative constructions of the international school. Compare, 50(3), 447–454. Poole, A. (2020b). Internationalised school teachers’ experiences of precarity as part of the global middle class in China: Towards ‘resilience capital’. The Asia-Pacific Education Researcher, 29(3), 227–235. Poole, A., & Bunnell, T. (2020). Developing the notion of teaching in ‘international school’ as precarious: Towards a more nuanced approach based upon ‘transition capital.’ Globalisation, Societies and Education, 1–11. https://doi. org/10.1080/14767724.2020.1816924. Resnik, J. (2012). Sociology of international education–An emerging field of research. International Studies in Sociology of Education, 22(4), 291–310. https://doi.org/10.1080/09620214.2012.751203. Rey, J., Bolay, M., & Gez, Y. N. (2020). Precarious privilege: Personal debt, lifestyle aspirations and mobility among international school teachers. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724. 2020.1732193. Rogers, C. R. (1995). A way of being. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Sallee, M. W., & Harris, F. (2011). Gender performance in qualitative studies of masculinities. Qualitative Research, 11(4), 409–429. Savva, M. (2017). The personal struggles of ‘national’ educators working in ‘international’ schools: An intercultural perspective. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 15(5), 576–589. Seidman, I. (2013). Interviewing as qualitative research. A guide for researchers in education and the social sciences. Teachers College Press. Sklair, L. (2001). The transnational capitalist class. Blackwell. Standing, G. (2011). The precariat: The new dangerous class. Bloomsbury Academic. Strauss, A., & Corbin, J. (1998). Basics of qualitative research: Techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory. SAGE.

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Tarc, P., & Tarc, A. (2015). Elite international schools in the Global South: Transnational space, class relationalities and the ‘middling’ international schoolteacher. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 36(1), 34–52. Tarc, P., Tarc, A., & Wu, X. (2019). Anglo-Western international school teachers as global middle class: Portraits of three families. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 40(5), 666–681. Tomlinson, C. A. (2011). Notes from an accidental teacher. Educational Leadership, 68(4), 22–26. Vähäsantanen, K., & Saarinen, J. (2013). The power dance in the research interview manifesting power and powerless. Qualitative Research, 13(5), 493–510. Veresov, N., & Fleer, M. (2016). Perezhivanie as a theoretical concept for researching young children’s development. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 23(4), 325–335. https://doi.org/10.1080/10749039.2016.1186198. Vygotsky, L. S. (1994). The problem of the environment. In J. Valsiner & R. Van der Veer (Eds.), The Vygotsky reader (pp. 347–348). Blackwell. Williams, P. A. (2015). Writing the polyphonic novel. NAWE, 1. https://www. nawe.co.uk/DB/wip-editions/editions/writing-in-practice-vol-1.html. Young, N. A. (2018). Departing from the beaten path: International schools in China as a response to discrimination and academic failure in the Chinese educational system. Comparative Education, 54(2), 159–180.

CHAPTER 2

Mapping the International School Landscape: Situating Chinese Internationalised Schools

2.1

Introduction

This chapter offers the reader information about the context in which International School teachers work, namely, International Schools. As there is a great deal of contestation concerning the definition and purpose of these schools, it is necessary to unpack this complexity for the reader. Moreover, many of the struggles that the participants talk about in their narratives are the result of structural issues related specifically to International Schools (i.e. a clash of national and international orientations, such as teaching staff, curricula, and pedagogical approaches). Therefore, it is necessary to explore them in this chapter in order to situate the narratives within a context. This chapter begins by discussing the conceptual difficulties of defining International Schools. It then explores the different types of International School by drawing upon Hayden and Thompson’s (2013) typology, which is used to introduce some of the changes that have occurred in the International School landscape, with particular focus on the rise of Type C Non-traditional International Schools in the Asia–Pacific region and China. These schools have grown rapidly in the fertile soil of a ‘post-ideal’ market-orientated epoch, satisfying local middle-class families’ desire for global mobility and distinction. The chapter then defines the scope of the International School landscape before mapping the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Poole, International Teachers’ Lived Experiences, International and Development Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78686-1_2

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changing landscape in relation to four dimensions: geography, demography, function, and legitimacy. This lays the groundwork for developing the category of Type C schools by offering a sub-type within the Chinese context, referred to as ‘Chinese Internationalised Schools’. This chapter argues that Chinese Internationalised Schools (as well as Type C schools in general) tend to be conceptualised in terms of incomplete international schools. This in turn affects how we approach the teachers who work in them, who might also be positioned as incomplete/inferior. It is necessary to ‘decouple’ Chinese Internationalised Schools from traditional International Schools so that they are seen as complete ‘Internationalised’ Schools and not as incomplete ‘International’ Schools. Taking a more positive approach to these schools is the first step towards (re)claiming the lived experiences of the teachers who work within them. The chapter ends by zooming in and describing the research context—a Chinese Internationalised School called WEST (pseudonym). This description includes the curriculum (intended and enacted), symbolic routines, and information about the parents and the students.

2.2 Conceptual Difficulties of Defining the ‘International’ in International Schooling Offering a clear-cut definition of the International School is problematic. The term ‘International School’ reveals many ambiguities and is loosely applied to a wide range of schools and institutions (Joslin, 2002). Firstly, the term ‘international’ itself is highly contested, and is inherently polysemic, something of a free-floating signifier, signifying everything and nothing. For some, such as Gellar (2003), the adjective ‘international’ is understood in utopian terms as a commitment to universal values. For others (e.g. Basaran & Olsson, 2018), the adjective ‘international’ has no fixed meaning as such but is a marker of social class and distinction. This is echoed by Gardner-McTaggart (2020, p. 5), who argues that, ‘far from evoking a sense of international solidarity and freedom, [it] now acts as a reification of luxury, advantage, and leadership whether in this context or even more broadly’. For others (Van Oord, 2007), the term ‘international’ is a synonym for western humanism, with international curricula—such as the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme—being seen as a kind of ‘Trojan Horse’ (Poole, 2018).

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Secondly, the International School landscape has changed a great deal in the last fifty years or so and continues to change at a dramatic rate, particularly in the global South, which has emerged as the main arena of activity (Bunnell, 2019a). Whilst once it might have been possible to speak of the International School in the singular, the growing focus on international education in local contexts (Hayden, 2006) has led to the proliferation of schools calling themselves international (Hayden & Thompson, 2013). Therefore, when attempting to answer the question, ‘What is an international school?’ it is first necessary to acknowledge the difficulty of such as task and to foreground the complexity and the heterogeneity of the International School landscape. Although it has been argued that any attempt to define the International School is futile (Hayden & Thompson, 2000a), I nevertheless attempt to offer some working definitions in order to provide the reader with an overview of the context in which the Chinese Internationalised School has emerged in recent years.

2.3

Defining the International School

The ISC1 2015 defines an International School as any school that offers some form of curriculum in English to students outside of an Englishspeaking country. Whilst this umbrella definition is useful, it is nonetheless broad in nature, failing to capture the reality of the International School landscape, which is both diverse and complex. Another issue with the definition is its Anglo-centric bias, which assumes that International Schools provide an English-medium curriculum (Bunnell et al., 2017). It could be argued that English could be substituted by a different language, such as Putonghua (Mandarin Chinese). A final issue with the definition offered by ISC is that it is overly descriptive in nature. Bunnell et al. (2016) argue that the ISC’s definition is insufficiently nuanced to underpin a legitimate claim for a school to label itself as ‘International’. Moreover, the authors argue that any claim to be ‘international’ needs a wider underpinning from a broader range of institutionalising forces. For some (e.g. Gellar, 2003), this range of institutionalising forces rests upon a commitment to so-called universal values, such as world peace, justice, fairness, and compassion. For others, the curriculum (Skelton, 2003) is the foundation on which the International School is built. It has also been suggested that cultural diversity in the student body (Hayden & Thompson, 2000b) is a pre-requisite for a school to be ‘legitimately viewed on a normative

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basis as ‘international’ (Bunnell et al., 2016, p. 413). Once again, the differing definitions of what the ‘international’ in International School actually means throws into sharp relief the ISC’s umbrella definition. More useful is the notion that International Schools fall along a continuum (Hayden & Thompson, 1998). This is illustrated in Hayden and Thompson’s (2013) now paradigmatic typology of International Schools. Unlike the ISC’s definition, which is too general, the authors identify three main types of International School: Type A Traditional International Schools; Type B Ideological International Schools; and Type C Non-traditional International Schools. Table 2.1 provides the reader with examples of each type of school in China, including the research site, WEST, in order to illustrate the differences more clearly. Table 2.1 Overview of type A, B, and C international schools in Shanghai Type A traditional

Type B ideological

Type C non-traditional

Name of school

Shanghai American School

WEST

Curriculum

K-12, independent, non-profit school Comprehensive American standards-based curriculum Offers IBDP and AP (Advanced placement)

United World College (UWC), Changshu Provides a holistic education for children and young people Offers the IBDP, Pre-DP programme and a Chinese programme

Student demographic

3,350 students More than 40 nationalities

Teacher demographic

90% of faculty are foreign nationals Two-thirds from North America

443 students, aged 16–19 from 99 countries and regions Expatriate and Chinese

K-12 According to the school, an ‘integrated’ curriculum is offered, taking the best from Chinese and international education Chinese national curriculum from K-8; IGCSE, 9 and IBDP 10–12 Chinese nationals

Chinese and expatriate (majority are Chinese)

(continued)

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Table 2.1 (continued)

Educational philosophy/mission/values

Type A traditional

Type B ideological

Type C non-traditional

Emphasises value of individualism, such as a lifelong passion for learning; a commitment to act with integrity and compassion; the courage to live their dreams Value of individualism is reflected in the core value: ‘when individuals take responsibility for their own decisions, they are empowered to make positive impact’

Shares UWC mission and values to promote: International and intercultural understanding; Celebration of difference Personal responsibility and integrity; Mutual responsibility and respect; Compassion and service’

The school aims to create: Patriotic citizens with a global perspective; Active and lifelong learners with critical thinking ability; Confident, optimistic leaders who are willing to confront challenges; Problem solvers who actively integrate available resources

Adapted from Hayden and Thompson (2013)

Traditional International Schools can be traced as far back as the late nineteenth century (Hayden, 2016) but really only started to gain traction in the early twentieth century with the establishment of the International School of Geneva and Yokohama International in 1924 (Hayden & Thompson, 2013). These International Schools were designed to cater to the children of globally mobile expatriates and, until late into the twentieth century, represented the majority of International Schools (Hayden & Thompson, 2013). Despite difficulties of categorisation, Type A schools exist in response to a pragmatic market demand. In contrast to Type A schools, Type B schools were not created specifically to satisfy market demand, but serve an ideological purpose (Hayden & Thompson, 2013). These schools are exemplified by the United World Colleges (UWCs) and are based largely on the vision of Kurt Hahn, who sought to promote international understanding and peace through education (Hayden, 2006). These schools have been created to bring young people together which, according to Hayden and Thompson (2013), is based on an underpinning ideology that many of the problems faced by

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this world—such as misunderstanding, violence, and hatred—can be overcome if young people from different parts of the world study together in order to develop greater empathy and intercultural awareness. Finally, the most recent type of International School, Type C, has emerged in part due to the effects of globalisation, which has led to a growing international focus in some national school systems (Hayden, 2016). For the affluent middle class of these countries, an international education is considered to be both superior to that available in their own national system (Hayden & Thompson, 2013) and a means to securing a competitive edge for their children (Hayden, 2016). It can be seen that Type C schools, like Type A, exist to serve a pragmatic market demand by the affluent middle-class (Yang, 2016). This tripartite typology provides the reader unfamiliar with the field of International Schooling with a good idea of its scope, heterogeneity, and contradictions. However, since that framework was developed in 2013 (Hayden & Thompson, 2013), the growing breadth of activity—amidst the ‘spectrum of approach’ from the ‘ideological’ to the ‘pragmatic/market-led’—has been joined by a growing depth of activity. Even the authors acknowledge that their typology is in need of updating (Hayden & Thompson, 2018). In fact, what we have witnessed in the years since the typology was formulated is the proliferation of Type C schools. This calls for new typologies to capture the increasing fragmentation of this type of school. For example, Tristan Bunnell and I have refined Hayden and Thompson’s typology to reflect the changing landscape. Through our research into International School teachers’ experiences in China, we have come to identify two different Type C schools (Bunnell & Poole, 2020). The first is referred to as Type C1 (Non-Traditional, Premium-sector) and the second is referred to as Type C2 (Non-Traditional, Non-Premium-sector). Table 2.2 offers the reader more information about these schools. This book is concerned with a subgrouping of the Type C Non-Traditional International School, namely, what I refer to as ‘Chinese Internationalised Schools’. Having established definitions, I will next map out the changing landscape of International Schooling. This change is significant because the emergence of Chinese Internationalised Schools has occurred as a result of ‘creeping globalisation’ (Hayden, 2011). These schools have also emerged because of the increasing marketisation and commodification of international education as a marker of distinction and as a metaphorical

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Table 2.2 Typology of type C schools Type C1 (non-traditional, premium-sector)

Type C2 (non-traditional, non-premium-sector)

Non-local curriculum/fusion of National and International curriculum High-fees Branded/commercially driven Accredited Focus on local families Low level of diversity of student and teacher body Focus on entry to elite Higher Education Located in both Tier-1 and Tier-2 cities British-based curriculum/Non-National curriculum Lower-fees Profit-driven Very low diversity of student and teacher body Non-accredited Non-branded Non-membership of Regional Associations Focus on entry to local Higher Education Largely located outside Tier-1 cities

Source Adapted from Hayden and Thompson (2013)

passport to a prestigious western university, and subsequently, a better life.

2.4 Metaphors for Understanding the International School Landscape The context of International Schooling has been understood in relation to a number of metaphors, including an arena, a field, and a landscape. These terms are often used interchangeably, something which I have also noticed in my own work. However, closer analysis reveals that even though these metaphors all belong to the same semiosphere (Lotman, 2005), they are subtly different, with each taking on a kind of metaphorical life of its own. Taking inspiration from a recent paper by Zittoun and Gillespie (2020), I utilise an abductive approach that makes use of metaphors in order to make visible patterns and processes that guide our theoretical imagination.

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2.4.1

Arena

The idea of an arena suggests an enclosed oval space in Roman Amphitheaters and may even conjure up images of gladiatorial combat. The image of an arena may also put the reader in mind of a central stage, ring, or area, used for sports or other forms of entertainment, surrounded by seats for spectators. These various images are somewhat apt. International Schools are characterised by micro-politics (Caffyn, 2018), insecurity (Bunnell, 2016), unfair dismissal (Blyth, 2017), and a loss of selfefficacy due to the marginalisation of professional identities (Poole, 2019, 2020b). Teachers must often fight for survival, whilst being watched by the ‘peanut crunching crowd’ (Plath, 1965), who in this metaphor are the schools’ clientele, the parents, and their children. Finally, ‘arena’ can be understood in terms of a field of conflict, activity, or endeavor. This idea will be developed below, when the notion of ‘field’ is explored. This focus on conflict complements the prevailing ‘negative discourse’ (Bunnell, 2019b) on International Schooling as hotbeds of precarity. 2.4.2

Field

The image of a field suggests a number of metaphors. The first is quite literal—a field is cleared land, suitable for tillage or pasture; cultivated ground; the open country. This metaphor is particularly apt in describing the rapid rise of Type C schools, which seem to be thriving in the fertile soil of marketisation and neoliberalism. The image of a field may also put some researchers in mind of Bourdieu’s work (Bourdieu, 2010; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990). In English, the image of a field is likely to conjure up images of a meadow. However, Bourdieu did not use the French word ‘les pré’(Meadow), but rather the more polysemic ‘le champ’, which carries with it connotations of an area of land or a battlefield (Thomas, 2008). This resonates with the metaphor of the arena, which also conjures up images of conflict and battle. The term ‘les pré’ can also refer to a field of knowledge (such as the accumulated research on International Schooling), as well as a field of forces in physics (Thomas, 2008). The effects of social fields on behaviour can be far reaching and not always apparent to actors (Swartz, 2016). Thomas (2008) uses the analogy of a football game in order to illustrate the notion of a field. A football game is played within a boundaried site; it has specific rules; each player is given a specific position on the field. According to

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Thomas, social agents who occupy particular positions understand how to behave on the field. In a sense, they internalise these rules so that they become second nature or a form of doxa (Bourdieu, 2010), the terms and parlance that are second nature to the field. In relation to an International School, we can see that the school itself is a boundaried site. It may be part of an overall landscape, but each school will have its own field and rules of engagement. Chinese Internationalised Schools are no exception. However, where these schools appear to be somewhat anomalous when compared to other types of International School is their mixture of national and international orientations. Expatriate teachers coming to these schools are likely to mis-read the field, assuming that the ‘international’ aspect is the most important. The result is that not all players understand the rules or their role. This failure in understanding may stem from unfamiliarity with the local language. (Chinese Internationalised Schools generally use Mandarin as their operational language.) This failure to understand the field of the Chinese Internationalised School may also be due to the teachers’ perceptions of the school and international education. Expatriate teachers in particular often come to the school with an image of the International School being modelled after Type A schools or an understanding of ‘international curricula’ derived from the IBO. What they get, instead, is something very different. Due to this mismatch, teachers may fail to understand the rules of the field or, in the case of Robert, resist the rules by attempting to create new ones that conform more to his perception of what an International School should be based on his experiences and understanding of the term ‘International’. 2.4.3

Landscape

Landscape is usually defined as a section or expanse of rural scenery, usually extensive, that can be seen from a single viewpoint or a picture representing natural inland or coastal scenery. The image of a landscape is inherently more positive than the metaphor of the arena and more expansive than the image of an enclosed arena. The feeling is of seeing the extent or scope of something stretching before one’s eyes. The image suggests a wide-angle lens that takes in the expanse. It also gives the reader a sense of the scale of International Schooling. The scope of International Schools is no longer confined to the global North but is now truly global in nature, concentrated in the global South, in

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countries like China and Thailand. This theme will be picked up again below. What this deconstruction teases out is that the language used to describe International Schools (arena and field) suggests a high level of conflict, competition, and struggle. This is, indeed, borne out by the literature and has been summarised in terms of a ‘negative discourse of International Schooling’ (Bunnell, 2019b). Yet, at the same time, the image of the field in terms of a meadow and a landscape also suggests something more positive. Although International Schools are generally portrayed as ‘complex’ and ‘messy’ spaces (Bunnell, 2019b), the reality is more nuanced. They are neither completely negative, nor completely positive. Rather, they are a mélange of precarity, marketisation, and opportunity. The metaphor of a landscape suggests the scope of International Schooling in the twenty-first century, but the images of the field and the arena are a reminder that the landscape itself is highly fragmented and localised. As Joslin (2002, p. 35) deftly puts it, each school will ‘possess its own ‘personality’, but ‘international schools’ may offer their own challenges’. I will have occasion to invoke all three of these metaphors throughout the book.

2.5

The Changing Landscape

The landscape of International Schooling has changed considerably in recent years. This change is characterised by the development of Type C schools, run commercially on a for-profit basis, attended by increasing numbers of local students from wealthy backgrounds, possibly organised into and managed as chains of for-profit International Schools, and the growth of branded English private school in other countries (Bunnell, 2019a). Whereas forty years ago, traditional International Schools accounted for over 80% of all International Schools, by 2013, that figure had been reversed, with over 80% of schools being the nontraditional, Type C variety (Brummitt & Keeling, 2013). The move from a non-profit to a profit-driven landscape has resulted in an explosion of Type C schools. Now, Type C schools represent the most numerous, and, therefore, visible, type of International School, with the Middle East and China witnessing the most growth (Bunnell, 2019a). It can be seen that growth of the International School market is no longer dictated by Traditional International Schools, but rather, by the rapid emergence of Type C schools, clustered largely in the global

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South. This growth is also the result of how International Schools are categorised (Bunnell et al., 2016). The now generally accepted definition from the ISC (any school outside of an English-speaking country offering a curriculum partially or completely in English) includes many schools that previously would have been excluded or not recognised as International Schools (Bunnell et al., 2016). In exploring the changing landscape of international schooling, it is possible to understand the landscape on multiple levels, including geography, demography, function and legitimacy. 2.5.1

Geography

In terms of geographical change, the main action of International Schooling has shifted from a previous Northern European base, centred in Geneva, to the global South, (including the Middle East), which can now be seen as the epicentre of International School activity (Bunnell, 2019a). In 2019, China had the most schools, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) had the most students. Dubai has the most schools, followed by Shanghai, Abu Dhabi, and Beijing (Curphey, 2019). This fact lead one scholar to remark that we are witnessing the ‘Great Asian Gold-Rush’ (Machin, 2017). 2.5.2

Demography

Another significant change in the International School landscape relates to school demographics. Traditionally, International Schools served a transmobile elite, typically from the US or the UK, whose relocation overseas necessitated a form of education that would enable their children to attend a university back at home or to return to their home country’s national education system (Hayden, 2006). In addition to the ideological dimension, it can be seen that traditional International Schools also satisfied a pragmatic need. However, with the rise of Type C schools and increasing marketisation, International Schools have come to serve a different clientele. Enrollment in Type C schools is increasingly dominated by the richest 5% of non-English-speaking parents (Brummitt & Keeling, 2013). Whilst International Schools have always been elitist, the emergence of Type C ‘elite’ schools (Tarc & Tarc, 2015) offering the IBO to middle-class elites, particularly in Asia (Wright & Lee, 2014), can

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be said to be creating an elite class of individuals (Belal, 2017), thereby leading to inequality on a global scale. Another changing demographic is that of the teachers. Increasingly, International Schools are being staffed by teachers who are exiting the education systems of their home countries, due to burn out and dissatisfaction (Weale, 2019). This is most vividly illustrated by the numbers of teachers exiting the UK school system, who, it has been claimed, are the biggest single supplier of staff to the field of International Schools (Vaughan, 2013). It was reported in 2016 that more teachers left England to teach overseas than had been trained that year, leading to fears of a ‘teacher brain-drain’ (Richardson, 2016). Teachers exiting the United Kingdom for the field of International Schooling are attracted by the prospect of lighter teaching loads, better remuneration, and the prospect of adventure (Bunnell & Poole, 2020; Rey et al., 2020). Given the shifting landscape, it also stands to reason that the majority of teachers recruited by International Schools are working in Type C schools. However, despite representing the lion’s share of the market, these schools, and the teachers that work in them, are still under-researched, which is a lacuna this book seeks to address. 2.5.3

Function

Along with this change in demographic (and perhaps because of it) has come a change in purpose or function of International Schools. In a context of the rise of Type C schools, the spectrum of international education has moved substantially away from the ideology-led dimension—i.e. to foster greater international-mindedness—towards the market-led side of activity. Bunnell (2014) makes a useful distinction between an ideal and a post-ideal phase. The ideal phase corresponds to the ideological aspect of International Schooling, which, geographically, can also be situated within the global North. What we are witnessing now is a postideal phase, with the International School landscape akin to an industry, informed not by an ideological vision to make the world a better place, but Neoliberal market-driven forces. Type C schools have emerged (or, to follow the metaphor of the field, sprung up) due to a loosening of restrictions on local schools offering an international curriculum, particularly in the global South (Young, 2018), and increased choice due to the spread of neoliberalism. At the same time, Type C schools are also shaping the landscape. Parents may choose to send their children to a Type C school

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in order to become more internationally minded. However, arguably, it is not solely the content of the curriculum that attracts parents, but rather, its instrumental value as a kind of passport to an overseas education (Poole, 2019; Wright & Lee, 2014). 2.5.4

Legitimacy

The rise of Type C schools, which are often taken to be ‘International’ in all but name (Tarc & Mishra Tarc, 2015), also raises the issue of ‘institutional legitimacy’ (Bunnell et al., 2016) which is defined by Suchman (1995, p. 547) as a ‘generalised perception or assumption that the actions of an entity are desirable, proper, or appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs and definitions’. In seeking to bring some order to the fragmentation that characterises the International School landscape—a preponderance of Type C schools all laying claim to be ‘International’ due to delivery of a curriculum in English outside of an English-speaking country—Bunnell et al. (2016, 2017) have proposed a normative definition of the International School modelled on Type A and Type B schools. For the authors, a defining aspect of International Schools is the existence of diversity. Whilst cautioning against uniformity, the authors nevertheless argue that a normative model of the International School is necessary. Their reason for offering this model is not to exclude Type C schools, but rather to highlight the challenges that such schools are likely to face in attempting to establish institutional (and perhaps even international) legitimacy. Type C schools may struggle to legitimise themselves as International Schools, due to a lack of diversity, which is considered to be a defining feature of International Schooling.

2.6

Making Sense of the Changing Landscape

Interrogation of the nomenclature used to describe (and position) Type C schools exposes a discourse that positions Type C schools as the other. Even though the arena of international schooling has shifted from the global North to the global South, normative models of the International School continue to be informed by models derived from the global North (e.g. Type A and B schools), which, arguably, are increasingly anachronistic. Following on from (or because of) this, Traditional International

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Schools are seen as more authentic or ‘International’ in nature and therefore need to be held up as models to be emulated. Type C schools are therefore deviant and less international. This is revealed in the nomenclature used to identity and position them. For example, Hayden and Thompson refer to Type C schools as ‘non-traditional’. Whilst this may appear quite innocent to many, the use of ‘non’ defines these schools in terms of a negation. They are not defined in terms of what they are— national schools offering international curricula to local students—but rather in terms of what they are not—Traditional International Schools. Another issue is the designation of a letter to identify different International Schools. Traditional International Schools are designated as ‘A’ whereas Non-traditional Schools are designated as ‘C’. Whilst it has been argued that querying the international nature of Type C International Schools requires a normative sense of the characteristics of International Schools (Bunnell et al., 2016), for me, the designation of a letter implies a value judgement about a school’s ‘international legitimacy’ (Bunnell et al., 2016). This response has been cemented in the recent proposal to add a new type of school to Hayden and Thompson’s typology in the form of ‘Type D’, or ‘Illiberal International Schools’ (International School, 2019). According to the author, who chose to remain anonymous, Type D schools are defined as ‘those which receive significant funding from national entities whose political discourse, action, and impact is in conflict with the humanitarian values that the international schooling movement has long championed’ (p. 7). The main issue with the typology is its political bias. It posits a normative model of the International School that fails to acknowledge the nuance of the local context. For example, the notion of the ‘liberal’ International School is presented as being self-evident and universal. However, ideas are rarely transplanted from one context to the other but go through a process of remediation and adaptation. Ironically, insisting that a school should conform to a certain ‘liberal’ stance is somewhat ‘illiberal’ in itself. The inclusion of a Type D school also gives the sense that the further along the alphabet we move, the further we stray from the Type A school, and the more diluted or illiberal the school becomes. Clearly, according to this logic, Type C schools are distortions of Type A schools. However, this does not reflect the reality of the actual market, where the global South has become the key arena of activity. It is necessary to develop new models of International Schooling that reflect the reality of the emergence, and even dominance, of the global

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South. In order to do this, it is necessary to decouple (Poole, 2020a) Type C schools from normative constructions of the International School that posit the Traditional International School as the model by which all other schools are to be defined, appraised, and judged. Such an approach is overly prescriptive, something which is evident in the recently proposed Type D model. If we take a step back from the debate, what we are seeing is a field in flux and transition. Bunnell (2020) has described this transition in terms of a ‘transitionary phase’, ‘as the previous norms and values break down and the actors must adjust to emerging, different, and problematic norms and values’ (p. 767). This transitionary phase can be seen in the academic discourse and changes going on in the field of International Schooling. The intellectual discourse is still rooted in models derived from the global North. However, the market has leaped ahead of the academic discourse. It is now dominated by the global South. There is, then, something of a lag in the academic discourse, with academic actors struggling to adjust to the ‘problematic norms’ and ‘values’ of Type C schools which, arguably, threaten to dethrone the seemingly sacrosanct sovereignty of the Traditional International School by being run largely for-profit, which also undermines the ideological dimension of an international education, such as fostering international-mindedness. These new Type C schools need to be understood in relation to the norms and values of the contexts in which they have emerged—mostly in the global South and in China— rather than in terms of seemingly universal norms and values derived from the global North, which clearly reflect a western-centric bias.

2.7

Chinese Internationalised Schools

As noted earlier, Type C schools have emerged predominantly in the global South, with the number of Type C schools in China continuing to rise at a staggering rate (Gaskell, 2019). In the past four years, the number of International Schools in China has grown about 30% annually, making it the highest growth rate of newly opened K-12 private schools in the world (Stacey, 2018). According to ISC research (2020), there are 857 International Schools in China, with 563 of them being international Chinese-owned private schools or, as I call them, Chinese Internationalised Schools. Most Chinese Internationalised Schools are to be found in China’s Tier-1 cities, typically located on the eastern seaboard. Summarising statistics derived from ISC research, but quoted

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in Gaskell (2019), the cities with the most International Schools include: Shanghai (169 schools), Beijing (141 schools), Shenzhen (55 schools), Guangzhou (47 schools), and Chengdu (27 schools). However, more schools are starting to emerge in Tier-2 cities, such as Chengdu and Shenzhen. Keeling (2019) even notes that Chinese Internationalised Schools are increasingly to be found outside ‘Tier-cities’. According to a special report compiled by L.E.K. (Abdo et al., 2018), a global management consulting firm, 1.1 billion Chinese people still live outside Tier-1 cities, presenting a potential market of 165 million affluent and middle-class consumers. The rapid rise of schools offering an international curriculum may strike the reader as strange, given that China has long had an ambivalent relationship with the West (Yan et al., 2015). This was particularly the case during the Cultural Revolution, where all things western were branded as bourgeoise, and, therefore, antithetical to the core socialist values of equality and a classless society. However, with the opening up of China in the late 1970s under Deng Xiao Ping, western companies and ideas were gradually allowed to come back to China. Gaskell (2019) also notes that the International School sector is developing thanks to favourable government regulations, and it is growing in popularity amongst Chinese nationals, despite free public schools. This is partly due to a shortage of education resources in the public education sector, but also due to increased wealth of many Chinese families who are seeking private options as a route to academic success. Type C schools in China do not represent a stable and homogenous type but can be sub-divided into different types. The first is referred to as Schools for Children of Foreign Workers or ‘expat’ schools. These schools correspond to Hayden and Thompson’s (2013) Type A Traditional International Schools and are generally not open to Chinese citizens. The next school is referred to as Sino-Foreign Cooperative Schools. These schools are a joint venture between a foreign education company or school and a local Chinese owner, with the former providing the teaching and learning and the latter providing infrastructure and funding. These schools are open to both Chinese and expatriate students. Chinese-owned public schools are also increasingly offering an international stream where the Chinese national curriculum is taught in both Chinese and English. The final type of school, and the focus of this book, is referred to as Chinese-Owned Private Schools. These schools correspond to Hayden and Thompson’s

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Type C Non-traditional International School in that they offer an international curriculum to a largely Chinese clientele. Chinese-Owned Private Schools go by numerous names, including ‘experimental schools’ (SI News, 2018), ‘International Chinese Private Bilingual Schools’ (Gaskell, 2019), ‘schools with integrated international curriculum’ (Xu, 2001; Yan et al., 2015), ‘Non-Exclusive International Schools’ (Young, 2018), or ‘Non-premium schools’ (Bunnell, 2019a). Wu and Koh (2021) have also identified international schools that adopt curricular forms and/or brands originating from the US, UK, and Canada. These schools brand themselves as American-style (meishi), British (yingshi), and Sino-Canadian (zhongjia) (these schools will be explored in the final chapter of the book). In my research (e.g. Poole, 2018, 2019), I have referred to these schools as ‘Chinese Internationalised Schools’ (Chinese Internationalised Schools). This term is starting to be employed by other academics (e.g. Wright et al., 2021). Chinese Internationalised Schools are privately run, largely profit-driven, and often partner up with Chinese businesses (representing the epitome of the ‘Type C Non-Traditional’ model). These schools are found all over China but are concentrated in the more affluent cities of Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou; although, as Bunnell (2019a) notes, ‘an underbelly of Non-premium’ schools are to be found in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities. Table 2.3 offers the reader an over-view of these types of school in Shanghai, which is the main arena for K-12 international bilingual education in China. 2.7.1

Curriculum

In contrast to International Schools, which typically deliver an international curriculum in English, Chinese Internationalised Schools offer an integrated curriculum that incorporates the Chinese national curriculum with international curricula, such as the IBDP (Gaskell, 2019). Typically, these schools follow the Chinese national curriculum during middle school, which culminates in an external examination known as the Zhong Kao. International curricula are then introduced in the final three years of high school. Chinese Internationalised Schools will also offer a ‘pre-IBDP year’, typically in grade 10, which functions as a transition stage from the Chinese national curriculum to the IBDP. Whilst some schools will create bespoke courses that mirror the IBDP, others will offer Cambridge’s

Curriculum

Chinese nationals Local and expatriate teachers

Student/teacher demographic

East China Normal University Affiliated Bilingual School (IB World School) Chinese nationals Local and expatriate teachers

Chinese nationals Local and expatriate teachers

Based on the Shanghai curriculum, develops a deep understanding of the Chinese heritage and culture whilst establishing the aptitudes and skills pupils need to become successful global citizens International integrated curriculum, implementing the national curriculum. Liaoyuan School has introduced the IB-PYP and IB-MYP research frameworks of International Baccalaureate Organization (IBO)

Huili School Shanghai

Chinese nationals Local and expatriate teachers

Nord Anglia Chinese Shanghai Liaoyuan International School Bilingual School (IB (IB World School) World School)

Mostly Chinese nationals, but also other nationalities Local and expatriate teachers Combination of According to the Offers a Chinese national school, an student-oriented curriculum and the ‘integrated’ course curriculum is offered, IBDP. framework that taking the best from Students will be includes bilingual prepared to take the Chinese and teaching in Chinese Zhongkao as part of international and English. the Shanghai education. High School offers National the IBDP which also Students follow the Curriculum. Grade involves a pre-IB year Chinese national curriculum from K-8; 10 is a pre-IBDP. IGCSE, 9 and IBDP Grade 11 and 12: IBDP 10–12

Shanghai Ping He School (IB World School)

Overview of Chinese internationalised schools in Shanghai

School’s name

Table 2.3

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Mission

Mission: To cultivate students who are successful learners and qualified world citizens rooted in Chinese traditional culture Motto: Competitive world citizens and successful lifelong learners deeply rooted in Chinese culture

Vision: We stick to a student-oriented approach, and aim to cultivate world citizens with originality, global perspective, and Chinese traditions. Patriotic citizens with a global perspective Motto: Learn for better, think for life

Mission: To provide the highest quality learning driven by outstanding teachers within a culture of pride and respect, that will empower our students to succeed Vision: A genuinely ambitious multilingual school community

Mission: Cultivates outstanding students ready for the globalisation who are also equipped with a profound Chinese complex Motto: Lifelong learners create the future

Mission: We aspire to create a caring, bilingual community that develops well-rounded individuals with strong values and the skills to thrive within an ever-changing global society

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IGCSE, which also functions as a stepping stone from a national to an international curriculum. 2.7.2

Students and Parents

Chinese Internationalised Schools cater to a local, middle-class elite, whose motivations for sending their children to an International School are based on the perception that an International School education is both superior to and more rigorous than the kind of education typically offered in local national schools (Hayden, 2006). Most Chinese nationals are unable to attend a ‘Traditional’ International School since a requirement of entry is to hold an overseas passport. Chinese Internationalised Schools, therefore, offer an alternative pathway to success, which not only—potentially—confers social and cultural capital, but also provides (more guaranteed or assured) access to an elite overseas university (Wright & Lee, 2014). However, not all Chinese Internationalised Schools cater to elites. The issue of parental choice in mainland China has become far more nuanced within the context of Type C schools, which, as noted earlier, come in various forms. In addition to schools catering to an elite clientele, Young (2018) has identified a new type of ‘International School’ in mainland China. These schools serve families who are well off economically but lack other markers of elite status, such as high levels of education or household registration.2 The families in Young’s (2018) study held precarious social positions in Chinese Society. For example, they were internal migrants or members of China’s new entrepreneurial class. Moreover, according to Young (2018), this new type of school provides a remedial rather than an elite academic environment, acting as a second-choice school based upon the child being less settled (many having been apparently ‘bullied’) in the national system. It can be seen that there may in fact be two categories of Chinese Internationalised Schools: one that is more elitist in nature, appealing to an aspirant middle-class, and another that is more remedial in nature. Table 2.4 offers an overview of an emerging typology of Chinese Internationalised Schools, which is based on findings from Bunnell and Poole (2020). The school in this study, WEST, sits somewhere between these two types, thereby adding further nuance to the typology of Chinese Internationalised Schools.

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Table 2.4 Typology of Chinese internationalised schools Premium Chinese Internationalised Schools

Non-premium Chinese Internationalised Schools

2.7.3

Non-local curriculum/fusion of National and International curriculum High-fees Branded/commercially driven Accredited by the IBDP and Cambridge Focus on local families who are part of a middle-class elite Low level of diversity of student and teacher body Focus on entry to elite Higher Education Located in both Tier-1 and Tier-2 cities British-based curriculum/Non-National curriculum Lower-fees Profit-driven Very low diversity of student and teacher body Accredited by the IBDP and Cambridge, but often not accredited Focus on local families who are internal migrants and therefore occupy a precarious position of privilege Non-branded Non-member of Regional Associations Focus on entry into local Higher Education Largely located outside Tier-1 cities

Teachers

Faculty of Chinese Internationalised Schools will be comprised of host country nationals and expatriate teachers, but with a greater degree of ‘local’ teachers than found in the ‘Traditional’ International School, where Anglo-Saxon ‘expat’ teachers continue to dominate (Lai et al., 2016). The proportion of foreign/overseas teachers employed by Chinese Internationalised Schools stands at 39.5%, indicating that local/host teacher nationals make up the majority (60.5%) of the overall workforce (Gaskell, 2019). Expatriate teachers will typically be employed on twoyear contracts, which can be renewed subject to satisfactory performance. Despite the promise of renewal, renegotiating a contract is not always certain. However, it has been found that although turnover in Chinese Internationalised Schools is high, teachers do not choose to exit the arena

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of International Schooling. Rather, they take advantage of short-term contracts in order to transition from one school to another (Poole & Bunnell, 2020). Overall, the raison d’être of Chinese Internationalised Schools is to provide local Chinese middle-class elites with a route to an overseas university, a route typically inaccessible via ‘Traditional’ International Schools that require students to hold an overseas passport. Even in the case of non-elite families, as in Young’s (2018) study, the motivation for enrolling their children into Chinese Internationalised Schools is arguably not just remedial but also aspirational in nature: Families seek to foster elite educational trajectories through their children’s education. The stated benefits of an elite International Schooling experience, such as enhanced intercultural awareness, criticality, and independence would appear to be of secondary importance. Chinese Internationalised Schools are not so much providing an education as a service, be it remedial, aspirational or elitist, which is driven largely by the clientele, the parents, who buy (into) International Schooling in order to cement and develop their status as part of the emergent ‘global middle class’, acting as a class-in-the-making. Having situated Chinese Internationalised Schools within a wider context, I next describe the research context, WEST.

2.8 The Research Context: ‘automobile, Suburb, Empty’ At the time data was collected for this book, WEST was a recently opened K-12, private boarding school in Shanghai that offered an ‘internationalised’ curriculum combining aspects of ‘Chinese’ and ‘Western’ approaches to learning. The school was located in the north-west of the city, far out in the suburbs. WEST operated in partnership with a local car company. The school was run on a for-profit basis and was part of a plan to develop the district by bringing in new families. The development of the area was part of a wider project in Shanghai, begun in 2001, entitled, ‘One City, Nine Towns’ (den Hartog, 2009). This project aimed to shift urban development in Shanghai from a central city model ‘to a poly-nuclear model’, which would be based on the idea of a ‘New Town’. According to den Hartog (2009, p. 1382), a new town is a city that has been deliberately planned and designed from scratch [that] searches for a new balance between government-driven and market-driven

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urban development. Simultaneously, it is searching for more sustainable forms of urban planning, the creation of identity, the retention of higher incomes in the city, the distribution of work and facilities and the prevention of uncontrolled urban sprawl. In all, ten New Towns were planned. In addition to a new, mediumsized German themed city, there would also be a Spanish Town, an Italian Town, a German Town, a Dutch Town, a Scandinavian Town, a British Town, one modern and one traditional Chinese town, a Harbour town, and an ecological town (den Hartog, 2009). The thematic parts of the town were intended to be a ‘germ’ or ‘billboard’—relatively small areas that would include a few thousand houses designed to attract residents— with the rest of the cities growing up around these thematic parts in a more conventional way (den Hartog, 2009). The new towns were also planned to bind the Chinese middle-class to the city and also aimed at drawing in educated expats and Chinese from abroad. The school, therefore, would both encourage families to move into the area, and also accommodate them. The school was located on two campuses that were about five minutes apart by car. One campus housed the Kindergarten, and the other housed the Primary, Middle, and High schools. At the time of opening, the school consisted of grades 1–3, grade 6, and grade 10. New year groups would be introduced on a rolling basis as students progressed through the school. During the two years I worked at the school, I witnessed the swift development of the town. When my family and I first arrived, it was something of a ghost town, populated with large, untenanted houses. The participants also shared their experiences of moving into the area. Robert explained that the houses ‘were essentially investment assets, and 80% of them were unoccupied’. Daisy laconically described her first impressions of the place as simply, ‘automobile, suburb, empty’, whilst Tyron described it as ‘like an old man’s town. There was no progress. It was just very desolate’. Robert also described the town in terms of a ‘ghost town’, elaborating that: Very few people were living there when we arrived. It didn’t make sense to me at first until I found out that it was essentially a failed project. It was supposed to be a visionary, sustainable, urban development model, but for various reasons, the good ideas were abandoned and a new developer was brought in when we were there. I recall there being a large, mournful looking square that housed only a church, which never seemed to be opened. Whilst others may have found

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the place sombre and depressing, I revelled in its emptiness. I spent the first few weeks wandering the near-empty streets, accompanied by the mournful strains of God Speed You! Black Emperor3 playing in my ears. I would loiter by the large, untenanted houses, imagining what it would be like to live in such luxury. Over the course of the next two years, families steadily trickled into the area. The untenanted houses became occupied. The empty square slowly came to life. Where once one would encounter only the wind during an evening stroll around the square, it soon became filled with laugher, shouts, and families who would bring their children out to play. A Starbucks sprang up. A Seven-Eleven. A European brewery—where myself and the other teachers would take refuge on Friday evenings to talk over the week’s drama—also opened. By the time I left, the Town had been completely transformed, now boasting two schools and numerous apartment complexes. WEST, too, would also expand, mirroring the growth of the area. At the time of writing this book, WEST has added a third campus, which now houses the Primary and Middle Schools. 2.8.1

The Curriculum

WEST offered ‘a fusion’ of ‘the best’ of ‘Chinese’ and ‘Western’ education. The school’s curriculum also emphasised subjects such as music, art and dance, which for most Chinese students are typically considered to be of less significance within the curriculum. This appeared to be in response to the general trend towards quality-orientated education (su zhi jiao yu) in China which aimed to take a more holistic approach to learning which places the student at the centre of the learning process (Tan, 2013). Primary and middle school students followed the National Curriculum until the end of grade 9, at which time they sat a high-stakes, external examination known as the Zhong Kao, which would determine the high school they would attend. In practice, however, this exam was somewhat redundant, as many of the students would continue in the school or move to another school that offered an international curriculum. From grade 10, students transitioned to an internationalised curriculum in what could best be described as a pre-IB year. As part of this pre-IB year, students would often study Cambridge’s International General Certificate of Secondary Education (IGCSE). Some teachers would also introduce the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme (IBDP) as part of this year in order to provide the students with a firm foundation for the

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following two years, grades 11 to 12, when students would study the IBDP. 2.8.2

The International Curriculum: The IBDP

The IBDP was established in 1968 as a ‘practical necessity’ in response to a new internationally mobile population who required internationallyorientated courses of study (Peterson, 2003). The programme’s stated mission is to develop inquiring, knowledgeable, and caring young people who help to create a better and more peaceful world through intercultural understanding and respect (cited in Resnik, 2012). The International Baccalaureate Organisation offers four programmes of study for students: the Primary Years Programme (PYP) for students aged from 3–12; the Middle Years Programme (MYP) for students aged 11–16; the Diploma Programme (DP) for students aged 16–19 (IBO, 2017); and, more recently, the Career-Related Programme (CP), which, in addition to offering a minimum of two DP courses also provides students with practical, real-world approaches to learning that lay the groundwork for both career-related education and lifelong learning. The DP requires students to choose subjects from six disciplinary studies in language and literature, language acquisition, individuals and society, sciences, mathematics, and the arts. There are also three compulsory core elements aimed to broaden students’ educational experience: Theory of Knowledge, in which students critically reflect on the nature of knowledge, ways of knowing, and areas of knowledge (IBO, 2017); the Extended Essay, a self-directed piece of research that is approximately 4000 words in length; Creativity, Activity, Service, in which students can explore ideas leading to a performance, undertake physical exertion leading to a healthy lifestyle, and work on a collaborative and reciprocal engagement with the local community, amongst other things (IBO, 2017). These core elements are designed to ‘nurture international-mindedness with the ultimate aim of developing responsible global citizens’ (IBO, 2017). International-mindedness can be understood as understanding between individuals—a sentiment that sits in stark contrast to the IBO’s original liberal humanist framework that sought to nurture ‘international understanding’ between nations. This change in nomenclature reflects a more general turn towards a neoliberal agenda that has affected all aspects of education (Resnik, 2012).

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2.8.3

The Enacted Curriculum

Despite the rhetorical emphasis on fusing ‘Western’ and ‘Chinese’ perspectives, in practice, such hybridity was largely rhetorical in nature (Poole, 2018). National aspects, such as the national curriculum, symbolic routines (such as the flag raising ceremony) and Chinese assumptions about management, teaching, and learning dominated. In contrast, western orientations, such as the IBDP, were relegated to a form of what Lan (2011) calls ‘segmented incorporation’—that is, a subtle form of institutional segmentation that, in the context of Chinese Internationalised Schools, positions the international as peripheral, or, as I have come to think of it, ornamental (Poole, 2018). This relegation of the ‘Western’ can be contrasted with Traditional International Schools in China that over-emphasise, and therefore reinscribe, ‘Western’ assumptions about teaching and learning (Lai et al., 2016). The main barrier preventing the fusion of pedagogical and cultural perspectives was the ideological nature of WEST. The school’s main mission statement was to produce ‘patriotic citizens with an international perspective’, echoing the discourse outlined in the Chinese Ministry of Education’s ‘Outline of China’s National Plan for Medium and LongTerm Education Reform and Development: 2010–2020’ (MoE, 2010). This discourse encouraged teachers to ‘step up education about citizenship […] and turn them [students] into qualified socialist citizens’ (p. 10) and to cultivate China’s talents so students are ‘imbued with global vision, well-versed in international rules, and capable of participating in international affairs and competition’ (p. 34). It could be argued that the centrality of the Chinese national curriculum, in conjunction with symbolic routines—like the flag raising ceremony—were designed to inculcate a sense of loyalty and love for the country, whilst international curricula like the IGCSE and IBDP, were more utilitarian in nature, equipping students with the necessary intercultural skills to negotiate a globalised world. 2.8.4

Students and Parents

The majority of students were Chinese citizens whose parents were part of an aspirational middle-class. Whilst they were well off financially, most occupied precarious social positions in Chinese society as internal migrants or part of an emerging, new middle class (Young, 2018). One

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student had spent some time in a school in Canada but struggled to adjust and, consequently, had returned to study in China. However, for the majority of students, WEST represented the first time that they had studied an international curriculum, and, for some students, the first time they had been taught by a western teacher. This situation would become particularly problematic for some teachers, such as Robert, who struggled to develop his students’ higher-order thinking skills because, from his perspective, his students were used to ‘a sort of old style of teaching that has changed in the West’ that did not lay the necessary groundwork for studying at the IBDP level. The difficulty of teaching an international curriculum to Chinese students also fed into teachers’ experiences of precarity (to be discussed in Chapter 5). Whilst marketing itself as an ‘elite’ school, in practice WEST could best be described as ‘remedial’ (Young, 2018) or Non-premium. Many students were enrolled because they were failing in the local/national education system, which was highly standardised and competitive, and they had little chance of getting into a top university in China. For many of the high school students, WEST was their last chance to achieve educational success. The remedial nature of the school, as well as the fact that it was newly opened and for-profit (and therefore could not afford to be overly selective), resulted in classes made up of a mélange of ages and abilities. In grade 10, for example, there were some students who had jumped from grade 8 to grade 10, by-passing grade 9 altogether. There was also one student who turned 18; he would end up graduating at the age of 20. 2.8.5

Teachers

The majority of teachers were local Chinese (about 80% of the overall faculty), with expatriate teachers making up the remaining 20%. The expatriate teachers were drawn from a wide variety of countries, including the UK, the US, South Africa, France, Ireland, Finland, New Zealand, and Albania. Most teachers did not have experience of teaching in China. There was also considerable variation in terms of qualifications and experiences. Whilst some of the expatriate faculty were qualified teachers, the majority were not. Some held a TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) certificate whilst others made up for a lack of teaching qualifications by holding higher qualifications, such as Masters degrees or PhDs. Other teachers were hired simply on the basis of where they had studied.

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(One teacher, who had no teaching experience or qualifications, had a degree from Cambridge.) This would no doubt fuel the aspirations of parents, who were keen to send their children to a top-tier university. Despite their lack of qualifications, the expatriate faculty were on considerably higher salaries than their local counterparts, who also had to shoulder considerably more responsibility. As an example, one expatriate teacher was allocated a mere six teaching periods a week. In contrast, local teaching staff had at least double that and also had to fulfil the role as a ban zhu ren (a homeroom teacher), in charge of overseeing a class and interacting with parents. This disparity caused considerable friction between local and expatriate staff, with the local staff, understandably, becoming increasingly frustrated that they had to work harder than the expatriate staff but for less money. There was also tension between expatriate teachers. For example, teachers who held a teaching qualification and/or hailed from an AngloSaxon country were offered the best salaries and packages, and often had a reduced teaching load. In contrast, teachers who did not hold a teaching qualification or whose first language was not English had to bear the brunt of the teaching load and received a less competitive salary. I recall one teacher from Eastern Europe who taught over 26 classes a week. Although he did not possess a teaching qualification, he was able to make himself indispensable by taking on the classes that other teachers, such as myself, could or would not teach (e.g. Grade 6 English).

2.9

Summary of Chapter

This chapter explored the changing International School landscape, arguing that Chinese Internationalised Schools are part of an emerging landscape that has seen the rise of Internationalised Schools in the global South. This chapter also argued that Type C schools need to be ‘decoupled’ from normative models derived from the global North and, instead, understood in relation to the norms and values of the local context. This chapter ended by exploring the local context in which WEST was situated. Having explored the big picture, the next chapter zooms in to consider the International School teachers. It explores who International School teachers are, their motivations for relocating overseas, and it critically surveys a number of typologies that have been developed in order to identify and understand different types of International School teacher.

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Notes 1. International School Consultancy provides data and trends on K-12 international schools around the globe. 2. The Chinese household registration system (or hukou system) categorises citizens according to both place of residence and eligibility for certain socioeconomic benefits, such as education and healthcare. Many of the parents in Young’s study were born with a ‘rural’ household registration. Transferring household registration from ‘rural’ to ‘urban’ is complex, and involves taking into consideration a person’s educational background and employment status. Moreover, there is not a fixed hukou policy, so cities will have different policies for obtaining an urban hukou. 3. God Speed You! Black Emperor is a Canadian Post-Rock band. The reader is directed to the track ‘Static’ from the album Lift your skinny fists like antennas to Heaven for a musical representation of the Town’s desolation.

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Bunnell, T. (2019b). Leadership of ‘messy, tense International Schools’: The potential scope for a fresh, positive lens of inquiry. International Journal of Leadership in Education 24(4), 558–570. Bunnell, T. (2020). The continuous growth and development of ‘International Schooling’: The notion of a ‘transitionary phase’. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 50(5), 764–768. Bunnell, T., Fertig, M., & James, C. (2016). What is international about International Schools? An institutional legitimacy perspective. Oxford Review of Education, 42(4), 408–423. Bunnell, T., Fertig, M., & James, C. (2017). Establishing the legitimacy of a school’s claim to be “International”: The provision of an international curriculum as the institutional primary task. Educational Review, 69(3), 303–317. Bunnell, T., & Poole, A. (2020). Escaping the fire for the frying-pan? British teachers entering International Schooling. British Journal of Educational Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/00071005.2020.1853673 Caffyn, R. (2018). ‘The shadows are many...’ Vampirism in ‘International School’ leadership: Problems and potential in cultural, political, and psycho-social borderlands. Peabody Journal of Education, 93(5), 500–517. Curphey, M. (2019). Numbers of international schools continue to rise. Relocate Global. https://www.relocatemagazine.com/articles/education-num bers-of-international-schools-continue-to-rise-curphey-0519 den Hartog, H. (2009). Shanghai new towns—Searching for community and identity in a sprawling metropolis. The 4th International Conference on the International Forum on Urbanism: Amsterdam. http://ifou.org/con ferences/2009delft/proceedings/9%20Changing%20Planning%20Cultures/ full%20papers/F054_Harry_den_Hartog_Shanghai_New_Towns.pdf Gardner-McTaggart, A. (2020). Washing the world in whiteness; international schools’ policy. Journal of Educational Administration and History. https:// doi.org/10.1080/00220620.2020.1844162 Gaskell, R. (2019, April 22). The growing popularity of international K-12 schools in China. ICF Monitor. https://monitor.icef.com/2019/04/growing-pop ularity-of-international-k-12-schools-in-china/ Gellar, C. A. (2003). International education: A commitment to universal values. In M. Hayden, J. Thompson, & G. Walker (Eds.), International education in practice: Dimensions for national and international schools (pp. 30–35). Routledge. Hayden, M. (2006). Introduction to international education: International schools and their communities. Sage. Hayden, M. (2011). Transnational spaces of education: The growth of the international school sector. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 9(2), 211–224.

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Hayden, M. (2016). Institutional interpretations of international education in national contexts. Sage Library of educational thought and practice: International education (Vol. 2, pp. i–xiv). Sage. Hayden, M. C., & Thompson, J. J. (1998). International education: Perceptions of teachers in international schools. International Review of Education, 44(5/6), 549–568. Hayden, M., & Thompson, J. J. (2000a). International education: Flying flags or raising standards? International School’s Journal, XIX ( 2), 48–56. Hayden, M., & Thompson, J. J. (2000b). Quality in diversity. In M. C. Hayden & J. J. Thompson (Eds.), International schools and international education: Improving teaching, management and quality. Kogan Page. Hayden, M., & Thompson, J. J. (2013). International schools: Antecedents, current issues and metaphors for the future. In R. Pearce (Ed.), International education and schools: Moving beyond the first 40 years (pp. 3–23). Bloomsbury. Hayden, M., & Thompson, J. (2018). Time for new terminology? International School, 21(1), 3. IBO. (2017). www.ibo.org. Accessed 2 May 2017. International School. (2019). The rise of ‘illiberal international schools’? A rejoinder to Hayden and Thompson. International School, 21(2), 5–7. ISC. (2015). ISC The International School Consultancy. The International School Consultancy. ISC. (2020). Education in China—How demand and supply is changing. https://www.iscresearch.com/news-and-events/isc-news/isc-news-details/ ~post/education-in-china-how-demand-and-supply-is-changing-20190329. Accessed 10 November 2020. Joslin, P. (2002). Teacher relocation: Reflections in the context of international schools. Journal of Research in International Education, 1(1), 33–62. Keeling, A. (2019, February 6). International Schools support higher Ed success says new research. TIE Online. Lai, C., Li, Z., & Gong, Y. (2016). Teacher agency and professional learning in cross-cultural teaching contexts: Accounts of Chinese teachers from International Schools in Hong Kong. Teaching and Teacher Education, 54, 12–21. Lan, P. C. (2011). White privilege, language capital and cultural ghettoisation: Western high-skilled migrants in Taiwan. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 37 (10), 1669–1693. Lotman, Y. M. (2005). On the semiosphere. Σημειωτ κ η-Sign ´ Systems Studies, 33(1), 205–229. Machin, D. (2017). The great Asian International School gold rush: An economic analysis. Journal of Research in International Education, 16(2), 131–146.

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Ministry of Education (MoE). (2010). Outline of China’s National Plan for Medium–and long-term Education Reform and reform Development, 2010–2020. http://planipolis.iiep.unesco.org/upload/China/China_Nat ional_Long_Term_Educational_Reform_Development_2010-2020_eng.pdf. Accessed 19 December 2016. Peterson, A. D. C. (2003). Schools across frontiers: The story of the International Baccalaureate and the United World Colleges. Open Court Publishing. Plath, S. (1965). Ariel. Perennial. Poole, A. (2018). ‘We are a Chinese school’: Constructing school identity from the lived experiences of expatriate and Chinese teaching faculty in a Type C international school in Shanghai, China. International Journal of Progressive Education, 14(1), 105–121. https://doi.org/10.29329/ijpe.2018.129.8 Poole, A. (2019). International education teachers’ experiences as an educational precariat in China. Journal of Research in International Education, 18(1), 60–76. Poole, A. (2020a). Decoupling Chinese internationalised schools from normative constructions of the International School. Compare, 50(3), 447–454. https://doi.org/10.1080/03057925.2019.1682839 Poole, A. (2020b). Internationalised school teachers’ experiences of Precarity as part of the global middle class in China: Towards ‘resilience capital.’ The Asia-Pacific Education Researcher, 29(3), 227–235. Poole, A., & Bunnell, T. (2020). Developing the notion of teaching in ‘International Schools’ as precarious: Towards a more nuanced approach based upon ‘transition capital.’ Globalisation, Societies and Education. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/14767724.2020.1816924 Resnik, J. (2012). Sociology of international education: An emerging field of research. International Studies in Sociology of Education, 22(4), 291–310. Rey, J., Bolay, M., & Gez, Y. N. (2020). Precarious privilege: Personal debt, lifestyle aspirations and mobility among International School Teachers. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 18(4), 361–373. Richardson, H. (2016, February 26). Warning over England’s teacher braindrain. BBC.co.uk. SI News. (2018). The 4 types of international schools in China. https:// www.studyinternational.com/news/demand-for-western-ed-in-china-breeds4-types-of-international-schools/ Skelton, M. (2003). Defining ‘international’ on an international curriculum. In M. Hayden, J. Thompson, & G. Walker (Eds.), International education in practice: Dimensions for national and international schools (pp. 39–54). Routledge. Stacey, V. (2018). Chinese draft amendment threatens investment in International Schools. The Pie News. https://thepienews.com/news/chinese-draftamendment-threatens-internationalschools/

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Suchman, M. C. (1995). Managing legitimacy: Strategic and institutional approaches. Academy of Management Review, 20, 571–610. Swartz, D. L. (2016). Bourdieu’s concept of field. Sociology. https://doi.org/ 10.1093/obo/9780199756384-0164 Tan, C. (2013). Learning from Shanghai: Lessons in success (Vol. 21). Springer Science & Business Media. Tarc, P., & Tarc, A. (2015). Elite ‘International Schools’ in the global South: Transnational space, class relationalities and the ‘middling’ international schoolteacher. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 36(1), 34–52. Thomas, P. (2008). Field. In M. Grenfell (Ed), Pierre Bourdieu: Key concepts (pp. 67–85). Acumen. Van Oord, L. (2007). To westernize the nations? An analysis of the International Baccalaureate’s philosophy of education. Cambridge Journal of Education, 37 (3), 375–390. Vaughan, R. (2013, March 15). English speakers sought to satisfy global boom. Times Educational Supplement. Weale, S. (2019). Fifth of teachers plan to leave profession within two year., The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/apr/ 16/fifth-of-teachers-plan-to-leave-profession-within-two-years. Wright, E., & Lee, M. (2014). Developing skills for youth in the 21st century: The role of elite International Baccalaureate diploma programme schools in China. International Review of Education, 60(2), 199–216. Wright, E., Ma, Y., & Auld, E. (2021). Experiments in being global: The cosmopolitan nationalism of international schooling in China. Globalisation, Societies and Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2021.1882293 Wu, W., & Koh, A. (2021). Being “international” differently: A comparative study of transnational approaches to international schooling in China. Education Review. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2021.1887819 Xu, H. (2001). A review of international schools and their curricular in China. Theory and Practice of Education, 6, 41–44. Yan, W., Han, Y., & Cai, Y. (2015). Internationalization and globalization in Chinese K-12 schools and university education. In M. Hayden, J. Levy., & J. Thompson (Eds), The Sage handbook of research in international education (pp. 569–582). Sage. Yang, D. T. (2016). The pursuit of the Chinese dream in America: Chinese undergraduate students at American universities. Lexington Books. Young, N. A. (2018). Departing from the beaten path: International schools in China as a response to discrimination and academic failure in the Chinese educational system. Comparative Education, 54(2), 159–180. Zittoun, T., & Gillespie, A. (2020). Metaphors of development and the development of metaphors. Theory & Psychology, 30(6), 827–841.

CHAPTER 3

International School Teachers: Motivations and (Mis)conceptions

3.1

Interlude #2

My background is somewhat unconventional for an International School teacher and an academic. I grew up in what could be described as a ‘disadvantaged’ household in an area of Plymouth called Efford. I was fortunate to have some inspiring teachers who not only kindled my interest in the field of learning but also recognised that I had some ability in English. Inspired by my teachers’ faith in me, I decided that I would become a secondary school English teacher. And so it was that when it came to having the obligatory career planning interview with Mr. Jenkins in Grade 10, I responded to his inquiry of what I wanted to do after my GCSEs (General Certificate of Secondary Education) with an emphatic, ‘I want to be an English teacher.’ He told me that I would need to obtain a grade ‘C’ or above in English and mathematics, study three A’ Levels (one of which would need to be English), take a degree in English at university, and then complete teacher training. For a working-class 15-year-old, this litany of requirements was akin to scaling Mount Everest. Nevertheless, I believed I could do it. However, life has a way of turning out differently. Fast forward to results day for my GCSEs. I tore open the envelope, leaping from grade to grade: Design and Technology, A; English, B; Geography, B; Information Technology, C; Science, C; Music, C; French, D; Mathematics, D. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Poole, International Teachers’ Lived Experiences, International and Development Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78686-1_3

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Forget the ascent, I had not even made it out of base camp. Mathematics would prove to be a continual source of frustration. A subsequent attempt to re-sit the exam in my first year of A’ Levels during evening remedial classes proved equally fruitless, resulting in a pitiable E. By the time I had completed my A’ Levels in English, History and Media Studies, I had built up such an antipathy towards mathematics that I abandoned any idea of teaching English. As a result, I left for university to study English and philosophy without any preconceived idea of what I was going to do in the future. All I knew was that I had a passion for English and that, most likely, I would do something in that field, whatever that would be. Fast forward a few years. I was working for Royal Mail whilst simultaneously working on a Masters degree on the Eighteenth-Century English novel. I was about four years into the job at Royal Mail when a colleague suddenly left and took up a teaching job in a university in China. He sent emails back declaring that it was ‘a great experience’ and ‘you could live like a king.’ All that was required was a university degree—no teaching experience or qualifications required. This was the call that I had been waiting for. A few job searches later through Google and I had secured my first teaching job in a university in Nanchang, a third-tier city in one of the poorest provinces in China. This fact did not concern me in the least. The job was a vehicle to escape from England, to try something new. I would be getting a glimpse of the ‘real’ China. With high expectations, I boarded a plane at Heathrow Airport with my entire life stuffed into one backpack, leaving behind twenty-eight years of false starts and the words of my family that I would ‘be back in a few months’ time’.

3.2

Introduction

This chapter lays the foundations for exploring the participants’ lived experiences of working in Chinese Internationalised Schools by exploring what the International School literature has had to say about teachers. Specifically, this chapter focuses on individuals’ motivations for leaving their home countries to relocate overseas and how four teacher typologies theorise International School Teachers and their motivations for relocating overseas. Two of the typologies were formulated in 2000 (Garton, 2000) and 2001 (Hardman, 2001) and focus on classifying teachers according to contract types and personality traits, respectively. Although influential, these typologies have recently been critiqued for being insufficiently nuanced (Bailey & Cooker, 2019, p. 129) or for reifying the

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teacher experience (Savva, 2015). This critique has given rise to the construction of two new typologies that explore both teachers’ motivations and teacher identities. The first typology by Bailey and Cooker (2019) offers three types of International School teacher, whilst Rey et al. (2020) also offer three complementary teacher types. Whilst these new typologies update Garton and Hardman’s typologies, they nonetheless commit many of the same conceptual sins by reifying teachers’ identities and experiences. This chapter interrogates these typologies from two perspectives. From a metaphysical perspective, the typology assumes that individuals embody a core identity that remains the same over time and place. From an ethical perspective, teachers become objects for research, akin to receptacles of answers. It can be seen that identity and ethics go hand in hand. However, although there has been a discussion of ethical issues related to the teachers’ roles and the development of common ethical principles (Räsänen, 2015), there has yet to be any discussion of the ethics of researching International School Teachers.

3.3

Who Are International School Teachers?

Teachers in International Schools are typically Western expatriates (Hayden, 2006), hailing predominantly from either the US or the UK (Hayden, 2006). They are also, often, qualified teachers in their home countries, possessing Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) in the UK or a teaching certificate in the US (Hayden, 2006). Many commentators speculate that the International School teaching force will drastically expand from its current number, 420,000 in 2020 (Bunnell, 2017), to 780,000 by 2026 (Gaskell, 2016). It has to be noted that establishing the actual number of teachers working in International Schools is difficult, as what constitutes an International School (and an International School Teacher) is ambiguous at best. The figures that Bunnell and others quote are indicative of a projected expansion in the international education industry which will require ever greater numbers of educators, thereby justifying the focus on the international school teacher as an emerging research agenda. However, caution needs to be taken if we are not to inadvertently conflate International School Teachers with Western Anglo-Saxon expatriates. Whilst it is true that the majority of teachers in International Schools are Anglo-Saxon, ever larger numbers of host country

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teachers are developing expertise in international programmes, such as the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme (IBDP) (Hayden & Thompson, 2013). This is particularly the case in Type C schools, such as Chinese Internationalised Schools. Despite this change in demographic, it is still the case that parents prefer their child to be taught by a native-English speaker (Garton, 2000), although it has been suggested that parents would be more accepting of host country teachers if they taught ‘local’ subjects, such as Chinese, mathematics or music (Walsh, 1999). Although host country Chinese teachers are likely to be disadvantaged in this regard, their understanding of the organisational culture and language of Chinese Internationalised Schools puts them in a position of paradoxical power and privilege, which remains largely inaccessible to most expatriate teachers. Another group of teacher to be found in Chinese Internationalised Schools are individuals who hail from the West but who are not from an Anglo-Saxon country. These teachers tend to be from European countries, such as France and Germany. However, I have also encountered teachers from South Africa, Finland, and Albania during my time teaching in China. 3.3.1

Motivations for Relocating, and Staying Overseas

Teachers’ reasons for relocating overseas to teach in International Schools are diverse and contradictory. This diversity is echoed by Robert, whose experiences of working in International Schools the world over led him to the understanding that ‘foreign teachers generally have different stories, and reasons for working overseas. So, they often feel quite differently about the situations they end up sharing’. In what follows, I offer five narratives of why teachers choose to relocate overseas. These narratives are derived from the literature, as well as my own experiences in the field and from conversations with former colleagues. 3.3.2

Narrative # 1: To See the World (or Seeking Out Greener Pastures)

For many young teachers, International School placements offer a kind of passport to see the world (Hayden, 2006; Savva, 2015). Unfettered by family commitments, these young teachers, who could be labelled as ‘adventurers’ (Rey et al., 2020), use teaching as a way to support their

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aspirations for travel and encountering new experiences. This group’s interest in the International School field can be explained in terms of their participation in the seemingly carefree, privileged environment of lifestyle migration that under normal circumstances would be unavailable to them back in their home countries. The flexibility that International School teaching affords is illustrated by one of the participants of Rey et al.’s study of younger teachers’ motivations for relocating overseas: One of the great things I thought that there is about teaching [is] that you can just go anywhere in the world. (…) [As a math teacher,] it’s surprisingly easy to get a job wherever you are, wherever you like in the world. (…). The adventure of teaching really appealed to me. (Rey et al., 2020, p. 4)

My own reasons for moving to China in 2008 were not too dissimilar from this teacher’s. Teaching, at that time, was not an end in itself, but rather a means to an end. And that end was to try something new. For younger teachers, there is a certain spontaneous, almost reckless, attitude about relocating overseas. Bailey (2015, p. 8) talks about teachers’ ‘spurof-the-moment-decision’ to move overseas. For these teachers, it is the pull factors of the ‘different and exotic’ that matter, and not the push factors, that cause them to leave home (Bailey, 2015). This youthful recklessness can be contrasted with the pragmatic realities of older teachers who often need to carefully weigh up every move (Koh, 2020). However, even for seemingly carefree younger teachers, the spectre of financial woes is never too far away, as will be discussed next. 3.3.3

Narrative # 2: To Escape Financial and Personal Issues (or the Wild West of International Education)

For young, Anglo-Saxon teachers, International Schools offer a way out of the challenge of personal debts, such as the accumulation of student loans. Working in International Schooling thus provides this group with a way to escape indebtedness. Yet, at the same time, their indebtedness ‘locks’ (Rey et al., 2020, p. 10) young teachers into ‘a precarious system that offers little protection and is highly unpredictable’ (Rey et al., 2020, p. 10). This paradox is captured in the phrase, ‘precarious privilege’, in which teachers ‘combine the privileges of emancipated globetrotters and

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the precarity of contractual employment in the neoliberal age’ (Rey et al., 2020, p. 10). Older teachers may choose to relocate overseas in order to escape from personal or professional issues back home (Hayden, 2006). The International School sector could be thought of as ‘the French Foreign Legion of the education world’ (Hayden, 2006, p. 75). One former colleague of mine offered a similar analogy when he described the International School sector as the ‘Wild West of education’. As Robert noted, ‘older, single, foreign teachers, especially ESL teachers, often [work abroad] to help deal with issues they have at home’. For teachers seeking to escape from their past, International Schools can offer an opportunity for reinvention, just as the Wild West of old offered individuals a chance to forge a new identity on the frontier. However, even if teachers are ‘reskilled and running ahead’ (Bailey, 2015), the shadow of the past has a way of catching up with them. Robert recollected a conversation he had with an immigration consultant when he was preparing to move from South Africa to New Zealand: He picked up on my anxiety at the time and told me, ‘Don’t expect a move to another country to solve all your problems. They will follow you wherever you go. In fact, your problems may even get worse’. Very true. And it applies to lots of foreign teachers, too.

It can be seen that financial difficulties are a push factor that force teachers to leave an otherwise preferred state of affairs in their home countries. This is likely to impact negatively on teachers’ identities and emotional well-being, which also exacerbates the precarity endemic to International Schools (Poole & Bunnell, 2020). 3.3.4

Narrative # 3: To Find Employment (or Riding the Gravy Train)

Another reason why teachers choose to relocate overseas is due to limited employment opportunities in their countries of origin (Rey et al., 2020). Prospective teachers will also be attracted to the prospect of better salaries and working conditions (Richards, 2019) and the accumulation of cosmopolitan capital (Rey & Bolay, 2020). International Schools offer teachers a relatively light teaching load and a slew of benefits, including health coverage, tuition subsidies, free accommodation, and, in some

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cases, pension contributions (Bunnell & Poole, 2020). Another colleague of mine referred to this as ‘the gravy train’—an informal expression that refers to ‘a way of making money quickly, easily, and, often, dishonestly’. For some teachers, such as Tyron, working in International Schools was more about surviving rather than thriving: I was a part-time teacher in South Africa at the school. I was actually a physical therapist first; then, I was a part-time teacher (…). But I was actually immigrating to Canada, but I lost my job. So, the head of the department at the university—it was at Calgary—told me he knows a principal in China who needs a PE teacher. And he saw on my resume that I was a teacher. You know, would I be interested? And from there on out I had to do it because I had no work.

As mentioned in the opening interlude chapter, I had always wanted to become a teacher, but found that trajectory blocked because I did not get a C grade in mathematics. Thus, International Schooling Teaching became a way for me to gain access to the otherwise inaccessible teaching profession. Whilst most International School Teachers are qualified, many lower-tier schools (and even some middle and higher tier schools, too, based on my experience) will accept teaching experience in lieu of professional qualifications. Some International Schools may also accept alternative teaching certificates, such as The University of Nottingham’s Postgraduate Certificate Education (International) (PGCEi), which is an academic qualification, not a teaching programme, and does not lead to Qualified Teacher Status. The course ‘focuses on improving professional practice for international educators through critical reflection and research’ (University of Nottingham, 2020). 3.3.5

Narrative # 4: To Escape the Tyranny of Performativity (or, Out of the Fire and into the Frying Pan)

Increasingly, teachers from the UK are ‘fleeing’ and ‘finding refuge abroad (Ferguson, 2018) as they are ‘sick of the system’ and seeking freedom from testing, inspections, and bureaucracy (Barker, 2016). It has been reported that about 15,000–20,000 teachers leave Britain each year to teach overseas (Knight, 2016). Ball (2003) talks of an educational culture of accountability where teachers are forced to adapt to new subjectivities that reward conformity and performativity. Conformity is

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rewarded, whereas resistance in the assertion of one’s ‘authentic’ teacher self is labelled as ‘irresponsible’ (Ball, 2016), akin to a form of treachery, vividly illustrated by Blyth’s (2017) experiences of unfair dismissal in an International School in Hong Kong. The potential for reclaiming a more authentic teacher self is corroborated by empirical data from the field. For example, Bailey (2015) found that two of the teachers in her study— who had left the teaching profession in the UK because of the pressures of performativity—were able to rekindle their love of teaching within an International School context, which was less demanding and less stressful than the context back in the UK. However, whilst teachers may be ‘seeking out’ greener pastures, they still cannot escape the ‘terrors of performativity’ (Ball, 2003) altogether. International Schools may be largely unregulated, but parental expectations, such as the desire for their children to achieve excellent examination results, can be understood as a form of performativity (Bunnell & Poole, 2020). This is particularly the case in Chinese Internationalised Schools where Chinese parents do not ‘buy into’ international education, so much as ‘buy’ it. The teacher, within this culture of commodification, becomes akin to a service provider, or ‘a source of profit’ (Giroux, 2003, p. 7). In an autoethnographic reflection on my experiences of working in Chinese Internationalised Schools (Poole, 2019), I identified two mechanisms of performativity: Teacher appraisal and school evaluation. To mix metaphors: teachers may indeed ‘flee’ national education systems crippled by accountability in order to seek out ‘greener pastures’, but in so doing they may also be ‘escaping the fire for the frying pan’ (Bunnell & Poole, 2020, p. 3). 3.3.6

Narrative # 5: Why Teachers Stay in the Field (or ‘a Lot of Them End up Staying Overseas Because They Have no Good Reason to Go Home’)

Once abroad, teachers may choose to remain with a particular school due to family commitments (Bailey & Cooker, 2019), or economic and social advantages, such as the accumulation of social and cultural capital (Tarc et al., 2019). Many teachers may choose to stay on the ‘international circuit’ because, in Robert’s words, ‘they have no good reason to go home.’ This may be the case for older teachers, referred to by Hardman (2001) as Mavericks, who are divorced, whose children are grown up, and who consider International School teaching as an opportunity for a new

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lease of life. These teachers may also find that the longer they stay ‘on the International School circuit’ the harder it becomes for them to return home. I refer to this as ‘advantageous exile’ (Poole, 2020). Teachers can live a very comfortable middle-class life and save a great deal of money, but many would be unable to continue this lifestyle if they returned to their home countries. Whilst qualified teachers are unlikely to struggle in finding a teaching position back home, the same cannot be said for their non-qualified counterparts, many of whom work in Chinese Internationalised Schools. For non-qualified teachers, gaining employment in China is relatively easy, as their academic qualifications and embodiment of ‘whiteness’ and ‘international capital’ (Basaran & Olsson, 2018) are in high demand (Lan, 2011). However, these two attributes are less valued in teachers’ home countries. Many experienced, non-qualified International School Teachers could not teach in a state school, although in the UK, they might be able to find employment in an Academy, a school that has more autonomy than traditional state-funded schools (GOV.UK, 2020), which can hire unqualified teachers. Therefore, many teachers become locked into the International School circuit. They are unable to find comparable employment in their home countries and/or are unwilling to relinquish their relatively privileged lifestyles overseas. This situation is also the case for indebted, younger teachers, who become locked into the International School circuit due to financial concerns back home (Rey et al., 2020). This situation could also be described in terms of ‘golden handcuffs’, ‘paradoxical privilege’ or ‘precarious privilege’ (Rey et al., 2020). Having established International School Teachers’ motivations for relocating abroad to work in an International School, I next explore how International School teachers have been conceptualised, focusing on four teacher typologies. It has to be noted that teacher typologies are by no means new or unique to international education. For example, in 1967, Phillips was asking, ‘Who is this teacher? What is he (or she) like? Is the teacher who makes the difference “type cast” and reproductible, and what is his net effect on the learning process?’ (1967, p. 26). Since that time, innumerable typologies have been proposed in order to answer these questions. These typologies have been constructed in terms of specific subjects, such as science teachers (Rickards et al., 2004) and mathematics teachers (Andrews, 2007), teachers’ beliefs and practices (Mama & Hennessy, 2013; Thomson & Nietfeld, 2016), different types of teachers active on the job market (Goff et al., 2019), and typologies of school

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leaders (Urick, 2016). Despite the range of typologies proposed, they all attempt to do the same thing: differentiate teachers according to traits, behaviours, and qualities that are taken to be unchanging in nature. The four International School Teacher typologies to be discussed next are no exception. They categorise teachers according to sets of characteristics and motivations that are also taken to be acontextual and static in nature.

3.4

International School Teacher Typologies

The first typology I examine was proposed by Garton in 2000. In keeping with the tripartite feature of International School Teacher typologies, Garton identified three types of International School teacher: host country nationals, local-hire expatriates and overseas-hire expatriates. Host country nationals may be attracted to International Schools as they offer better conditions of service than those offered by the national system. International Schools can also provide host country nationals a more ‘authentic’ environment in which to experience and understand international education, as illustrated by Daisy, who stated that ‘WEST gave [her] an idea of how Chinese schools do international education.’ The second type of teacher identified by Garton is referred to as local-hire expatriates. These teachers are typically spouses or partners who work for embassies or multi-national companies and are often recruited at a lower cost than overseas hires, as it is perceived that they do not require housing, flights or other benefits. It has to be noted that the category of local-hire expatriates is far more expansive than Garton assumed. This category could include expatriate teachers who have been residing in a country for some years. (For example, I was technically a local-hire expatriate for most of my International School career as I was resident in Shanghai when I joined a number of International Schools there.) The third type of teacher identified by Garton is referred to as overseas hires. Teachers in this category are often hired through recruitment fairs and can receive a more lucrative package than locally hired expatriates. These teachers also possess expertise and experience teaching international programmes such as the International Baccalaureate Diploma or the International General Certificate of Secondary Education (Hayden & Thompson, 2013). The difference in status can lead to friction between local and overseas-hired teachers (Hardman, 2001) due to different pay scales and the perception that host country national teachers work harder than their overseas and locally hired counterparts (Zhang, 2015). Cambridge (2002) has also

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suggested a similar set of groupings that consists of a long-term administrative core, a fringe of relatively high-paid professional expatriates who are on short-term contracts, and local staff who, whilst hired on lower rates of remuneration, are likely to remain at their schools for a longer term. The second typology was developed by Hardman (2001). Developing Garton’s three categories, Hardman offered a number of sub-categories that include: • childless career professionals • mavericks • career professionals with families. And amongst more senior members of staff: • senior career professionals • senior mavericks • senior Penelopes. Childless career professionals are perceived to be dedicated and more likely to get involved with students and student activities (Hardman, 2001; Savva, 2015). Career professionals with families are also perceived in similarly positive terms as they are more likely to renew contracts due to a vested interest in the education of their children, who are typically enrolled in their workplaces (Hardman, 2001; Savva, 2015). In contrast to the first two categories is the so-called maverick who is characterised as a global traveller or someone seeking to escape from national constraints and other issues in their home country (Hardman, 2001). The fourth sub-category of senior teachers includes senior career professionals, who are described as mature teachers that are motivated by lifelong learning, and senior mavericks who, motivated by their lack of family commitments, seek to travel before retirement (Savva, 2015). Finally, senior Penelopes are faithful to the country they have adopted even after they have outlived their value (Savva, 2015) and are named after the character of Ulysses’ wife who remained faithful during Ulysses’ twenty-year absence (Hayden, 2006). Despite adding nuance to Garton’s categories, Hardman’s choice of nomenclature should be critiqued for reproducing a neocolonial discourse that places the West at the centre. For example,

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the character of Penelope is derived from the myth of Ulysses, but it has to be asked to what extent this Western myth has applicability to teachers like Daisy, who do not hail from similar western traditions. Moreover, the term ‘Penelope’ is not a particularly flattering comparison, suggesting that teachers in this category are defined in terms of negative or undesirable character traits. There is a sense that this type of teacher has outstayed their welcome and are simply wasting their resources along with those of the school. Savva (2015) has also critiqued Hardman’s typology for not considering the potential for individuals to embody different categories at various stages in their lives. Despite these critiques, this typology is frequently cited by leading scholars in the fieldof International Schooling, such as Hayden and Thompson, who even as recently as 2013 referenced it uncritically in their work. The third typology was recently proposed by Bailey and Cooker (2019). This typology, entitled, ‘Typology of International School Teachers’, takes its inspiration from Hayden and Thompson’s typology of International Schools (Hayden & Thompson, 2013). The reader can find a summary of Hayden and Thompson’s typology in Chapter 2. Bailey and Cooker’s typology is comprised of three categories: Type A, Type B, and Type C teachers. The Type A teacher sees his or her job as supporting travel and mobility. Type A teachers have joined the profession in order to be globally mobile. Type B teachers see their jobs in ideological terms. Type B teachers see being open-minded and international as central to their role as International School teachers. They are committed to the profession because it enables them to make a difference in students’ lives—to change the world in global, ideological ways. Finally, Type C teachers view their primary attachment as belonging to the locale in which the International School is situated, perhaps because of personal interest, marriage or children (Bailey & Cooker, 2019). The typology also identifies and elucidates different narratives of commitment by teachers who lack a teaching qualification. This focus is both timely and much needed. Bailey and Cooker’s typology updates Garton and Hardman’s typologies by offering researchers a typology that has emerged from an Internationalised School landscape that has seen the rise of Type C (Hayden & Thompson, 2013) and Chinese Internationalised Schools, the latter of which places academic qualifications (e.g. Masters degrees) above professional qualifications (e.g., Qualified Teacher Status or a valid teaching license).

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The final typology by Rey et al. (2020) was proposed the same year in which this book was written. The authors identify three types of International School teacher: the expat, the local, and the adventurer. The expat teacher is typically a foreign teacher whose mobility is linked to personal circumstances, such as travelling with a partner and children as a trailing spouse. This category corresponds to Garton’s (2000) category of the local-hire expatriate. Many expat teachers have come from other careers, motivated by limited employment opportunities in their country of origin. This category also resonates with the ‘Accidental teacher’ label (Bailey & Cooker, 2019). The category of the local refers to teachers from a local background and corresponds to Garton’s (2000) category of the host country teacher. Local teachers are typically trained within their country and have transitioned to an International School from the public or private sector (Rey et al., 2020). Unlike the categories of the expat and the local, the adventurer is neither connected to the country in which the school is located nor to the expat community. This category corresponds to Bailey and Cooker’s (2019) Type A teacher and Hardman’s (2001) maverick teacher. Adventurer teachers are typically trained teachers from countries such as the UK and the US, and they are mostly young and unaccompanied by a spouse or children. In keeping with the stereotypical image of the international teacher as a ‘globe trotter’ with a thirst for adventure and travel, the adventurer teacher typically regards teaching as a means to an end, with that end often being a desire to see the world.

3.5

Critical Response to the Typologies

Given that International School teachers have been relegated to the position of a neglected actor in International School research, the typologies must be applauded for not only foregrounding the teacher as a significant topic for research but also laying the groundwork for greater theorisation. The typologies identify the different types of teacher to be found in International Schools whilst acknowledging their different motivations and professional aims and goals. Finally, the correspondence between the four typologies also strongly suggests that there is validity to the labels offered. However, I struggle to see myself or my colleagues in the typologies listed above. To return to the metaphor of sound introduced in the prelude, try as I might, I cannot hear the resonate live sound of lived experience through the maverick or the adventurer’s lips, who are more akin to ‘wire-pulled automatons’ (Wilde, 1994, p. 115) than actual living,

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breathing human beings. When bathed in the dim shadow of the scholar’s study, the typologies have a certain simulated depth, like a black and white film. However, when exposed to the harsh glare of the cacophonous classroom, the spell is swiftly broken. I do not see my colleagues or myself in these typologies, but rather, ‘strange mechanical grotesques’ (Wilde, 1994, p. 115) or, in T. S. Eliot’s (2014, p. 77) words, ‘hollow men’, ‘stuffed men’, ‘head piece filled with straw’. The above poetic diversion is designed to illustrate a fundamental dilemma that emerges (or is perhaps created) as a result of my positionality as a practitioner-researcher. Theory and abstraction are an integral part of academic research, yet in the process of theorising, something fundamental is lost—the voices of lived experience. This dilemma informs my critical response to the typologies, which I offer next. The first critique is metaphysical in nature, and the second is ethical.

3.6

Metaphysical Critique

The typologies assume that teachers embody fixed traits or characteristics that are taken to be acontextual in nature. This assumption is revealed by the labels employed to identity different International School teachers, such as the Type A teacher (Bailey & Cooker, 2019), the expat (Rey et al., 2020) or the maverick (Hardman, 2001). The definite article (the) implies that individuals embody and consistently perform the same set of characteristics over time. Whilst Bailey and Cooker (2019) and Rey et al. (2020) readily acknowledge that teachers may shift categories along their professional trajectory, the full complexity of teachers’ experiences is not addressed. People’s experiences cannot be seen as completely residing within a fixed category that reduces the complexity of lived experience and identity (Clandinin et al., 2018). The research on teacher identity (Akkerman & Meijer, 2011) shows that teachers’ identities not only change over time, as Rey et al. (2020) and Bailey and Cooker (2019) argue, but these identities also change across contexts (Akkerman & Meijer, 2011). Reducing teachers to a category or a type thus reifies experience. As a consequence, it is not possible to understand how teachers’ experiences inform how they subjectively experience labels like ‘the expat’ or the ‘maverick’. This reification can also be seen in the demarcation between teacher types (e.g. Rey et al.’s the local and the expat ). On the level of lived experience, however, individuals occupy multiple identities (Gee, 2000; Hermans, 1996, 2006; Valsiner,

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2014). For example, I may be labelled an ‘expat’ for legal purposes, but having spent many years living in China, I also feel like a ‘local’. Similarly, a local teacher may feel like an expat, particularly if he or she has lived in a foreign country before finally returning home. A more radical critique of ‘solid’ identities is offered by postmodernist thinkers who view identity as inherently fluid, discontinuous, and social in nature (Bauman, 2005; Giddens, 1991; Lyotard, 1984). From a postmodern perspective, it is not possible to talk about a ‘solid’ identity, as the absolutes on which the past was built have all been swept away on a tide of globalisation and modernity. Although postmodernist accounts of identity have rightly been critiqued for being overly relativistic in nature, they nevertheless compel us to move beyond a trait-like approach to theorising International School teachers’ lives and to consider identity as something that is fragmented and multiple in nature. At the same time, we do not want to lose sight of ‘solid’ identities altogether. It may be tempting to equate lived experience with the kind of free flow of unmediated experience associated with postmodern accounts of identity. However, doing so would provide an incomplete picture of lived experience, which is comprised of both ‘solid’ and ‘liquid’ states of being. ‘Solid’ and ‘liquid’ states of being is something that is explored in Chapter 4, where I compare teachers’ intercultural adaptations to working in a Chinese Internationalised school from the perspective of critical interculturality. Rehearsing an argument that I develop later in Chapter 7, it is possible to reclaim ‘solid’ identities, and therefore the typology, albeit within a framework that emphasises the ‘liquid’ aspect of lived experience.

3.7

Ethical Critique

Interrogating the assumption that teachers can be distilled into a type or category also exposes the often-concealed ethics of labelling. One of the ‘hidden rules’ (Kincheloe, 2005, p. 329) of labelling in academic research is the assumption that the researcher’s voice is more authoritative than the teacher’s voice. Whilst this may the case for certain research topics and traditions that fall within the realm of the quantitative, exploring lived experiences requires a drastic repositioning in how researchers conceptualise their traditional role as expert and interpreter. I would suggest that when researching qualitative phenomena, such as lived experiences, researchers should view their role as editors or perhaps even co-creators. One construct that is fundamental to understanding why researchers need

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to be conscious of their role in the research process is that of voice. To have a voice is to be heard, to share and to shape discussion and discourse. However, the act of labelling—the researcher deciding which category a teacher belongs to—exposes an asymmetry of power that privileges the researcher’s voice, thereby silencing the teacher, who is positioned as the researched, a passive receptacle of answers. Hargreaves (1998, p. 4) has argued that ‘in much of the writing on teaching and teachers’ work, teachers’ voices have either been curiously absent, or been used as mere echoes for preferred and presumed theories of educational researchers’. Bound up with the notion of voice are epistemological and ethical considerations of who has the right to speak and whether what is said is considered to be academic enough. Clandinin (2020, p. 27) summarises this point well when she writes that ‘teachers are commonly acknowledged as having had experience but they are credited with little knowledge gained from experience’. From the perspective of lived experience, the (mis)appropriation of teachers’ voices is akin to symbolic violence (Bourdieu, 1984; Schubert, 2008). According to Gardner-McTaggart (2020), symbolic violence may be gentler in some ways than physical violence, but it is no less real, as it is a form of forcefulness that is unseen. Applying this idea to the relationship between academics and teachers, the normative role of researcher as expert endows the academic voice with authority that enacts symbolic violence against those—such as teachers—who cannot partake in its theoretical and academic norms. In the case of the teacher typologies, the symbolic violence takes the form of a negation, an Othering (Mills et al., 2010). The teacher is rendered passive and mute in the research process, a ventriloquist’s dummy through which the researcher speaks. In order to overcome this imbalance of power, it is necessary to move from labelling teachers to creating relationships that foster negotiation and collaboration. The act of labelling makes the teacher passive in the conferment of identity, whereas negotiating assumes that the teacher is an agential being, active in the construction of his or her identity. Inquiring into the metaphysical nature of how teachers are quantified through the act of typologising reveals a neglected ethico-political dimension (Clarke, 2009) to identity, with which international education researchers, and teacher researchers in general, have yet to engage. Wellmeaning research becomes ‘exploitative’ in nature when teachers’ voices are marginalised. It has to be stated that I am not suggesting researchers

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are consciously exploiting teachers. Rather, the metaphysical assumptions on which research tools, like the typology, are founded—individuals embodying traits and characteristics that remain stable over time— inevitably lead to participants being positioned as the researched and, therefore, the exploited. Exploring the role of teachers in the research process through an ethical lens compels us to question our tendency to position teachers as the researched or to reify them as types and to place ‘exploration’ and ‘construction’ of teachers’ identities at the forefront of the research process. In order to facilitate this movement from exploitation/abstraction to construction/actualisation, I draw upon the idea of relational ethics. 3.7.1

Relational Ethics

Relational ethics places caring and nurturing at the centre of the research process. Relational ethics encourages researchers to move from the margins from which they typically, ‘objectively’ observe and to ‘come alongside’ (Clandinin, 2016, p. 45) participants in the research process. Underpinning this move from observing from the outside to coming alongside is the belief that research should be done with individuals rather than on them. Such a move also requires a change in nomenclature. Teachers are no longer the researched—they are participants. The term ‘participant’ carries a connotation of being active and involved. In many respects, the researcher also becomes a participant, as he or she is involved in the research and is a part of their participants’ lives. Because researchers are part of participants’ lives, ethical decisions/actions must be made within the context of a relationship that involves mutual respect, engagement, embodied knowledge, environment and uncertainty (Pollard, 2015). These five dimensions of a research relationship were explored in Chapter 1. In addition to these five dimensions, Clandinin and Caine (2013) define the space between researcher and participants as one characterised by attitudes of openness, mutual vulnerability, reciprocity, and care. What is important to underscore here is the word, ‘mutual’. The research process needs to be beneficial to both researcher and teacher, rather than serving just the researcher. The focus on building mutually rewarding and sustainable relationships, therefore, suggests an ethics of care, where researchers have a duty not only to protect participants, but also to empower them. One such vehicle for empowerment

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is through identity work, which involves sharing, negotiation, trust, and transparency. Sadly, the positivist tendency to quantify, categorise and label teachers still informs many qualitative studies, even if they employ qualitative interviews. The interview may capture the liquidity of lived experience, but it is subsequently rendered solid by the typology. This prevailing positivist tendency precludes consideration of issues of ethics or the researcher’s relationship to the participant, as both embody and reproduce positionings that are ingrained and that appear natural. These positionings are the researcher as the active asker of questions (the conferrer of identity), and the teacher as the passive receptacle of answers (the [grateful] receiver of conferred identity). However, relational ethics not only interrupts this positivist researcher-teacher dyad by promoting greater reflexivity in researchers (and teachers), but, most crucially, offers a way to repair it, based on a relation of care and mutual benefit. Thus, research needs to be cradled within a caring relationship between the researcher and the participant, a collaborative space in which the interpretation of interview data is continually negotiated. It is not enough for researchers to just share transcripts with participants; the participants need to be involved in the whole research process. This involves allowing the participants to co-construct interpretation of their data. In some instances, the participants’ interpretation of the interview data may differ from the researcher’s interpretation. This was the case in the writing of this book. There were a number of instances where the participants did not agree with my interpretation. Rather than silencing the participants’ voices, the questioning became a space in which to deconstruct our assumptions about role and voice. This process can be thought of as a form of bricolage (Kincheloe, 2005) whose juxtaposition creates a space to uncover and explore issues of epistemology and power, what Clarke (2009) refers to as an ‘ethico-politics of identity’. Bricolage recognises that the commitment to identity is not just a metaphysical or theoretical proposition but ‘a serious recognition that our work as teachers shapes and is shaped by the very mode of our being’ (Clarke, 2009, p. 186). Relational ethics places the researcher and the participant within a collaborative set of relations that is flexible in nature, allowing both to continually renegotiate their relationship to each other and the research. Relational ethics also addresses the issue of asymmetries of power by forcing the researcher to confront the assumptions and biases that their

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positionality renders tacit and invisible. Because researchers within a relational ethic work closely with participants, they are more likely to view teachers as full humans (agential, complex and contradictory) rather than as passive receptacles of answers, thereby bringing about a potential transformation in researchers’ thinking.

3.8

Summary of Chapter

This chapter has argued that researching International School teachers’ lives and identities is first and foremost an ethico-political endeavour. The typology is insufficiently nuanced to capture the complexity of teachers’ lived experiences and identities. The tyranny of the typology lies in its reinscription of asymmetries of power. The interview, from which the typology is derived, may be a good starting point for identity work, but it needs to be nested within a collaborative, relational ethics, which invites the participants to be part of the interpretation and application of the data as equal, and informed, partners. Having situated the study of International School teachers within a relational ethics that places lived experience at the centre of the research process, I next turn to the participants, who speak for themselves. Not only does this allow for more depth, but it also allows the participants’ voices to be heard unmediated. The reader is asked to imagine that the participants are introducing themselves in their own words. In what follows, I offer no interpretative gloss, acting only as an editor by highlighting what I consider to be those excerpts that illuminate the participants’ interviews used in subsequent chapters.

3.9

Introducing the Participants 3.9.1

Daisy

My secondary school was the typical Chinese way of teaching. During the classes, we were taught some grammar points, knowledge points, grammar, vocabulary and sentence structure. And tenses, something like that. And you had to do lots of practice—practice drills for examination just to prepare for the Gao Kao.1 Yes, everything is centred around Gao Kao so there is no time for anything else. During my high schooling time, as I remember, my classmates including me, our speaking English is very

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bad. We felt afraid to talk to foreigners because we never had the opportunity to do so. All we had done was to practice the grammar, the sentence structure, the exercises that will be tested in the examination of Gao Kao. Because my major is teaching Chinese as a second language, so during my major I got in touch with lots of foreigners and I felt like I like English more than Chinese, so I decided I wanted to be an English teacher. So, it’s kind of like the comparing between these two experiences that made me make the decision I think. When I became a teacher, I just came here to WEST, so there’s no change for me, actually. These are the first students I am formally teaching. I will compare them to my way of studying English many times. So, my way of teaching is to teach students the grammar points and not knowledge points and the vocabulary because that’s the only way I know to teach students because I was taught like that before. But as time goes on, I feel that that is not real English; that’s just for the examination-centred. So that’s why—so I think to learn English you need to use English in all kind of areas. You need to make presentations; you need to write in English; you need to read in English. You need to read magazines, novels, fiction, poems, and you need to talk to someone, then you can convey your ideas through all kinds of forms like the audio books or make video in English. I still don’t have a very clear picture of what is international education. So sometimes when the expatriate teachers are teaching, I cannot say that they are doing the international education—they can do the local Chinese national education. You cannot say that if an expat teacher is teaching, he or she is doing the international education. So, if I am teaching, I am a Chinese, but that does not mean that I am teaching the local Chinese way of teaching. But I don’t know what kind of thing is the international way of teaching. 3.9.2

Sophie

I was the kind of student who never spoke and stayed at the back–not at the back of class, but—maybe in front. I was very serious, but I never participated—you know, just raised my hand and say and try to answer the questions of the teacher. I think before I decided to study art, I wasn’t interested in anything. So, I just preferred to stay at home and explore nature because I lived in the countryside. So, going to school was for me going to the city and

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communicating with people that I had nothing in common with because we had different environments, different lives. So, it wasn’t a very good experience at the beginning. And then I think very early on I started to think that maybe I could do something in art, something that I really enjoyed doing. In high school, I met very, very good art teachers and of course they changed my life and my way of seeing the world for sure. Thanks to them, I’m here in China. I had three art teachers, and all of them taught me art in different ways, especially the first one, the first teacher. I remember the first class. She was so strict with us. Like, we didn’t bring anything for the first class and she said, ‘But where is your paper?’ And she made us, you know, because we didn’t have any paper so she said, ‘Okay, I have paper, but you have to pay for it’. So we thought, ‘Wow, she’s so strict’, and maybe it’s rude also, like you really had to use your own money, like one Euro for a piece of paper. So, what is this kind of teacher? And also, I remember she forced us to realise one work in one lesson. The time was very rushed and that meant also that you had to create with what you had in the classroom. And that was so difficult. I remember every time before going to class I was stressed. And I was afraid to go to the class. But after that, you are trained to make art anywhere with what you have. And actually, that was the best exercise. I studied art at university. I went to the National School of Fine Art in France which is one of the best universities. But I only stayed there for two years because there was too much competition between people. And also, it was the first time that I left my parents, so I was alone in the city. It was very hard. So then I decided to change from the School of Fine Arts and go and study with Michel, which was more like a city school of fine arts so the level is a little lower—it’s not lower, but you have less opportunity to make exhibitions or to visit exhibitions because it’s a small province. I got my Masters degree there. And then I went to China for the first time to study at the School of Fine Arts–a French school, but in Shanghai and in Hangzhou. It was a childhood dream. My mother gave me when I was ten years old a book about Chinese calligraphy. And I really loved it. And from this time, I decided that all the money that people will give me I will save it for later when I will be an adult when I go to China. That was my dream. And I read all the books that I could find about China, such as Chinese culture and calligraphy. I remember also that I watched a documentary with my

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father about Chinese culture in Su Zhou. Like you know, Chinese calligraphers, and they explained the way of, all the philosophy of calligraphy and stuff. And this is something that I wanted to study. 3.9.3

Tyron

If I think back now, I was actually a naughty student, but good naughty. But I listened to the teachers. I mean, I never threw my toys out of the box. We weren’t allowed to do that. I was taught a lot like I think the schools in China like the teachers to teach. The way the teacher stands in front of the class with the chalkboard. He will explain something to us; he will give us some work to do; he will tell us to do the work, and we were not at all to be open-minded or a risk-taker. And if we talked too much, obviously he would tell us to keep quiet. The big thing was the headmaster and the principal. The vice principal and everybody would walk around, and if your class was quiet, from a teacher’s perspective, then you were a good teacher. I must say again the difference between university and schooling was so huge that from schooling, you came from this closed, if I can say, closed atmosphere where you weren’t allowed to say anything. To suddenly this open, you’re allowed to say anything—not anything that you wanted, but I mean, you were much more open and much more like the IB (International Baccalaureate) Learner Profile. You had to communicate. And they were a lot more caring, and I just found that the difference between school and university was so huge that it was actually difficult for me. Especially the first year. I studied physical education and biology. So, my two main subjects were biology and PE. And again, I must say, if I think back to what we did in schooling PE and what we did in PE at university, it was such a huge difference. Just the way people would talk to you like you are now an adult, like you are somebody—in school you feel like you are no one. I thought I’d never become a teacher because of the bad examples I had of teachers when I was at school. So, I was actually surprised when my parents told me, ‘Do you know you will make a good teacher?’ and I go, ‘I will never become a teacher because if you’re a teacher you must be ugly to kids. They must be quiet in class and just do what you tell them to do’. So, I was actually told that I’ve got the personality to be a teacher and maybe my personality was such a way that I was, once again, much more like the IB Learner Profile where I would be open-minded and tell

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the kids to be risk-takers. And okay, so I was told by other people, so I had the external influence on me. And actually, when I did start doing my teaching diploma I enjoyed it. From then on, I said, ‘Maybe this is the way for me?’. I was a part-time teacher in South Africa at the school. I was actually a physical therapist first, then I was a part-time teacher. And the school would phone me and ask me if somebody’s sick or whatever, then I’d go fill in for him. But I was actually immigrating to Canada, but I lost my job. So, the head of the department at the university told me he knows a principal in China who needs a PE teacher. And he saw it on my resume that I am a teacher. You know, would I be interested? And from there on I had to do it because I had no work. I came to China because of practical reasons. I came because I had no work. And I was kind of looking forward to it because, I mean, I kind of enjoyed it when I was doing it in South Africa. And now I’ve been doing this for the last three years. And somebody would tell me, ‘It’s kind of funny Tyron that you would go almost around the world to go to find a job’, because I went to Canada from South Africa and then Canada to China. 3.9.4

Robert

A major influence on my experience of schooling was the fact that I became an epileptic at the age of five. I really struggled. But then I moved from St. Benedicts College, which was a private Catholic school. Although they did have teaching in English at my level, the work was a lot easier. I managed to, you know, things kind of came right for me and I also got onto a medication which was far less intrusive and didn’t affect my performance as much. So, my schooling kind of improved then. As far as teaching was concerned, back in those days—you’re going back sort of thirty, forty years now—teaching was very teacher-directed. Students didn’t really get that involved in working with this new knowledge that they were given, or this new information, and they are actually building the knowledge out of it that would move them forward. So, I don’t have any memories of really good learning experiences to be honest. My father said, ‘You really should give this a try. If it doesn’t work, then it doesn’t matter’. And so I applied. I didn’t think there was a university that would take me with these grades. And then my father said, ‘Well try it. Here’s the application form, fill it in and send it in and see what happens’. And they accepted me. So, I did the first year and I failed it.

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There were five courses and I failed three of them. You had to pass three of them to get into second year. And then my sister said, ‘Oh but you should be given special consideration because of your health situation’. She had been at the university for a few years, so she went and spoke to them and they said, ‘Yeah, okay, you can do it again’. I was quite determined that I would get through it. It took me four years, but I did it. Okay, well, why did I become a teacher? I pretty much had come to the end of the road in what I was doing. The banking career fizzled out in New Zealand, and the business services self-employment career came to a sticky end. I actually went to a graduation ceremony; it was my daughter. She’d done a postgraduate diploma in education and I saw a whole lot of grey-haired people going up and getting their diplomas and I thought, ‘I can do this too’. So, I went into teaching for all the wrong reasons really. I went to China because there was nothing for me back in New Zealand.

Note 1. A high stakes examination for university admittance.

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Tarc, P., Tarc, M. A., & Wu, X. (2019). Anglo-Western international school teachers as global middle class: Portraits of three families. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 40(5), 666–681. Thomson, M. M., & Nietfeld, J. L. (2016). Beliefs systems and classroom practices: Identified typologies of elementary school teachers from the United States. The Journal of Educational Research, 109(4), 360–374. University of Nottingham. (2020). Postgraduate Certificate Education (International) (PGCEi). https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/education/study/pgcei/ index.aspx Urick, A. (2016). The influence of typologies of school leaders on teacher retention: A multilevel latent class analysis. Journal of Educational Administration, 54(4), 434–468. https://doi.org/10.1108/JEA-08-2014-0090 Valsiner, J. (2014). Needed for cultural psychology: Methodology in a new key. Culture and Psychology, 20(1), 3–30. Walsh, P. (1999). International teacher recruitment: An empirical investigation (Unpublished MA in Education dissertation). University of Bath. Wilde, O. (1994). The collected poems of Oscar Wilde. Wordsworth Editions. Zhang, C. (2015). Discursive construction of Chinese language teacher identity. In F. Dervin (Ed.), Chinese educational migration and student-teacher mobilities. Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 4

The (Inter)cultural

4.1

Interlude #3

The first International School I worked at was located in Shanghai and housed both a local and an international division. There was a prevailing view that the local division produced excellent examination results whilst the international division effectively funded the local division. One student sagaciously remarked, ‘We (the international division) pay for their (the local division’s) green grass’. This example highlights a recurring theme throughout this book: namely, the uneasy collocation of national and international orientations, a defining feature of Chinese Internationalised Schools. I was assigned to the middle school to teach English and History. My timetable was very full, but I relished the opportunity to be able to teach literature. After a year, I was offered the chance to move to the high school and teach IB Language A. I recalled the words of an experienced colleague from Nanchang to seize any opportunity to teach the IBDP as it would be good for my C.V. The opportunity arose thanks to the recommendation of two high school teachers, one of whom was leaving and recommended I be his replacement. Naturally, I accepted the role. It was during my time teaching the IBDP that I decided to undertake a teaching qualification in the form of the PGCEi, offered by the University of Nottingham. Having decided to remain on the International School © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Poole, International Teachers’ Lived Experiences, International and Development Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78686-1_4

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circuit for the foreseeable future, it was imperative that I obtain some form of professional accreditation as well as develop my understanding of my teaching practice, which, to date, had mostly been based on instinct. The main theme that came out of my time at this school was my experience with the intercultural. Potentially, there was a lot of space for intercultural interactions to occur. For example, expatriate and host national teachers shared the same office, and expatriate teachers, in the lower years, also worked with a host national co-teacher. Aside from professional conversations about students’ progress, however, there was little by way of spontaneous conversation about teaching or even more personal matters, such as interests. It was a little later that I learnt that the Chinese staff had been ordered to minimise their interactions with the foreign staff as much as possible, as it was considered pointless to try to establish an interpersonal connection with such transient colleagues. One of the few host country national teachers who did speak to me once referred to the expatriate staff as ‘ghosts’—we were there in the office, but we were treated as if we were not there. This was not simply a negation of professional identity but a negation of existence.

4.2

Introduction

This chapter explores the first dimension of International School Teachers’ lived experiences in Chinese Internationalised Schools, namely, the development of intercultural identities. The other two dimensions, which will be explored in subsequent chapters, are precarity and resilience. As established in Chapter 2, the International School is not a decontextualised space. Rather, it can be described in terms of an ‘assemblage’ (Collier & Ong, 2005), that is, ‘a machinery of ideas, tactics and practices assembled to deal with a problem at a historical time and contextual moment’ (Koh, 2011, p. 271). The International School could also be described as ‘a problem space’ (Collier & Ong, 2005), ‘a transnational space’ (Hayden, 2011), or ‘a contact zone’ (Pratt, 1991) in which actors struggle and strategically maneuver in order to ‘thrive’ and ‘survive’. Teachers are not defeated by precarity and difficulty but instead accrue resilience as a result of their experiences of adversity. These adverse experiences are transformed into resilience capital. In order to show this connection, I combine the words ‘survival’ and ‘thrive’ into a portmanteau of ‘sur-thrival’ and ‘sur-thriving’.

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The focus on tactics, struggles, and problems clearly exposes the existence of asymmetries of power. It has been noted that the epistemologies and teaching strategies of expatriate staff in Type A (Hayden & Thompson, 2013) International Schools privilege western ways of knowing, leading to the marginalisation of local faculty teacher identities (Lai et al., 2016). Transnational education programmes, such as the IBDP, have thus been criticised for promoting ‘knowledge capitalism’, ‘linguistic and cultural imperialism’ or ‘ideological imperialism’ (Zhang, 2015). However, as will be illustrated below, the opposite is the case in Chinese Internationalised Schools. Rather, the field of the school is fundamentally Chinese in nature. It has to be pointed out that the term ‘Chinese’ could be critiqued for being overly homogenous, belying a great deal of diversity and contradiction. However, the interview data shows that Robert and Tyron also viewed WEST in similarly homogenous terms. The Chinese Internationalised School privileges certain practices and assumptions that are in continuity with Confucian heritage cultures. According to Mason (2014, p. 2), a Confucian heritage culture is defined as: a high regard for education and a belief that it plays a significant role in upward mobility; the holding, at a deeply personal level, of Confucian values to do with the cultivation of the self; a strong work ethic that gives practical expression both to this high regard for education and to this commitment to the cultivation of the self; a belief, generally more widespread than might be the case in other societies, that success depends more on effort than on innate capacity, and hence that everyone can succeed, provided that he or she works hard enough; a commitment to repetitive drilling and to apparently rote learning in an acceptance of the effort needed to succeed; and a sense of respect for teachers that is understood in more hierarchical and authoritarian terms than might be the case in, say, many Western societies.

The monocultural nature of Chinese Internationalised Schools requires a re-evaluation of conceptualisations of the intercultural, which are typically predicated upon the International School as being inherently diverse in nature. This chapter offers such a re-evaluation by problematising the assumption that teachers develop intercultural identities as a result of working in transnational spaces, hence the use of parenthesis in the chapter title ‘(Inter)cultural’, which is designed to draw attention to the fact that Chinese Internationalised Schools are monocultural in nature

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(They are comprised predominantly of local teaching staff and dominated by Chinese organisational logics.). Similarly, the use of ‘Inter(cultural)’ in relation to teachers’ identities relates to the prevalence of ‘solid’ or ‘cultural’ identities that emerged from the interviews, which can also be attributed to the monocultural nature of Chinese Internationalised Schools. The International School literature talks a great deal about the need for teachers to develop intercultural competence and intercultural identities in order to adapt to a new culture (Halicioglu, 2015; Hayden, 2003; Poole, 2020). However, what is less discussed is the fact that prolonged exposure to new cultural norms often does not conform to traditional notions of cultural immersion but rather, to a failure to integrate into the host country (Savva, 2017). Some of the reasons for failing to acculturate include a lack of language proficiency, living in countries that are sometimes antithetical to Western ideals, and discriminatory practices based on national and/or race affiliation (Savva, 2017). In addition, International Schools in general have been shown to be inherently precarious (Bunnell, 2019) or riddled with micro-politics (Blyth, 2017; Caffyn, 2010), both of which impact upon the acculturation process and can chip away at teachers’ sense of self-efficacy. My research into expatriate teachers in China (e.g. Poole, 2019a, 2019b) has also found that the ‘personal struggles’ that Savva identified can lead to the retrenchment of existing beliefs and deficit views of China, Chinese education, and Chinese teachers as the Other. A final reason why teachers often struggle to acculturate and develop intercultural identities is due to a lack of professional and emotional support (Hayden, 2003). The professional development that is offered tends to be overly ‘technocratic’ in nature (Kerr, 2018), focusing on assessment and content. Little attention is paid to the realities of working in International Schools, which include adapting to a new culture and, in the contextof Chinese Internationalised Schools, adapting international (that is, Western) curricula to fit the epidemiological and political expediencies of the local context. Generally speaking, the approaches to the intercultural and identity explored in the international education literature tend to conform to traditional approaches to interculturality and intercultural identity that are Western-centric in nature (e.g. Poole, 2019a; Savva, 2017). Whilst these more traditional approaches may be commensurate with International Schools that take their inspiration from western models (e.g.

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Dulwich or Harrow), Chinese Internationalised Schools (as established in Chapter 2) are a different beast, comprised of national and international orientations that cannot easily be fused, and therefore require a different approach. In order to bring into focus the lived intercultural realities of teachers working in Chinese Internationalised Schools, it is necessary to bracket Western-centric assumptions about the intercultural, and to develop a bespoke approach that is commensurate with the idiosyncrasies of Chinese Internationalised Schools. In realising this endeavour, I draw inspiration from the burgeoning concept of ‘critical interculturality’ (Dervin, 2016), although I have occasion to critique and adapt it in order to fit it into the context of this study. In order to contextualise critical interculturality, I first present the orthodox approach to interculturality as a process of developing competence, an approach that critical interculturalityvehemently rejects.

4.3

Traditional Accounts of the Intercultural

The notion of intercultural competence has traditionally encompassed the ability to communicate effectively and appropriately across cultural differences based on particular knowledge, skills and attitudes (e.g. Byram, 1997; Deardorff, 2006). The interculturally competent individual is someone who draws upon a repertoire of cultural attributes in order to negotiate interaction amongst culturally distinct individuals. She or he does this by alternating ‘between different perspectives’ and being ‘conscious of their evaluations of difference’ (Byram et al., 2001, p. 5). Being interculturally competent not only requires individuals to focus on difference but also to reflexively question the conventions and values that they have unconsciously acquired (Alred et al., 2006). Reflexivity is a key component of interculturality that allows individuals to relativise perspectives and enhance their intercultural sensitivity. This perspective has recently been developed by Byram (2018, p. 72), who argues that adopting an internationalist perspective ‘gives learners an Archimedean point from which to view the world, and their own nation and country within it, a point from which they can see what they have never seen before’ (emphasis added). An ‘Archimedean point’ refers to a mental or perhaps cultural vantage point from which individuals can see more clearly and objectively. However, the notion of intercultural competence as traditionally conceived can be critiqued on a number of fronts. Firstly, it has to

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be asked to what extent individuals can become conscious of the tacit values and conventions that have shaped their worldviews. Secondly, the focus on competence can be critiqued for its teleological assumption that there can in fact be an end to the intercultural process. It has been argued, for example, that presuming a seemingly objective perspective from which the individual can transcend the subjective is in fact inherently subjective, reflecting an entrenched Western-centric perspective (Dervin, 2016). Ferri (2018) argues that ‘a view of intercultural communication predicated on the search for a final moment of understanding when all cultural conflicts are resolved is problematic’ (Poole, 2019b, p. 60). This perspective is also echoed by Blasco (2012, p. 476), who concludes that assuming there is a final moment to the intercultural process ‘paradoxically reproduces an ethnocentric way of perceiving self as perspicacious, self-transcendable, and able to expose the features of a fixed and knowable other.’ Another assumption that critical interculturalityaddresses relates to notions of culture and identity. Both of these are frequently taken to be ‘solid’ in nature; they are perceived as self-contained entities that influence how individuals think and behave. Such ‘solid’ thinking is taken to be unwanted and counterproductive to the intercultural encounter, as this can easily lead to the pigeonholing of individuals into static identities related to national cultures or other racialised identity markers (Kim, 2007). However, as I will show below, simply portraying ‘solid’ identities and culture as inherently ‘bad’ is incongruent with how individuals actually experience their day-to-day realities in intercultural spaces. This is particularly the case for expatriate teachers in Chinese Internationalised Schools, where organisational, cultural and pedagogical practices are often in conflict with their existing beliefs about teaching, learning, and management. This disconnect underscores the need to develop conceptual tools that are able to capture the ambivalence and complexity of lived experience, which I find in the concept of critical interculturality.

4.4

Critical Interculturality

In order to move beyond the limitations of ‘solid’ approaches to identity and culture, Fred Dervin has developed the notion of ‘critical interculturality, which is defined as:

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a never-ending process of ideological struggle against solid identities, unfair power differentials, discrimination and hurtful (and often disguised) discourses of (banal) nationalism, ethnocentrism, racism and various forms of -ism. Critical interculturalityis also about the now and then of interaction, beyond generalizations of contexts and interlocutors. (Dervin, 2017, p. 2)

Critical interculturalityurges us to reconsider our assumptions about solid accounts of individual identity. In transitioning away from static or ‘solid’ conceptions of identity in intercultural communication, it is possible to identify the emergence of two new lines of thinking. Firstly, a critical intercultural perspective moves beyond ‘solid’ approaches by ‘questioning the terms, concepts, and notions that we use to discuss this topic, moving away from Western-centric (and other kinds of centrisms), somewhat biased and limited/limiting discourses, leading us to believe that we are “better,” more “civilised,” and more “democratic” than the Other’ (Li & Dervin, 2018, p. 13). Critical interculturalitylays bare the western assumptions that present the West as ‘the best’ and ‘the rest’ as the Other. Secondly, critical interculturalityforegrounds the interactional aspects of intercultural encounters. This challenges researchers to look at the particulars of a social encounter rather than judging with ready-made frames of reference that can only generalise. The International School Teacher typologies presented in Chapter 3 very much fall into the category of ‘ready-made frames’. From a critical intercultural perspective, terms such as ‘intercultural interaction’ and ‘intercultural identity’ are tautologous. All interaction involves negotiation of the particular, regardless of whether it is national or international in nature. Although it has also been the case that identities are inherently intercultural and liquid in nature, the Internet has contributed greatly to the blurring (but also reinforcing, for some) of national and international boundaries. Dervin’s ideas challenge researchers to approach the typologies explored in Chapter 3 more critically. Appropriating Dervin’s terminology, it can be said that the typologies are predicated upon ‘solid’ or ‘modern’ (Akkerman & Meijer, 2011) notions of identity, as they are taken to be an ‘Archimedean vantage point’ (Byram, 2018) that seemingly allows the researcher to transcend the particular and to gain some kind of objective insight into a teacher’s identity or motivations. However, what is at stake or lost when the ‘solid’ becomes the focus of scholarly attention is the situated, emergent nature of identity. Individuals

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do not simply reveal or perform an identity the same way, ad infinitum. To appropriate Dervin’s notion of ‘liquid’ identities, it can also be argued that in addition to performing the same ‘solid’ teacher type, individuals also improvise or ‘free style’ their identities based on the repertoire of identity positions available to them. To develop the metaphor of performance further, identity is never just performed to an empty audience; it is performed for others and is therefore constrained and enabled by ‘unfair power differentials’ that coalesce around social relations. This is particularly salient in Chinese Internationalised Schools—as argued in Chapter 2 and developed later in this chapter—where the dominance of Chinese pedagogical, linguistic, and organisational practices can marginalise and/or empower teachers. Dervin reminds us that an over-reliance on ‘solid’ typologies of International School Teachers is likely to miss the nuance and subtlety that characterises teachers’ lived experiences in Chinese Internationalised Schools.

4.5 Getting Critical About Critical Interculturality Critical interculturalityas an anti-teleological project helps to bring into focus the complexity of International School Teachers’ lived experience, but it is not without limitations. It is obvious that individuals do not approach every interaction as a new encounter but, rather, draw upon previous experiences or frames of reference (identities) in order to (re)negotiate the familiar, new, and unexpected (Zotzmann, 2016). It therefore has to be asked to what extent individuals can be critically intercultural without bringing ‘solid’ identities into play. In dispensing with ‘solid’ identities, Dervin effectively leaves us with nothing but the shifting sand of fluidity on which to construct new and emergent identities. However, the prevalence of ‘solid’ notions of cultural identities that emerged from the participants’ interviews makes it necessary to reconsider how manifestations of the ‘solid’ become dissolved within the ‘liquid’, intercultural space of the Chinese Internationalised School. The prevalence of ‘solid’ identities also suggests that International School Teacher typologies, insufficiently nuanced though they may be, still have a part to play in capturing the complexity of teachers’ lived experiences in Chinese Internationalised Schools, where we see both ‘solid’ and ‘liquid’ identity positions mobilised in order to negotiate the intercultural.

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As will be shown next, ‘solid’ notions of identity and culture take on a particular significance for the teachers in WEST. Therefore, the collocation of national and international orientations in Chinese Internationalised Schools requires an account of the intercultural that is able to capture the lived reality of working in such schools. Hence, it is necessary to find some middle ground between ‘solid’ and ‘liquid’ accounts of identity in order to capture the nuance at work in this intercultural context. The participants viewed themselves as representing particular educational cultures and mobilised and deployed claims around culture and identity to advance their own careers and pedagogical agendas, to resist change and, also, to simply survive. Therefore, I choose to present the term ‘intercultural’ as (inter)cultural in order to problematise its use within the context of Chinese Internationalised Schools. The findings from my study clearly show that cross-cultural interaction can also lead to the retrenchment of cultural ways of thinking about individuals and groups. Moreover, there is a case to be made for reclaiming notions of the ‘solid’ as fundamental to intercultural adaptation (e.g. Daisy) and survival (e.g. Robert and Tyron).

4.6

Teachers’ Experiences of the (Inter)cultural

Based on my own experiences of working in Chinese Internationalised Schools (see Chapter 1), I had expected that working in a Chinese Internationalised School would bring about a transformation in the participants’ identities as teachers, such as increased cultural empathy or adaptation of teachers’ beliefs about teaching and learning. As recounted in the reflective narrative that opened this book, my experiences of living and working in China profoundly altered my worldview. My experiences, many of which were tough, forced me to confront and dismantle a number of deficit discourses about Chinese learners and Chinese people in general, leading to a hybrid identity. However, unexpected findings from my research revealed that some of the participants’ experiences of adapting to working in a Chinese Internationalised School led to the retrenchment of ‘solid’ identities. The complex and ambivalent picture that emerged suggested that there was more going on than I was aware of, which also gave credence to employing a polyphonic approach that drew upon other teachers’ experiences in addition to my own. Analysis of the interview data generated three intercultural identity positions: cultural chauvinism

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(the retrenchment of Western ethnocentric beliefs about teaching and learning), cultural insider (the retrenchment of Chinese ethnocentric beliefs about teaching and learning), and cultural mediator (the decentering from ethnocentric beliefs, and the synthesising of Chinese and Western approaches to teaching and learning).

4.7

Cultural Chauvinism?

The term cultural chauvinism (Holliday & Aboshiha, 2009) refers to the feeling that one’s group has a mode of living, values, and patterns of adaptation that are superior to those of other groups. From their interviews, Tyron and Robert both expressed opinions about China and Chinese education that could be described as ethnocentric in nature. However, as will become evident below, ethnocentrism within the context of Chinese Internationalised Schools is multifaceted in nature. Chauvinism also becomes a defence mechanism to protect marginalised professional identities, hence why I place a question mark after the word chauvinism. The first example of cultural chauvinism expressed by Tyron and Robert focused on issues of pedagogy. Tyron and Robert struggled to reconcile their beliefs about teaching and learning, which was studentcentred in nature, with what they perceived to be antithetical and ultimately incompatible demands from the school’s leadership. These demands included teaching more to the test, adopting teacher-directed approaches, and combining ‘Western’ and ‘Chinese’ approaches to teaching and learning without these two terms being defined in any significant way. For Robert, the demands of teacher-directed approaches were equated with what he described as ‘a sort of old style of teaching that has changed in the West, and perhaps China just hasn’t caught up with that yet. Maybe it’s, you know, part of the journey which it’s on’. China is positioned as backwards whilst the West (which itself is homogenised) is taken to be more progressive. Robert also used the metaphor of ‘journey’ to articulate his beliefs about teaching and learning, which are clearly student-centred in nature: It’s not a destination, it’s a journey. But something which I’ve become very aware of which relates to this whole IB Learner Profile is that there has to be consistency between what the school does and what is said within this profile. And I mentioned that whole student-centred idea, that’s something which is intrinsic in all of this. But if you don’t see it

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happening in the school then you know there’s a mismatch and there’s this cognitive dissonance—you just can’t reconcile the two. So that’s what I’m having difficulty with here at the school. It’s with the whole management approach. The focus on a journey indicated that Robert’s identity as a teacher was predicated upon constructivist assumptions about teaching and learning, which assumes that knowledge is both social (co-created between individuals) and emergent (prospective) in nature. Robert considered his identity as a student-centred teacher to be commensurate with the aims of the IBDP. However, it can be inferred that Robert perceived WEST to be the antithesis of the IB Learner Profile, that is, destination-orientated, knowledge as something that is fixed and, therefore, needing to be transmitted. For Robert, it was the curriculum (in this extract embodied by the IB Leaner Profile) that dictated the pedagogy, rather than the school. The clash between these two positions led to what Robert referred to as ‘cognitive dissonance’ which, according to Shaules (2007), refers to situations ‘when cultural difference does not “make sense” or it threatens to undermine our view of reality’ (p. 63). Tyron also provided an example of how WEST’s management approach led to cognitive dissonance. For Tyron, the school’s aim to combine ‘Chinese’ approaches to teaching and learning with ‘Western’ approaches proved to be impossible to realise: They first said to us we have an international curriculum. We didn’t. They said, ‘No, it’s not good enough; we have to have a Chinese curriculum’. And these were the actual words from the principal: ‘with a touch of international in it.’ And we say, ‘what are we supposed to do now?’ Do we have to make it softer? Do we have to run less or run more? Do we have to talk less in this class, or do we have to talk more? Do we have to show more pictures? Do we have to —I don’t know!

Tyron struggled with the changing demands of the school. Initially, they required an international curriculum, but subsequently, they changed their minds and instead requested that the curriculum be Chinese. However, for Tyron, terms like ‘international’ and ‘Chinese’ were inherently ambiguous. Consequently, he struggled to implement a Chinese curriculum with a ‘hint’ of ‘international’ in it. It appeared that the principal wanted Tyron to fuse or embed aspects of international education into a Chinese curriculum. However, as Tyron was unsure of the full

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significance of both of these terms, the result was cognitive dissonance. Tyron’s use of interrogatives conveys his confusion and frustration. The ambiguity of the principal’s words is further accentuated through the use of repetition (‘do we’), which Tyron eventually abandons when he exclaims ‘I don’t know!’. Another feature of ethnocentric thinking is the deployment of cultural stereotyping and cultural homogenisation. This type of thinking recurred frequently in Tyron’s interviews. In talking about his struggles adapting to the local cuisine and communicating with his Chinese colleagues, Tyron lamented that: The food that they eat here, I just can’t get used to it. The Chinese have got some habits that really I don’t like […] These people don’t understand what next week means. A lot of problems with communication, especially when I’m in meetings and I have to repeat myself about six times. And even then they don’t understand. It’s super frustrating. So, communication is a big thing.

Despite China being home to 56 officially recognised ethnic minorities, and, therefore, home to diverse cultures and cuisines, Tyron nevertheless considered all Chinese food to be the same—that is, un-Western. The use of the terms ‘they’ and ‘these people’ also positions China and the Chinese people as a reduced Other. It can be seen that, for Tyron, dayto-day frustrations take on the form of micro-frustrations. In order to deal with these frustrations, Tyron mobilised ‘solid’ or ethnocentric frames of reference. In Robert and Tyron’s narratives, the reinforcement of group boundaries was manifested in the retrenchment of an ethnocentric perspective that reaffirmed their existing beliefs about Western pedagogy or Western cultural practices. Western-centric approaches to teaching and learning were taken to be inherently superior to Chinese approaches, which are positioned as inferior. Whilst it might be tempting to label Tyron and Robert as ‘cultural chauvinists’, there is more at work here. As one of the aims of this book is to come alongside the participants and see the world from their perspective, it is necessary to refrain from judging them and instead offer a more empathetic account of their experiences. It can be argued that Tyron and Robert were unaware of their ethnocentrism, as it was effectively neutralised and made invisible to them due to being in continuity

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with their existing beliefs about teaching, learning, and cultural practices. Pedagogically, this kind of chauvinism also went unnoticed because it suffused the language and pedagogy of the IB Diploma Programme, a course that is often taken to be the embodiment of intercultural education. However, a number of position papers published by the IBO clearly situate the diploma programme within Western philosophical traditions, such as constructivism (Bullock, 2011) and western humanism (Walker, 2010). The retrenchment of Tyron and Robert’s ethnocentric beliefs can also be interpreted as a response to dissonance created between their conceptions of themselves as International School Teachers and their conceptions of WEST as a ‘Chinese’ school. This dissonance can also be related to precarity, the second dimension of teachers’ lived experiences in Chinese Internationalised Schools. Perceiving their identities to be continually under threat and marginalised, Robert and Tyron fortified the defences of their professional identities, as it were, by mobilising those aspects of themselves which were in harmony with their conceptions of a ‘good’ teacher or an ‘international’ teacher. These aspects included constructivist assumptions about teaching and learning, as well as assumptions about individuality and autonomy.

4.8

Cultural Insider

In contrast to Robert and Tyron, who had little knowledge of, or inclination to learn about, Chinese education or the Chinese language, Sophie was very much an insider. Her interest in China stemmed from a love of China and Chinese culture, which stretched back to her childhood: My mother gave me when I was ten years old a book about Chinese calligraphy. And I really loved it. And from this time, I decided that all the money that people will give me I will save it for later when I will be an adult when I go to China. That was my dream. And I read all the books that I could find about China, such as Chinese culture and calligraphy. I remember also that I watched a documentary with my father about Chinese culture in Su Zhou.

Whereas Tyron and Robert did not express any interest, or love, for China, Sophie’s interviews were suffused with an awe and respect for China. For Tyron, moving to China was strategic as he ‘needed a job.’

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In contrast, because of her interest in China from a young age, Sophie had a rich repertoire of linguistic and cultural capital with which to negotiate the intercultural space of the Chinese Internationalised School. This was also recognised by Robert who, in a follow-up email communication, reflected that ‘Sophie has the advantage of at least being able to understand the language. I was never able to communicate with the powers-that-be. In retrospect, that I stuck it out for two whole years is truly remarkable’. Sophie was able to use her knowledge of Chinese in order to develop social capital. When she arrived at the school, she had little by way of resources: I remember the first class I gave in high school last year in their classroom without anything. The only paper we had was, you know, printing paper, A4 paper with a pencil. Let’s do an art class.

However, Sophie’s ability to speak Chinese, coupled with her understanding of China and Chinese culture, enabled her to connect with the students and her Chinese colleagues, which made it far easier to get things done. Being able to speak Chinese: helps me a lot. The students, they know that they can speak with me in Chinese and it’s easier for them and they can speak more freely when they use their own language. Chinese teachers, when they know you speak Chinese, you are a part of their world.

As a result of building a connection with her students and particularly with Chinese colleagues (including the school principal who was also Chinese), Sophie was able to develop the art department. It is with an understandable sense of pride that she could boast: Now, we have three classrooms, we have two storages, we have many things. And last year we had an art show; this year we’ve had a fashion show.

Figure 4.1 is a picture of one of Sophie’s art shows. It clearly shows the scale and impact that these exhibitions had. The growth of the art department not only bolstered Sophie’s identity as a teacher, but it also enabled her to realise her long-term goal, which was to become a professional artist. In contrast, Robert and Tyron

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Fig. 4.1 Sophie’s identity artefact: Student art exhibition

were perpetually on the periphery of the school, as outsiders. As Sophie explained it, being able to speak Chinese enables foreign teachers to navigate the intercultural space of the school, as teachers ‘consider you as someone who can understand them. Otherwise, you are just a foreigner who doesn’t get anything’. Within the context of a Chinese Internationalised School, the identity of ‘just a foreigner’ is the negative foil against which expatriate teachers like Sophie position themselves as insiders. In many respects, Sophie’s experiences of working in China have resulted in a form of reverse ethnocentrism, in what might be described as a form of ‘Sinocentrism.’ It may appear that Sophie is distancing herself from her identity as a ‘foreign’ teacher and is also looking down on her expatriate colleagues, who are described as ‘just…foreigner[s]’. However, it could be argued that Sophie understands the social reality of being an expatriate teacher in a Chinese Internationalised School.

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She understands that within the context of the Chinese Internationalised School, notions of the ‘international’ are configured differently. Whilst in more traditional International Schools, ‘Western’ epistemologies are privileged (Lai et al., 2016), Chinese Internationalised Schools emphasise so-called ‘Chinese’ organisational logics, such as a hierarchical organisational structure. Therefore, strategically, Sophie has to adopt a Chinese-centric identity. It is not so much dispensing with one identity in favour of another, but rather, it is understanding that certain identities, abilities and skills have more value or currency within Chinese Internationalised Schools. Because Sophie is fluent in Chinese, she is able to cultivate an insider identity, which in turn enables her to convert her cross-cultural capital into social and cultural capital.

4.9

Cultural Mediator

In contrast to the ethnocentric position adopted by Tyron and Robert, or the ‘Sinocentric’ position adopted by Sophie, Daisy appeared to situate herself between these two poles, making her something of a cultural mediator. A cultural mediator is here defined as someone who is able to de-centre from both sinocentric and ethnocentric perspectives and to synthesise differences. Daisy’s data also revealed the presence of solid identity positions: I think I am transferring from a local teacher to an international teacher. I am an internationalising teacher now. I used to put an emphasis on the knowledge points, the grammar, the sentence structure and also the question. I used to be examination-orientated … because that’s the only way I know to teach students because I was taught like that before … And then I found that to learn a language is not only to learn the basic things like the language skills, the basic knowledge points – the most important part is that the students can understand the culture behind the language and can communicate with the language in a variety of forms.

She referred to herself as a ‘teacher-centred educator’, but as a result of being exposed to the IBDP and to expatriate colleagues, she came to define herself as an ‘internationalising teacher’. Although the expression may appear a little unidiomatic, the use of the present continuous conveys a sense of liminality. It is not just that she is moving from one identity

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position to another (e.g. from being teacher-centred to a ‘real international teacher’), but rather, her identity as an educator is comprised of different I-positions (Hermans, 2001), which are in dialogue with each other. Her identity as an ‘internationalising’ teacher could be described as ‘liquid’—as it is in a state of transition and uncertainty—whereas her past identity as a ‘teacher-centred educator’, as well as her future identity as an ‘international teacher’, are ‘solid’. Daisy also reported a gradual shift in mindset from viewing cultural conflict between local and expatriate staff as inherently problematic, towards viewing it as an opportunity to explore differences and construct new ways of knowing based on cultural hybridity. One of her suggestions for creating greater understanding between faculty was through collaboration: I think we need to find a better way to help the Chinese and expatriate teachers to cooperate with each other. Do some research together and do the real co-teaching. I think that’s really important for a Chinese school. I’m not sure what is the real co-teaching, but I guess the idea is the two teachers can make use of each other’s strength and try to incorporate the teaching content into one integrated part.

Rather than passing judgement on her expatriate colleagues, she acknowledges that both Chinese and expatriate perspectives contain strengths and weaknesses. In Daisy’s narrative, solid identities are a starting point for creating new assemblages. This is in contrast to the ethnocentrism that characterised Robert and Tyron’s interviews. However, as stated above and reiterated here, ethnocentrism, when situated within the largely monologic context of the Chinese Internationalised School, is more than simply bigotry; it becomes a strategy for reclaiming lost agency and self-efficacy. For Daisy, being truly international involved collaboration and criticality, the bracketing of solid identities that all too easily result in judgement. Only by combining the ‘best’ of each identity is it possible that cognitive dissonance can be resolved. Her open-mindedness and reflexivity meant that she was able to develop a repertoire of bicultural experiences that resulted in a hybridised identity. Daisy’s advanced intercultural skills may also be attributed to her linguistic ability in both languages:

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I don’t know, maybe it was the comparing teaching Chinese—you know, my major is teaching Chinese, so when teaching Chinese, I am also teaching English. So, it’s kind of like the comparing between these two experiences that made me make the decision I think. (to become an English teacher)

As she was habituated to the local context, she could utilise her ‘solid’ identity as a foundation on which to develop a new hybrid identity that incorporated aspects of both Chinese and Western education. Whilst it would be unrealistic to expect all expatriate staff to become similarly bicultural, it is feasible for schools to make better use of teachers like Daisy as cultural mediators. Exploring cultural differences with a cultural mediator highlights the very processes of being intercultural, such as being interactive and reflexive. There are also a number of other advantages of utilising mediators like Daisy for facilitating the development of interculturality. Firstly, mediators add an affective dimension to the intercultural process, which is all too sadly missing from most workshops and training sessions on interculturality that are typically somewhat abstract in nature. Secondly, because mediators like Daisy are able to de-centre and combine different cultural perspectives, they both model and scaffold the intercultural process for mono-cultural teachers, who may approach intercultural interactions from the perspective of solid frames of reference.

4.10

Summary of Chapter

The excerpts above shed light on the development of intercultural identities in Chinese Internationalised Schools. Firstly, they indicate that simply working in an intercultural environment does not necessarily lead to the cultivation of an intercultural identity. This is vividly illustrated by Tyron and Robert. Clearly, without some form of support or programme, teachers are likely to continue operating within the comfort zone of their entrenched ethnocentric frames of reference. It could be asserted with some caution that expatriate teachers mobilise solid identity positions as one way of responding to the adaptive demands of otherness and the need to establish legitimacy in the context of Chinese Internationalised Schools. The participants’ interviews also suggest that solid identities and ethnocentrism are an essential strategy for some teachers in Chinese Internationalised Schools.

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It is necessary to caution against the polarisation of ‘liquid’ and ‘solid’ identities by viewing liquid as positive, and therefore desirable, and ‘solid’ as negative, and therefore undesirable. As illustrated in this chapter, ‘solid’ identities are not inherently ‘wrong’ or counterproductive but appear to be a necessary survival strategy for some teachers in Chinese Internationalised Schools. This point will be developed in a later chapter on resilience where it will be argued that solid identities help teachers develop resilience and a positive sense of self. Having explored the first dimension of teachers’ lived experiences in Chinese Internationalised Schools, the next chapter considers the second dimension, namely, experiences of precarity. This chapter has already highlighted some of the emotional difficulties that arise and that also feed into notions of precarity and International Schools Teachers as an educational precariat. The next chapter develops these arguments by considering the structural, macro-level difficulties that teachers contend with day-to-day in Chinese Internationalised Schools.

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Caffyn, R. (2010). ‘We are in Transylvania, and Transylvania is not England’: Location as a significant factor in ‘International School- micro-politics. Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 38(3), 321–340. Collier, S., & Ong, A. (2005). Global assemblages, anthropological problems. In A. Ong & S. J. Collier (Eds.), Global assemblages: Technology, politics and ethics as anthropological problems (pp. 3–21). Blackwell. Deardorff, D. K. (2006). Identification and assessment of intercultural competence as a student outcome of internationalization. Journal of Studies in International Education, 10(3), 241–266. Dervin, F. (2016). Interculturality in education: A theoretical and methodological toolbox. Springer. Dervin, F. (2017). Critical interculturality: Lectures and notes. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Ferri, G. (2018). Intercultural communication: Critical approaches and future challenges. Springer. Halicioglu, M. L. (2015). Challenges facing teachers new to working in schools overseas. Journal of Research in International Education, 14(3), 242–257. Hayden, M. (2003). International education: Pragmatism and professionalism in supporting teachers. In M. Hayden, J. J. Thompson, & G. Walker (Eds.), International education in practice (pp. 112–125). Routledge. Hayden, M. (2011). Transnational spaces of education: The growth of the international school sector. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 9(2), 211–224. Hayden, M., & Thompson, J. J. (2013). International schools: Antecedents, current issues and metaphors for the future. In R. Pearce (Ed.), International education and schools: Moving beyond the first 40 years (pp. 3–23). Bloomsbury. Hermans, H. J. (2001). The dialogical self: Toward a theory of personal and cultural positioning. Culture & Psychology, 7 (3), 243–281. Holliday, A., & Aboshiha, P. (2009). The denial of ideology in perceptions of ‘Nonnative Speaker’ teachers. TESOL Quarterly, 43(4), 669–689. Kerr, J. (2018). Challenging technocratic logics in teacher education: Seeking guidance from indigenous and Aristotelian traditions. Research in Education, 100(1), 83–96. Kim, Y. Y. (2007). Ideology, identity, and intercultural communication: An analysis of differing academic conceptions of cultural identity. Journal of Intercultural Communication Research, 36(3), 237–253. Koh, A. (2011). Singapore’s ‘global assemblage’: Digging into the culture of education policy making. Critical Studies in Education, 52(3), 267–278. Lai, C., Li, Z., & Gong, Y. (2016). Teacher agency and professional learning in cross-cultural teaching contexts: Accounts of Chinese teachers from International Schools in Hong Kong. Teaching and Teacher Education, 54, 12–21.

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CHAPTER 5

The Precarious

5.1

Interlude #4

After two years of teaching the IBDP, I decided that it was time to move on to another school and try something new. This time I would be teaching English as a Second Language, and A’ Level English Literature. In contrast to my previous school, my new school had a more open and collegiate atmosphere between expatriate and host country teachers. Both groups shared an office, worked together, and were encouraged to share ideas about teaching. I taught English with two co-teachers, and we were in charge of different aspects of the language course: I would teach speaking and writing whilst my two colleagues would focus on reading and listening. This school would prove to be a turning point in my life. It was here that I met my wife, with whom I now have a son. It was here that I would begin to undertake a doctorate in Education, which would culminate in moving to Beijing and in writing this book. For years, I had wanted to study for a research degree, but the conditions were never quite right. Suddenly, all of the conditions were right, and I thus enrolled with the University of Nottingham. My intention was to remain at this school for another year or two until I completed my doctorate, but that changed with a phone call from

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my wife’s former colleague. A new school was opening in the northwest of Shanghai, and they were looking for teachers who had IBDP teaching experience. Having grown weary of teaching English as a Second Language, the chance to return to teaching literature was a welcomed opportunity. That phone call would result in being hired by WEST. Another attraction for making this move was the opportunity to help nurture and shape a school from scratch. However, it was at this stage in my teaching career that the theme of precarity started to manifest itself. Whilst International Schools offer excellent salaries and benefits, these benefits come at the cost of having to continually renegotiate contracts every two or three years. The offer of contract renewal is never guaranteed, and if the offer is not forthcoming, teachers will once again need to endure the arduous task of relocating to a new school, sometimes in a new city or country, which is both costly and challenging. The short-term nature of International School contracts had suited me as a younger man keen to try new things. However, once I got married and had a child, this transient existence started to chafe against the need to establish some continuity and security. After working for a while at WEST, I was coming to the end of my doctorate, and the idea that I might be able to create more stability by making the transition to academia started to take hold. The intention was to stay at WEST for at least another year in order to finish the doctorate, and then see what the world of academia had to offer. However, renewing my contract with WEST would prove to be a complicated and frustrating experience. Repeated attempts to initiate dialogue with Human Resources (HR) about renewal were met with a brusque, ‘Come back next week’. Dutifully, I returned the following week only to receive the same reply; it felt like I was being stalled. Worse still, I kept receiving contradictory information. HR informed me that the principal had yet to decide whether my contract should be renewed whilst the principal told me that my contract would be renewed. It was now January, and I still had no idea whether I would be re-employed. For younger teachers, or teachers without families, such a prospect would not be that troubling. For older teachers with families, however, negotiating transitions is an uncertain and anxious time. To the best of my knowledge, I had done a good job as a teacher and therefore could not understand why my contract was not immediately renewed.

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Convinced that the school was planning to let me go, I took matters into my own hands and looked for employment at other schools in Shanghai. At this stage in my career, I had accumulated seven years of International School experience and had experience in teaching both Cambridge Exams and the IBDP. I was thus able to utilise my professional capital in order to extricate myself from this precarious situation. I also drew upon reserves of resilience that I had built up during my teaching career. Rather than being defeated by not having my contract renewed, the situation energised me and motivated me to ‘show them.’ I soon found an opening at a non-profit boarding school in Shanghai with an excellent reputation. A few Skype interviews later, I secured a job teaching both IGCSE English as a Second language and IB Language A and B. It was with some relish that I informed HR that I had been offered a job at another school. Immediately, I was told that of course my contract was going to be renewed and why had I not asked about it earlier?!

5.2

Introduction

The metaphor of an arena is a good way to frame the theme of precarity in International Schools since they have been characterised as being hotbeds of precarity and insecurity (Poole & Bunnell, 2020). Research has also explored the difficulties that International School teachers face working in International Schools. These include increasing precarity, such as short-term contracts (Bunnell, 2016) and unfair dismissal (Blyth, 2017), difficulties in adjusting to a new culture (Savva, 2015), dysfunctional and destructive leadership (Caffyn, 2018), and the marginalisation of local faculty’s knowledge and teacher identities due to dominant epistemologies and teaching strategies imported by Western expatriate teachers (Lai et al., 2016). The overriding image we come away with is of teachers battling it out for survival in the arena of the International School. According to Bunnell (2019), the focus on the negative has been the dominant focus of research into International Schooling for the last twenty years or so. Bunnell (2019) has also argued that this tendency towards the negative is a feature of sociological inquiry in general. International School researchers have thus inherited a predisposition towards the ‘dark side’ when adopting a sociological lens of inquiry as a new approach to understanding International Schooling (Resnik, 2012). Chinese Internationalised Schools also present educators with forms of

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precarity that they may not otherwise experience in more traditional International Schools. Whilst it cannot be denied that International Schools are precarious, it is necessary to acknowledge the advantages of working in such schools. It has been shown that International Schools enable teachers to accrue social capital (Tarc et al., 2019), save money (Poole, 2019), see the world (Savva, 2015), and develop their careers in ways that would not be possible back in their home countries (Bailey, 2015). In order to bring the lived experiences (the negative and the positive) of International School teachers into perspective, I turn to a burgeoning field of international education research, namely a sociology of international schooling (Resnik, 2012). Two concepts have emerged from this field that are germane to Chinese Internationalised Schools: the precariat/precarity and the Global Middle Class. This chapter begins by exploring the concept of the precariat/precarity to highlight some of the struggles that teachers face in adjusting to a new environment. It then mobilises the concept of the Global Middle Class to bring into focus the benefits that working in International Schools bring to teachers. Having established these two concepts, I next bring in the lived experiences of the participants. The interviews highlight the need to bring multiple sociological frames into play in order to explore the complex, messy, murky space that is the Chinese Internationalised School.

5.3 International School Teachers as a Global Educational Precariat Standing’s (2011) ‘precariat’ is a construct that denotes an emerging low-status class of individuals whose working lives are characterised by a general lack of security (job title, income, pension, length of contract), and an associated lack of subsequent support from agencies, such as trade unions, or from employment laws (Minimum Wages, Social Welfare, etc.). This scenario of dual-insecurity factors, lack of both security and support, is a very unpleasant condition. People in this group include refugee and asylum seekers, illegal migrants, temporary and seasonal migrants, and long-term migrants (Standing, 2011). It has also been argued that precarity is not so much embodied in a class but is more akin to a situation or a condition (Frase, 2013). The concept of the precariat has also been applied to teachers in International Schools, as a form of white-collar precariat, whose experiences of short-term contracts,

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micropolitics, and uncertainly, coupled with a lack of support from either national or international agencies, suggest that they could be part of a ‘Global Educational Precariat’ (Bunnell, 2016).

5.4

International School Precarity

International Schools have been defined as being inherently precarious places (Poole & Bunnell, 2020). One of the main causes of precarity is the practice of hiring teachers on short-term contracts (2–3 years) that are open to renewal upon negotiation and satisfactory performance. As touched upon in my autobiographical narrative that opened this chapter, the contract renewal process can create anxiety and uncertainty. Compounding matters is the fact that renewal of contracts is often contingent on receiving a good student evaluation (Poole, 2019). Within Chinese Internationalised Schools, evaluation takes two forms: student and peer evaluation. These evaluations could be thought of as a form of ‘tyranny of performativity’ (Ball, 2003) or ‘management panopticism’ (Ball, 2003) that re-orient teacher behaviour to a set of quality indicators while providing the ontological framework for teachers to know how to be ‘good’ teachers (Holloway & Brass, 2018, p. 363). As will be shown later in this chapter, not only does the performative nature of the evaluation reshape teachers’ identities, but it also exacerbates existing precarity. Another example of International School precarity is the threat of unfair dismissal and a lack of fair representation in labour disputes, as illustrated by Blyth’s (2017) autoethnographic account of being unfairly dismissed from her position as a head of department in an International School in Hong Kong. Blyth highlights the technologies of power that the school mobilised in order to marginalise her. These technologies included being moved to a small, dark room ‘located in a part of the building where teachers and students rarely ventured’ (Blyth, 2017, p. xiii). As presented by Blyth, her situation was somewhat Kafkaesque in nature. Just like Josef K. in Kafka’s The Trial (1998), Blyth found herself branded as guilty, but she was not clear what her crime actually was. All she knew was that she had been dismissed, and there was little she could do about it, even if she took the case to a tribunal. Similarly, Caffyn explores the discourse of contagion by framing International Schools in terms of the metaphor of the vampire and vampirism (2018). The metaphor has been used to understand the notion of energy

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flow and what catalyses or disturbs energy within an organisation (Bruch & Vogel, 2011). For Caffyn, International Schools are particularly susceptible to vampirism as they are highly complex, active and contentious social, psychological, cultural, and political spaces. As Caffyn (2015, p. 433) puts it, ‘beneath the glossy veneer of brochures and baccalaureate, International Schools can be regarded as reactionary corporate monocultures’. Jibing with Blyth’s recorded experiences, International Schools are fundamentally about power, bargaining, and unease (Caffyn, 2013). Caffyn’s observation that International Schools are focused on borders of unease between the space of the locality and the expatriate (2018) is particularly salient to Chinese Internationalised Schools, where the tensions created by national and international orientations are some of the main breeders of precarity. Within International Schools, vampirism is a form of psychosocial micropolitics that encompasses competing interests, personal agendas, and combative character traits (strong, persuasive, aggressive or volatile), which create vast potentialities for social friction (Caffyn, 2018). Undoubtedly, we have all encountered individuals whom we have considered to be as villainous as a vampire. In exploring precarity, it is necessary to zoom in even further in order to explore the intersection of precarity and how the individual experiences it. The metaphor of the vampire, like Dracula himself, is an attractive and alluring one, but it bathes the International School too much in shadow. In attempting to understand Chinese Internationalised Schools as complex spaces, it is necessary to utilise multiple sociological lenses. Some of these lenses, such as precarity, bring into focus the struggles that teachers face. Others, such as the Global Middle Class, highlight the advantages they attain.

5.5 International School Teachers as a Global Middle Class If the notion of a precariat/precarity has been employed to explore the struggles that teachers face in International Schools, the concept of the Global Middle Class (GMC) has been used in order to highlight the affordances (Poole, 2020). The GMC is regarded as a ‘new’ class, identified as servants of Capital, rather than as owners of Capital, as exemplified by the more established Transnational Capitalist Class (TNCC) (Sklair, 2001). The GMC can be differentiated from their more placebound counterparts, due to their accumulation of ‘cosmopolitan capital’

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(Weenink, 2008, p. 1092). Cosmopolitan capital encompasses experiences abroad, international networks, language skills, and transnational degrees (Bühlmann et al., 2013). Cosmopolitan capital reproduces social advantage, such as facilitating global mobility or providing teachers and their families with instrumental advantages (social capital, access to better schools, etc.) (Tarc et al., 2019). Tarc et al. (2019) have offered a platform for understanding teachers’ experiences through the GMC lens, stressing their similarities and aspirations. Generally speaking, understanding teachers in International Schools as part of a GMC stresses the more positive aspects of being a globally mobile teacher. Moreover, the accumulation of ‘cosmopolitan capital’ may outweigh the negative aspects of precarity. This conclusion helps to explain the paradox of why teachers in the field of International Schooling are continuously growing in number yet are experiencing precarity (Bunnell, 2019). There is clearly something ‘locking’ them into the arena beyond the usual explanations of high salary or freedom from inspection that frequently appear in national press reports. I next explore the participants’ experiences in Chinese Internationalised Schools through the lenses of the precariat and the Global Middle Class.

5.6 5.6.1

Teachers’ Lived Experiences of Precarity ‘I Left Without a Fight, like Most International Teachers Do’

Robert’s experiences of precarity can best be described in terms of a gradual effacement or process of being rendered invisible. He entered WEST with a positive mindset and was excited to ‘help establish a school along liberal pedagogical lines’. However, after his attempts to help build the school were continually frustrated, Robert came to the realisation that ‘the school had no interest in what I thought. I was expected to simply do my job’. This frustration soon escalated to confrontation, with Robert being openly critical of the school’s leadership. Eventually, Robert was told not to return to school, and then his contract was terminated. The incident which triggered Robert’s dismissal was an upcoming International Baccalaureate Organisation (IBO) school inspection. To provide context, schools wishing to offer the IBDP need to be authorised to become an ‘IB World School’, which involves, amongst other things, two school inspections and follow-up evaluations every five years.

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As WEST had only recently opened, gaining IBO accreditation would confer upon it much needed ‘institutional legitimacy’ (Bunnell, 2016) or ‘reputational capital’ (Hayden, 2011). As Robert put it: Teachers were expected to do what they were told without asking questions. Causing displeasure of the powers-that-be could have dire consequences. Telling teachers what to say when the IB team visited the school was a case in point. I found it offensive and refused.

Teachers being told what to say represents but one of the mechanisms, from Robert’s perspective, by which the school attempted to control the teachers during the inspection. Another strategy involved pairing teaches up during interviews with the inspectors. I recall my co-teacher (Daisy) and I being interviewed together. The inspector’s question of whether we had any ‘issues’ with the school was met with awkward silence. This act of mutual policing silenced us both. For Robert, being told what to say was akin to bullying: This went on all the time. Making decisions and expecting registered teachers to fit in without explaining the logic or consultation is professional bullying. International School management does this unapologetically all the time. International Schools have to have registered teachers to teach an international syllabus. Parents expect these teachers to be fluent English speakers, which is why English-speaking teachers from overseas are hired (if possible). Management resent having to pay expat teachers three times as much as local teachers and usually international teachers are given very limited influence over how the school operates. This is mainly where the bullying comes from, certainly in Chinese managed schools hosting an international curriculum.

Stephen Ball’s (2016) work on performativity can help to make sense of this situation. The need to produce an acceptable performance can result in teachers feeling a sense of what Ball refers to as ‘inauthenticity.’ Robert’s attempts to assert his authenticity were met with the termination of his contract: They promptly terminated my contract. The underlying problem is poor management quality. Being challenged is not tolerated. After my last day, I had thirty days to leave the country, and local laws did not provide

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much protection anyway. So, I left without a fight, like most international teachers do.

Regardless of whether Robert could appeal or not, his acceptance of his fate suggests that he considered such an endeavour to be impossible or simply not worth his time and energy. As Blyth’s (2017) autoethnography shows, appealing against an unfair dismissal is not only time-consuming but is also typically futile. Rather, it is easier for teachers to simply move on and find another job. As Robert put it, ‘I was always happy and relieved to leave at the end of contracts’. The end of a contract, or dismissal, does not necessarily represent uncertainty, but rather, it can be seen as a way out of a difficult situation. This idea will be developed further in the next chapter on resistance. However, for Robert, jumping from job to job was becoming increasingly precarious as he was fast approaching retirement age. Most Chinese Internationalised Schools are reluctant to hire teachers over the age of 50. In his own words, Robert recognised that ‘at this late stage of my working life I feel an urgent need to get it right this time’. Despite this declaration, Robert continued to find himself being dismissed from future jobs. Clearly, from Robert’s perspective, his dismissal was unfair; he wanted to do the right thing and therefore chose inaction as a way to resist being controlled. However, Robert’s act of resistance could also be read as the inability to understand (in the Bourdieusian sense, as introduced in Chapter 2) the field of Chinese Internationalised Schools. From the school’s perspective, the end (obtaining IBO accreditation) justified the means (having teachers fall into line to ensure that the inspection went smoothly and was successful). As a for-profit school, gaining IBO accreditation was of vital importance. As Bunnell, Fertig and James (2016) observe, non-traditional International Schools, like WEST, may struggle to emulate the features of a typical International School in a normative sense (i.e. having a diverse student body). Gaining IBO accreditation would, therefore, confer much needed symbolic, international, and reputational (Hayden, 2011) capital on the school, which would draw in more parents eager to buy (into) international education. Robert’s ‘misreading’ of the school’s field was also due to his beliefs about teaching. Reflecting on his dismissal, Robert came to the understanding that ‘I suffered under the naïve delusion that I would help establish a school along liberal pedagogical lines. This, after all, is what the IB is about’. The phrase ‘liberal pedagogical lines’ is key to unlocking

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many of Robert’s experiences of precarity. Based on my interactions with Robert, I came to understand that ‘liberal’ for him refers to openness, transparency, sharing ideas, and not being afraid to stand up and question authority in the spirit of open debate. For Robert, the curriculum is the defining feature of an international education. This belief also aligns with some researchers (Gellar, 2002; Walker, 2016) who have argued that a liberal curriculum is the cornerstone of an international education. Robert’s thinking followed a kind of syllogistic logic: the IBDP is liberal; the school offers the IBDP; therefore, the school is (or should be) liberal. However, Robert’s lived reality of international education clashed with the social reality of the school, which some might describe as ‘illiberal’ (International School, 2019), but which I prefer to describe less pejoratively as ‘national.’ Robert’s misreading of the field was also the result of a lack of transparency: Decisions were made behind closed doors and we never knew what to expect. Pedagogy and educational objectives were mystifying. Acting independently in this area was not recognised and got little support … The lack of transparency turned working there into an ordeal. We never knew what to expect.

However, Robert still highlighted the benefits that working in WEST, and International Schools in general, afforded: Personal benefits include having an adventure, travel opportunities, experiencing different cultures, good money, and meeting interesting people. The main professional benefit is getting experience that is hard to get in the home country. This of course comes at a price—living away from home, grappling with a foreign language, banking frustrations, etc. Also, having to compromise and doing a job which doesn’t do justice to customers (students) becomes distressing. I lived with the frustration only because of the benefits offered by teaching overseas.

5.6.2

‘If You don’t Perform, They’re Going to Send You Home’

Tyron’s experiences of precarity stemmed largely from politico-social idiosyncrasies outside of his control. As a white South Afrikaner, he considered himself ‘unemployable in my own country’ due to the complex sociopolitical consequences of Apartheid, such as labour laws like

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Affirmative Action, a policy that places quotas on government positions to ensure black South Africans are appropriately represented in the public sector. Consequently, Tyron felt like he was forced to join the global precariat in a state of permanent exile and uncertainty as an economic global migrant. Compounding matters, Tyron had to support his wife and four children (three of whom were teenagers and one of whom had started university), who remained in South Africa. Because of this situation, he became locked into a cycle of ‘permanent agonism’ (Ball & Olmedo, 2013), where he had to continually struggle in order to survive. Tyron described himself as a ‘mercenary’ who would go anywhere in the world, even ‘Tibet’ or Kathmandu’, in order to make money. This economic imperative to provide for his family helps to explain the most significant form of precarity to emerge from Tyron’s interviews, namely insecurity. Insecurity manifested itself in the short-term nature of his work as an International School teacher. This is illustrated in the following excerpt where Tyron talked about the need to constantly perform as an ‘excellent teacher’ in order to ensure that his contract would get renewed every two years: I have to perform all the time. It’s pretty stressful. Talking a little bit about performance, it’s a big thing. You have to try to perform. People like me, I think they like me because I don’t complain a lot and work pretty well with the kids. They kind of like me, and I do work pretty well too. There is that down side to it that if you don’t perform they might ask you to leave, and that would be bad. My whole thing in China is to get that experience—it would be besides the point. It’s still pretty stressful. If you don’t perform, they’re going to send you home.

Tyron’s word, choice, ‘perform’, is interesting and can be interpreted in a number of ways. Firstly, ‘perform’ suggests a dramaturgical reading (Goffman, 1959) that views life as a never-ending play, and we are all actors in this play. In this sense, Tyron is anxious (‘it’s pretty stressful’) that he is not performing his part well enough. There is also the sense that he is pretending to be someone he is not in order to keep his students happy and ensure that he can renew his contract. Tyron drew upon his experiences as an IB examiner to illustrate the performative nature of working at WEST:

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Teaching here is like the IB examining thing. You don’t score the student’s work; you think of the seeds all the time, scoring the work in the same way that you think the examiner scored it. So, trying to perform does influence the actual teaching style.

Tyron continually second-guesses himself lest he get caught out. Recalling Robert’s experiences explored above, Tyron is unable to perform an authentic self but is forced to offer up a sanitised self that will please his students. There is also the sense that if one is seen to be ‘performing’ as a teacher then one is a teacher. Performativity has come to be associated with neoliberal discourses that are taken to pervade all aspects of teachers’ lives (Ball, 2003), even in the seemingly autonomous space of the International School. It was noted earlier that Chinese Internationalised Schools tend to have more autonomy and flexibility than other public or private schools for Chinese citizens (Young, 2018). However, a number of studies (Bunnell & Poole, 2021; Poole, 2019) have identified the existence of regulatory technologies, such as the student evaluation system, that function along neoliberal lines. Given that Chinese Internationalised Schools are typically run for-profit, the primary stakeholders, the feepaying parents, find themselves in a somewhat advantageous position. If they, or their children, are dissatisfied with a teacher’s performance, they can easily take their children and money elsewhere. In such a situation, it is easier for a school to simply replace a teacher than to risk losing the valuable income that a child’s enrolment provides. As the market for Chinese Internationalised Schools has rapidly expanded (Gaskell, 2019), there is no shortage of schools from which parents can choose. Given the for-profit nature of WEST, and the need to ‘keep the customer satisfied’, it comes as little surprise that teacher turnover at this school was high. I witnessed innumerable teacher dismissals, and I recall one expatriate teacher who, after publicly quarrelling with management, was dismissed on the spot and promptly escorted from the building by the bao ˇ ¯ an (security guards). We would affectionately refer to this teacher as ‘our fallen comrade’. There were also a fair number of teachers who packed their bags and fled in the night. There was also a ‘revolving door’ of heads of departments and managers. Tyron noted: This is the fifth principal I’ve had in the past five years in this school. For some reason, the principals don’t last that long. There’s never really been consistency at our school. The management style is changing all the time.

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Robert also discussed an example of unfair dismissal, which also contributed to the school’s instability: An expat couple was initially employed to take the school through the IB authorisation process. The principal didn’t like some of their ideas, which involved going a more expensive professional route. So, visa support was withdrawn, and they were not able to return to China to complete their contracts. They were replaced with a Chinese head of school and high school management has become dysfunctional, to say the least.

Tyron and Robert both observe that the high turnover of staff leads to instability, which creates a dysfunctional working environment, at least for some expatriate teachers. (Interestingly, neither Sophie nor Daisy alluded to this instability in their interviews or interactions with me.) With this instability in mind, it is understandable why Tyron felt anxious about having to give the right performance. This situation, having to always be performing to ensure contract renewal, leads to a kind of existential precarity: I don’t live in the present. Every day I think about tomorrow. I don’t think of now. And I’m getting older too. Soon…I’ll be old. So, I think it’s pretty bad that I live in the future constantly and don’t live in the present. I think it’s much better to live in the present than to live in the future.

In order to deal with his situation, Tyron projects himself into an imaginary tomorrow where he will be one step closer to being reunited with his family. Unfortunately, due to the Covid-19 crisis, he was unable to return home to South Africa during the summer of 2020. Knowing that he would be reunited with his family made his work bearable. He could displace himself into tomorrow. This created a regular, reassuring rhythm that carried him from day to day until, finally, the day of salvation would arrive—the end of term. Tyron used to joke that come the last day of school, we would turn around to find his office chair swivelling comically, like a cartoon image, as he rushed to the airport. However, when he was unable to return home, his reason for staying positive was gone. In his own words, Tyron found the situation, ‘depressing’. Despite these difficulties, Tyron was able to survive, due to the economic advantages that working at WEST afforded him: ‘A big advantage is the financial advantage. I’m earning a lot more money than I

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would earn in my country. Definitely a big advantage there’. In addition to the ‘big financial advantage’, Tyron noted that: The most positive thing about the whole thing is meeting all of the different teachers from all of the different countries, seeing their perspective on everything. I’m a lot more open-minded than I think I was, say six or seven years ago. The one benefit it has for my family is that they meet a lot of people, and they have a lot of opportunities; they can get that opportunity because I’ve now got the experience. I mean, they can come with me and stay with me, and, you know, see the world (Poole, 2020, p. 231).

Many of the advantages highlighted by Tyron (seeing ‘their’ perspective, being open-minded, and the benefits that living abroad brought to his family) resonate with the notion of cosmopolitanism, a defining feature of the Global Middle Class. Cosmopolitanism has been understood as being instrumental (a means to an end) and humanistic (an end in and of itself) in nature (Tarc et al., 2019). For Tyron, the social capital he has accrued through his experiences at WEST has made him more interculturally receptive. In his own words, he is ‘a lot more open-minded’. However, this statement clashes with other statements made by Tyron, which were more ethnocentric in nature. Here, we see the ambivalence of lived experience. Tyron is not a typology. He is a person. Unlike the typologies offered by researchers (Bailey & Cooker, 2019; Caffyn, 2018; Hardman, 2001; Rey et al., 2020), which assign teachers to categories based upon seemingly static characteristics, Tyron’s lived experience is more dynamic and messy. He occupies multiple identities simultaneously. The contradictory nature of Tyron’s statements is a reminder that teachers’ experiences of Chinese Internationalised Schools are complex in nature. It would appear, for Tyron anyway, that despite the difficulties encountered, the benefits of working at WEST outweighed the disadvantages. 5.6.3

‘I don’t Know What Kind of Thing is the International Way of Teaching’

Whilst Daisy was also employed on short-term contracts—initially for one year, and then, after she re-signed, for three years—she was not concerned about whether or not her contract would be renewed. Rather, she understood the short-term contract to be a ‘trial’ and found it ‘quite normal’.

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She also considered short-term contracts to be an ‘advantage’, giving both ‘the school and the teachers more choices’. She went on to explain that: For the teachers, I think it is a good thing, especially for expatriate teachers doing the international curriculum. They need to know the school’s way of doing things. Although they are offered the international education, most Chinese bilingual schools still have the Chinese system as its basis. Although they are doing the international curriculum, it is really difficult for expatriate teachers to adapt to the Chinese system, and so in that way that short-term contract might help.

For Daisy, short-term contracts offered expatriate teachers a kind of ‘try before you buy’ grace period. This idea resonates with previous studies (e.g. Poole & Bunnell, 2020), which likens short-term contracts to a metaphorical ‘safety-valve’ that enables teachers to let off the pressure of precarity by giving them a way out of a difficult situation, which also resonates with Robert’s experiences. Significantly, Daisy did not appear to be aware of the logistical difficulties of changing schools, focusing instead on the copacetic benefits to both teacher and school. Daisy’s positive perception of short-term contracts—and precarity in general—could be attributed to her age and nationality. Daisy was young and single and therefore did not have to worry about the consequences that unemployment might have on anyone else except her. She also had a symbolic safety net on standby. Even though she strived to be independent, Daisy could move in with her parents if she lost her job. Tyron, in contrast, had to support his family. He did not have a safety net as he was the safety net. Another reason why Daisy perceived short-term contracts positively was that she had a clear understanding of what type of school WEST was. Whereas the inclusion of an international curriculum (the IBDP) led Robert to conclude that the school was ‘international’, Daisy, with her insider’s knowledge, saw the school for what it was: We are an internationalising Chinese school. We are in the process of internationalising. Yes, but the first part is we are a Chinese school. We emphasise Chinese culture in our school; that’s one important thing. That is why we have the flag raising ceremony, but we want to achieve the internationalism—international education.

The use of the present continuous (-ing) suggests that the school is in the process of developing an international perspective. However, at its

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core, the school is fundamentally Chinese, as demonstrated by the use of the copula ‘to be’. From Daisy’s perspective, the school is a Chinese school with international characteristics. Daisy allusion to the flag raising ceremony is offered as proof to support her interpretation of the school’s Chinese identity. In a previous paper (Poole, 2018), I explored teachers’ perceptions of a Chinese Internationalised School’s flag raising ceremony. I found that Chinese faculty tended to view the ceremony as worthwhile and necessary as they identified the school as ‘Chinese’. In contrast, the expatriate teachers tended to find the ceremony unnecessary. For some expatriate teachers, the ceremony was clearly not intended for them; therefore, they felt no reason to support it. For others, the ceremony was superfluous and even antithetical to what they perceived to be the values of international-mindedness, inclusivity and diversity embodied within the IBDP. The curriculum, for these teachers, was taken as the defining feature of the school; therefore, the school should be more of an International School. In contrast to Robert, who viewed WEST as a ‘school along liberal lines’, Daisy recognised and accepted the school for what it was—a Chinese school—rather than what it is not—a school along liberal lines. In Daisy’s words, ‘I think those [experiences of precarity] are more for expats because Chinese teachers are used to the way Chinese school is organized’. She went on to develop this idea by observing that: Although they are doing the international education, most Chinese bilingual schools still have the Chinese system from the basis. Although they are doing the international curriculum, so whether the expatriate teacher can fit into the system is very important. And sometimes it is really difficult for them to adapt to the Chinese system, and so in that way that short-term contract might help.

Daisy’s observation elucidates Robert and Tyron’s struggles. Daisy observes that an international curriculum is just one aspect or characteristic of a greater whole—the school itself is ultimately the most foundational or significant part. Whilst expatriate teachers might be familiar with teaching the IBDP, their unfamiliarity with the Chinese system (which I take to refer to a top-down approach to management and a focus on transmission strategies for teaching) makes it difficult for them to adjust. We can thus observe two units of analysis that mediate teachers’ perceptions of school identity. For Tyron and Robert, the curriculum

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was the foundational unit of analysis, the ‘international’ in ‘international education’. However, Daisy recognised that the curriculum was not the defining feature. Rather, it was the school and its adherence to a kind of Chinese organisational logic that mattered most. Because Daisy was Chinese, she instinctively understood how the school worked. In the parlance of Bourdieu (2010), she not only knew the rules of the field, but she also understood them tacitly as a form of doxa, an unquestioned truth. Thus, Daisy did not experience the kind of precarity identified by Robert and Tyron because she was Chinese; therefore, her perception of the school and its doxa were in alignment. Despite its general absence, Daisy’s narrative did reveal examples of precarity, albeit in an unconventional form. Rather than struggling with short-term contracts or micropolitics, Daisy struggled to make sense of the meaning of ‘international education’: I don’t know because I don’t know what is the international education. I don’t have a very clear picture of what is international education. So, sometimes when the expatriate teachers are teaching, I cannot say that they are doing the international education—they can do the local Chinese national education. You cannot say that if an expat teacher is teaching he or she is doing the international education. So, if I am teaching, I am a Chinese, but that does not mean that I am teaching the local Chinese way of teaching, but I don’t know what kind of thing is the international way of teaching.

In order to illustrate this confusion, I asked Daisy to supply a visualisation, which can be seen in Fig. 5.1. This struggle could be referred to as conceptual precarity. Daisy believed that her difficulty in understanding the nature of international education was due to a fundamental clash between Chinese and Western education, the latter of which she took to be synonymous with international education:

Fig. 5.1 Conceptual confusion

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There are so many differences between the Chinese and western education. First of all, I need to know what is the real international education. Although I’ve been exposed to the western cultures. I’m not born in that environment. So, it is difficult to fully understand the so-called international education. The next difficulty is to adapt my understanding of the international education to the Chinese student.

Daisy struggled to understand the conceptual nature of international education because she could only do so through the lens of her Chinese educational experiences, which she believed were diametrically opposed to international education (‘there are so many differences’). Understanding something unfamiliar through the lens of the familiar echoes Robert and Tyron’s experiences of trying to understand WEST. In Tyron and Robert’s case, their understanding of the school was mediated by ethnocentric frames of reference that positioned WEST in deficit terms. In Daisy’s case, her understanding of international education was mediated by a Chinese frame of reference, which also resulted in some cultural dissonance. However, rather than leading to the strengthening of ethnocentric thinking, Daisy came to recognise the need to bring the two positions of Chinese and Western education together. Returning to the concept introduced in Chapter 4, Daisy is a ‘cultural mediator’: I think I cannot fully overcome the difficulties because I still cannot have the whole picture of international education. Most Chinese teachers are not born in that culture so they can’t understand it, but I think it’s a process. Through more efforts to understand, I can combine the western elements, the international elements, better with the Chinese things and to fit it to my Chinese students.

5.6.4

‘You Are just a Foreigner Who doesn’t Get Anything’

In contrast to Tyron and Robert’s interviews, Sophie’s interviews did not touch upon the theme of precarity in any depth. Her first few months in the school were something of a struggle: We are doing everything here—it is a lot of work, but we are free to do it in our way, so I think we are quite satisfied to work here. I remember the first class I gave in high school last year in the classroom without anything. The only paper we had was, you know, printing paper, A4 paper with a pencil. Let’s do an art class.

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However, overall, Sophie’s experiences affirmed the affordances conferred upon her by the Global Middle Class, namely the accrual of social and economic capital and the fostering of prestige, rather than the constraints and difficulties imposed by precarity. Once well-established at her school, Sophie had few, if any, difficulties in consolidating her status and position. It was with understandable pride, that Sophie was able to boast that, ‘Now we have three classrooms, we have two storages; we have many things. And last year we had an art show; this year we’ve had a fashion show’. The absence of precarity in Sophie’s interviews suggests that she was unwilling to discuss this issue, or, like Daisy, she just did not experience it. Unlike Tyron and Robert, Sophie did not have to face the uncertainties and anxiety of working in a new school on her own. She and her partner were hired as a teaching couple and were thus able to start from a position of power. According to Sophie, ‘If we could work together, I think we are stronger and we can have more projects’. Unlike Robert and Tyron, who were unwilling to learn Chinese, Sophie and her partner were both fluent in Chinese. As noted in previous chapters, Sophie’s ability to speak Chinese, and her familiarity with Chinese culture, proved to be an invaluable asset in helping her build up the art department and negotiating an indispensable position within the school. Sophie, like Daisy, clearly understood that WEST was a ‘Chinese’ school and used her knowledge of the language and the culture to negotiate the school’s sociocultural spaces and to forge valuable gu¯anxi (or connections) with Chinese leaders and teachers. Over time, Sophie and Michel (Sophie’s partner) integrated themselves into the fabric of school. Not only were they in charge of the art department, but they also put on school art exhibitions with the students. These exhibitions became something of a ritual in the school’s calendar and further cemented the couple’s indispensability since the school benefited from the good publicity that the exhibitions created. In this manner, Sophie and Michel could use these exhibitions as a way to prove their worth. As noted earlier, whereas Robert could be, and was, replaced, Sophie and Michel put in place structures and routines that only they understood and that only they could maintain. Whether this was by happenstance or by design, the result was that Sophie could be confident in knowing that her position in the school was safe. Significantly, she and Michel were the only teachers to be hired on five-year contracts. This is a testament to the skill with which they negotiated their roles within

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the school and to the school’s pragmatism: they recognised Sophie and Michel’s potential in terms of international capital, thereby strengthening the school’s international legitimacy. When Sophie used her position as a teacher to stage exhibitions, she was able to develop professionally: My main goal is to do something in art, to continue to make art. So, I think the best combination, because of course I cannot be an artist— I’m too young, I need more experience—the best combination I think to continue to make art is to be an art teacher, so that’s why I’m an art teacher.

This example helps to explain why Robert suffered from so much precarity and Sophie did not. WEST was able to support her in achieving her goal to become an artist. This identity position could be called ‘an artist who teaches’ (Poole, 2019). In contrast, Robert’s identity as a ‘liberal’ teacher was not only antithetical to the school but, from the school’s perspective, a destabilising force, hence why his contract was terminated and he was rendered invisible and silent. Another reason why Sophie was able to prosper and was largely sheltered from precarity was due to how she picked her battles. Whereas Robert was openly critical of leadership, Sophie chose instead to be critical of the International Baccalaureate Organisation (IBO) and the Learner Profile: I’m kind of critical about the IBO … For me, it’s just beautiful words to describe the beautiful IBO curriculum … From my point of view, I don’t know for the other subjects, but for me, it’s very western—it’s very western. For me, it represents the perfect American guy. Really! It’s also very masculine … I think we should switch to every kind of curriculum. We can always find our way to teach art.

Sophie considered the IBO curriculum to be ethnocentric, echoing other researchers (van Oord, 2007; Wells, 2011) who have argued that the seemingly universal tenets of Western humanism on which the IBDP is predicated are in fact parochial and Western-centric in nature. From this critical perspective, the notion of an international curriculum as transcendent and offering the individual an ‘Archimedean point’ (Byram, 2018, p. 72) to objectively view the world is not only spurious, but assimilationist. To become ‘internationalised’ is to become ‘Westernised’. Sophie

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also noted the androcentric nature of the IB Learner Profile, likening it to an American man. Sophie’s critique resonates with the reverse ethnocentrism identified in Chapter 4. However, her critique is consonant with her identity position as an insider, and also with the school’s identity as a Chinese school. Her critique reaffirms this identity, and along with it, her place within the school.

5.7 The Emergent Picture of Precarity in Chinese Internationalised Schools The picture that emerges of precarity in Chinese Internationalised Schools is complex and multifaceted. On the one hand, the interviews support the findings of previous studies that highlight the struggles that expatriate teachers face in Non-traditional International Schools (Bailey, 2015; Poole, 2020; Savva, 2017a, 2017b). Savva’s (2017b) study of 30 Anglophone educators is particularly germane here, as it touches upon many of the struggles experienced by Robert and Tyron. Savva (2017b) found that most of the Anglophone teachers in her study struggled with language, with one of the participants even describing herself as ‘illiterate’ (p. 581). Robert and Tyron were similarly ‘illiterate’, which made it impossible for them to ‘read’ the unwritten rules that underpinned WEST. In contrast, Daisy, as a Chinese woman, tacitly understood these unwritten rules (or doxa), whilst Sophie was able to accept them due to her pragmatic approach (she wanted to use the teaching job to build her career as an artist) and her insider’s knowledge of China and its language. Savva (2017b) also noted that the teachers in her study gradually moved from a position of judging to understanding. This clearly represents Daisy’s experiences of trying to understand the nature of international education more profoundly. Savva notes that some teachers were able to withhold judgement, which became an important skill that helped them to acculturate. It can be seen that Sophie is able to withhold judgement. Sophie accepts WEST for what it is. In contrast, Robert is unable to withhold judgement. Instead, he struggles to adapt when values are contradictory to his identity as a ‘liberal’ teacher. The dissonance from this contradiction reinforces an ‘us-them ethnocentricism’ (Zhou et al., 2011, p. s157). This dissonance not only feeds into, and thereby exacerbates, precarity, but it could also be thought of as a form of precarity in itself. On the other hand, we see the typical advantages of working in International Schools (money, adventure, travel, exposure to different

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cultures, etc.) which have been reported in previous studies (Rey et al., 2020; Tarc et al., 2019). Tyron and Robert were both quick to note the economic advantages, despite the difficulties they experienced. Daisy, despite receiving a relatively low salary, was able to use her experiences to bolster her CV, which she planned to ‘cash in’ in the future in order to secure a better job in a ‘real’ International School. The concept of precarity is useful in understanding the difficulties teachers face in International Schools, including short-term contracts, destructive leadership, and a sense of rootlessness. On the flip side, the Global Middle Class construct allows us to focus on the more positive aspects of being an International School teacher, such as the accumulation of social, cultural, and cosmopolitan capital. Although these two concepts are useful in bringing a teacher’s lived experience into focus, they nevertheless present lived experience in a bifurcated manner; lived experience is parsed into negative (precariat) and positive (the Global Middle Class). However, based on the definition of ‘lived experience’, as given in the introduction to be a form of perezhivanie, lived experience is phenomenological in nature. From this subjective perspective, seemingly absolute notions of struggle and advantage become blurred. The same also goes for teachers’ identities. We may impose labels on teachers, but they tell us little about the flux of subjective experience that flows beneath the surface of those labels. Therefore, seemingly absolute notions of precarity and advantage do not just denote negative and positive, respectively. They are not just two sides of the same International School coin. They become hybrid in nature. At the level of lived experience, notions of positive and negative become blurred and smudged. Seemingly negative experiences can, in fact, come to be perceived positively. This leads to the proposal of ‘resilience capital’ and ‘sur-thrival’, concepts that are developed in Chapter 6. Based on the prevalence of precarity experienced by expatriate teachers (the small sample notwithstanding), it might be tempting to posit that precarity in Chinese Internationalised Schools is exclusively an expatriate phenomenon. Whilst Tyron and Robert’s experiences would seem to support such an interpretation, Sophie’s experiences are a reminder that ‘Accidental teachers’ (Bailey & Cooker, 2019) as a group are quite varied. Recalling the concepts of insider and outsider developed in Chapter 4, I would argue that the degree to which a teacher is likely to experience precarity within a Chinese Internationalised School is not necessarily determined by race, as suggested by Tyron and Robert, but can also be constituted along cultural and linguistic lines, as suggested by Sophie.

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Tyron and Robert both remain outsiders because they cannot, or will not, speak Chinese and view Chinese culture and teaching practices in deficit terms. Their reliance on ethnocentric armour (as explored in chapter 4), makes it difficult for them to view the environment as anything but hostile. With their sense of self continually under attack, whether actual or perceived, they have little recourse but to fortify their position by mobilising ethnocentric frames of reference. For Robert and Tyron, Chinese Internationalised Schools are and can only be Other, defined in terms of what they are not: incomplete International Schools, or, in Robert’s parlance, incomplete ‘liberal schools’ or Type-D ‘illiberal International Schools’ (International School, 2019). Expatriate teachers in Chinese Internationalised Schools are likely to experience more precarity because they misread the field. This misreading appears to be linked to their inability to speak Chinese. Teachers like Robert and Tyron are effectively culturally (il)literate. They can only read the field using ethnocentric frames (e.g., ‘liberal’, ‘student-centred) derived from their experiences in the West, which results in dissonance, distortion and misunderstanding. The situation is akin to trying to understand a foreign language by using the grammar of one’s mother tongue. The resulting dissonance exacerbates precarity and also creates the conditions for it to spread. Of course, arguing that individuals can or should simply adapt when negotiating intercultural interactions is overly simplistic and naive. As established in Chapter 4, individuals approach new interactions through ‘solid’ frames of reference, which intersect with notions of power. Within WEST, power was configured in terms of the value ascribed to national orientations. Daisy and Sophie both recognised that ‘Chinese’ national orientations, such as speaking Chinese, accruing ‘gu¯anxi’ in order to get things done, and a top-down approach to organisation, all carry value. Conversely, ‘international’ orientations (as embodied in the IBDP curriculum and the IB Learner Profile) were imbued with little symbolic value. Within the context of WEST, the notion of the ‘international’ was something of an empty, free-floating signifier. Chinese orientations, on the other hand, were the foundation or the bedrock of the school. They were solid, whereas the international was diffuse. This distinction underscores one of the central arguments in this book: Chinese Internationalised Schools are so culturally distinct from traditional International Schools that they need to be understood on their own terms, rather than through models derived from Anglophone contexts.

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5.8

Summary of Chapter

This chapter has explored the difficulties of working in a Chinese Internationalised School through the concept of the precariat and precarity. It highlighted three types of precarity in the form of short-term contracts, unfair dismissal, and performativity. It also highlighted a number of new forms of precarity entitled ‘conceptual precarity’ and ‘existential precarity’. This chapter also explored the affordances of working in a Chinese Internationalised School through the concept of the Global Middle Class. These affordances included the accrual of economic and social capital, as well as more humanistic forms of capital, such as cosmopolitanism and intercultural awareness. This chapter also made a distinction between insider and outsider positions. Insiders, like Daisy and Sophie, experienced less precarity because they had the necessary linguistic and cultural capital to act in a way that was congruent with WEST’s Chinese organisational logics. Because of this, they were able to thrive. Outsiders, like Tyron and Robert, experienced more precarity because they lacked the necessary linguistic and cultural capital to understand the school and to negotiate its complex spaces. Because of this, they struggled to thrive. So far, however, the difficulties and the affordances have been explored as separate phenomena. In order to be congruent with lived experience, it is also necessary to explore the messy space between the positive and the negative. The next chapter develops the themes of surviving and thriving by exploring how teachers utilise their difficult experiences in order to grow and develop. Precarity will be understood as a perezhivanie, or a working-over of a difficult experience. This gives rise to two concepts to complement precarity and the Global Middle Class: namely, resilience and sur-thrival.

References Bailey, L. (2015). Reskilled and ‘running ahead’: Teachers in an international school talk about their work. Journal of Research in International Education, 14(1), 3–15. Bailey, L., & Cooker, L. (2019). Exploring teacher identity in International Schools: Key concepts for research. Journal of Research in International Education, 18(20), 125–141. Ball, S. J. (2003). The teacher’s soul and the terrors of performativity. Journal of Education Policy, 18(2), 215–228.

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Gellar, C. (2002). International education: A commitment to universal values. In M. Hayden, J. Thomspon, & G. Walker (Eds.), International education in practice: Dimensions for schools and international schools (pp. 30–35). Routledge. Goffman, I. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Doubleday. Hardman, J. (2001). Improving recruitment and retention of quality overseas teacher. In S. Blandford, & M. Shaw (Eds.), Managing international schools (pp. 123–135). Routledge Falmer. Hayden, M. (2011). Transnational spaces of education: The growth of the international school sector. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 9(2), 211–224. Holloway, J., & Brass, J. (2018). Making accountable teachers: The terrors and pleasures of performativity. Journal of Education Policy, 33(3), 361–382. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2017.1372636 International School. (2019). The rise of ‘illiberal international schools’? A rejoinder to Hayden and Thompson. International School, 21(2), 5–7. Kafka, F. (1998). The trial. Schoken Books. Lai, C., Li, Z., & Gong, Y. (2016). Teacher agency and professional learning in cross-cultural teaching contexts: Accounts of Chinese teachers from International Schools in Hong Kong. Teaching and Teacher Education, 54, 12–21. Poole, A. (2018). ‘We are a Chinese school’: Constructing school identity from the lived experiences of expatriate and Chinese teaching faculty in a Type C international school in Shanghai, China. International Journal of Progressive Education, 14(1), 105–121. https://doi.org/10.29329/ijpe.2018.129.8. Poole, A. (2019). How internationalised school teachers construct cross-cultural identities in an internationalised school in Shanghai, China. Unpublished doctoral thesis: University of Nottingham. Poole, A. (2020). International school teachers’ experiences of precarity as part of the Global Middle Class in China: Towards resilience capital. The AsiaPacific Education Researcher, 29(3), 227–235. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40 299-019-00472-2 Poole, A., & Bunnell, T. (2020). Developing the notion of teaching in ‘International School as precarious: Towards a more nuanced approach based upon ‘transition capital.’ Globalisation, Societies and Education, 1–11. https://doi. org/10.1080/14767724.2020.1816924. Resnik, J. (2012). Sociology of international education – An emerging field of research. International Studies in Sociology of Education, 22(4), 291–310. Rey, J., Bolay, M., & Gez, Y. N. (2020). Precarious privilege: Personal debt, lifestyle aspirations and mobility among International School Teachers. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 18(4), 361–373.

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CHAPTER 6

The Resilient

6.1

Interlude #5

My time at EAST could best be described as a combination of surviving and thriving (or sur-thrival). One experienced teacher described working in the school as a ‘marathon’, and he was not wrong. The school day was divided into three programmes: the academic curriculum ran from 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.; co-curricular activities ran from 5:10 p.m. to 6:10 p.m., and the pastoral programme, which included study hall and dorm duty, ran from 7:15 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. In addition to teaching, teachers ran a club twice a week and were on dorm duty one evening a week. They would also be expected to undertake one or two weekend duties a year. The first year proved to be relatively easy, and I was able to complete, submit, and pass my Doctorate. However, the second and third years would prove to be more challenging, due to changes in the academic timetable, which introduced more teaching periods for English. This proved to be my catalyst for leaving International School teaching. Teaching alone was manageable. However, the additional requirements of co-curricular activities and pastoral duties left little time or energy for developing an academic profile, and, most importantly, playing with my son. Juggling so many roles was becoming impossible. I was heading for burn out. Teaching had changed from ‘emotional work—investment in © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Poole, International Teachers’ Lived Experiences, International and Development Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78686-1_6

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authentic selves and the capacity for professional empathy (Day, 2018)— to ‘emotional labour’—the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display (Day, 2018). I enjoyed being in the classroom but increasingly felt that I was ‘acting’ as a teacher, which drained me emotionally, and left me feeling dissatisfied, and even somewhat of an impostor. Unbeknownst to me, I had transitioned from being a teacher to an academic. By the end of the second year, I decided that the upcoming year would be my last. My intention was to move from the International School arena to academia. That September, I signed a one-year contract (quite rare, but the school was supportive of my plans) and set about looking for an academic position. My situation was incredibly precarious. I did not have the safety net of a two-year contract. If I failed to find an academic position, I would end up without a job. I also had a family to support (at that time, I was the sole breadwinner). Although I might have eventually been able to find another International School position, I was determined to have a go of it as an academic. The job offers did not exactly roll in. Entering, and remaining, on the International School circuit was relatively easy; breaking out of it, however, proved to be far more difficult. Of the uncountable applications sent out, only two offers came back: one in Hong Kong as a lecturer in International Schooling and the other in Beijing, as Director of Research. I decided to take the position in Beijing. With that, I made my biggest transition since moving to China in 2008.

6.2

Introduction

It has been argued that since World War 2, the field of psychology has been fixated on fixing mental illnesses and dysfunctional behaviour rather than trying to understand it (Luthans et al., 2015). As a result of this tendency, negativity has been overemphasised, which has resulted in a deficit-orientated approach (Luthans & Youssef-Morgan, 2017; Luthans et al., 2015). A similar situation has been noted in the related discipline of sociology (Bunnell, 2019), with Frawley (2018) even referring to this inclination towards a more deficit or deviant approach to human behaviour as a ‘happiness problem’. Within the context of research into International School leadership, there has been a similar tendency to focus on International Schools as ‘tense’ and ‘messy’ spaces (Bunnell, 2019). This tendency can also be seen more generally in studies, including my own, that focus on the negative aspects of International Schooling (Blyth,

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2017; Caffyn, 2018; Poole, 2019). However, these studies do not help to explain what is keeping teachers in International Schools. This has been referred to as the ‘growth-paradox’ (Bunnell, 2019). In Bunnell’s words (2019, p. 2), ‘The field of “International Schooling” is usually presented as messy, tense, problematic and challenging yet it continues in practice to attract and retain a growing body of educators’. In order to offer a more nuanced view of the International School experience, Bunnell (2019) has proposed ‘a positive sociology of International Schooling’. Some of the concepts offered as part of this field include ‘transition capital’ and ‘resilience’ (Poole & Bunnell, 2020), both of which inform the theorisation of my own concepts. I complement this burgeoning positive sociology with a psychological perspective. Whereas Bunnell seeks to explore the International School from a wide-angle lens, I zoom in and explore the International School context as refracted through the lived experiences of the teachers. By taking the lived experience as the unit of analysis, it is possible to identify areas of congruence between the positive and the negative. In order to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of teachers’ experiences in Chinese Internationalised Schools, it is necessary to unite the benefits and drawbacks. This I do through the concepts of ‘precarious privilege’ (Rey et al., 2020), resilience, and ‘resilience capital’. Resilience capital is a concept that has been sketched in previous papers (Poole, 2020; Poole & Bunnell, 2020) but is fleshed out here with the participants’ interview data.

6.3

Precarious Privilege

As highlighted in the previous chapter, International School teachers embody a contradiction: On the one hand, they enjoy the many benefits associated with the Global Middle Class, such as high salaries, accumulation of social and cosmopolitan capital, and opportunities for travel. Moreover, many teachers would be unable to partake of these benefits in their home countries. On the other hand, they are in a position of perpetual insecurity due to the contractual nature of their work. How do we reconcile these two seemingly antithetical positions, particularly in relation to ‘Accidental’ teachers whose lack of teaching qualifications would seem to place them in a lower social stratum, which makes them more vulnerable to precarity? The precariat/precarity and the Global Middle Class lenses offer a bifurcated perspective of teachers’ experiences in International Schools.

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One way of overcoming this limitation is to return to the notion of ‘precarious privilege’ (Rey et al., 2020), introduced in Chapter 2. Precarious privilege is defined as the ways in which ‘international teachers combine the privileges of emancipated globetrotters and the precarity of contractual employment in the neoliberal age’ (Rey et al., 2020, p. 370). Rey et al. go on to explain that teachers’ employment opportunities are advantageous, yet the market’s high turnover is such that they are often ‘locked into a precarious system that offers little employee protection and formal retirement plans and is sometimes characterised by summary dismissals and continuous relocations’ (Rey et al., 2020, p. 370). The effects of being locked into a system of precarious privilege leads to a fundamental change in teachers’ identities, which can be viewed in terms of tenuous positions and subjectivities within a deregulated global labour market (Rey et al., 2020). Ironically, teachers fleeing the UK public education system for the seemingly less regulated world of International Schools end up experiencing forms of precarity that are comparable, if not worse, to those they had to face back home. This dilemma has been described metaphorically as ‘escaping the fire for the frying pan’ (Bunnell & Poole, 2020). The fire represents the state school from which the teacher escapes whilst the frying pan represents the International School. The International School is not quite as unbearable as roasting in the metaphorical fire of the state school, but it still brings with it its own issues, such as living in a permanent state of precarity due to the short-term nature of teachers’ contracts. Rey et al. (2020) offer a firm basis for further critically analysing and theorising the growing International School scene. Their work adds to the emerging literature on teachers’ experiences and realities in International Schools by focusing on a sub-group of teachers (Anglo-Saxon, young, and in debt) who have yet to receive much, if any, specific attention. Finally, Rey et al. (2020) neatly capture the ambivalence and complexity of the International School context by considering the affordances and constraints of mobility within the field, which helps to explain why teachers remain in the field of international education in terms of resolving their indebtedness. However, the focus of the researchers’ work is on younger teachers. How are we to explain why ‘older’ teachers (40 and above)—like Robert, Tyron, Sophie, and myself—also remain ‘locked’ in the arena? In order to answer this question, it is necessary to introduce a psychological perspective. The growth paradox—International Schools are precarious, but teachers do not seem to leave the

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arena—can also be explained in terms of teachers developing ‘reserves of resilience’ (Poole, 2020) that enable them to survive despite the precarity, and, in some cases, also to thrive—what I refer to as ‘sur-thrival’. I next develop this argument by drawing upon the concepts of resilience, teacher resilience, and ‘resilience capital’ (Poole, 2020).

6.4

Resilience

Resilience is acknowledged to be complex and multi-dimensional in nature (Beltman et al., 2011), and it is closely linked to the development of positive psychology (Illouz, 2020). Within the context of positive psychology, resilience is defined as ‘the capacity to rebound or bounce back from adversity, conflict, failure or even positive events, progress and increased responsibility’ (Luthans, 2002, p. 702). This interpretation of resilience is premised on the assumption that resilience is a psychological property of certain individuals who adapt to tragedies; resilient people have positive thoughts, and these thoughts are a buffer against negativity; resilient people are adaptable and are able to curb emotional reactivity (Illouz, 2020). Resilience has also been understood chiefly as a character trait in terms of ‘resource caravans’ (Hobfoll, 2002) that individuals carry within themselves. However, resilience as theorised from the perspective of positive psychology has been critiqued on multiple fronts. It has been asked whether it is possible or even desirable to ‘replace negative experiences with positive ones’ (Parks & Biswas-Diener, 2013, p. 160). Illouz (2020, p. 87) puts it well: ‘The moral lesson is clear: Whatever blow fate hits us with, negativity must always be converted into existential positivity’. Resilience as a trait or resource has also been critiqued for denying the legitimacy of negative feelings and decontextualizing human character since the act of bouncing back is taken as a virtue without any consideration for the wider social or ethical landscape (Illouz, 2020). It can be seen that traditional notions of resilience are premised on similar positivist assumptions, such as the typologies of International School teachers explored back in Chapter 3. Traditional notions of resilience also limit the scope of human experiencing and feeling. In the case of positive notions of resilience, negativity is relegated to the sidelines as an undesirable and unproductive feeling. In the case of the International School teacher typologies, teachers are assumed to embody traits or characteristics that remain fixed over time and space.

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A more nuanced interpretation of resilience has been proposed that is based on the capacity to soberly confront the harshness of reality as it is, unencumbered by an expectation that negativity must be dampened or even avoided altogether (Kalkin, 2018). Beales (2018) refers to this in terms of ‘the brutality of reality’. Accordingly, negativity or adversity is not temporary, but, rather, a fundamental part of life. To relegate negativity to the sidelines is to miss out on something fundamental to life. The same argument can also be applied to the International School. In moving towards a more ‘positive lens of inquiry’ (Bunnell, 2019), it is important not to lose sight of ‘the brutality of reality’. This is not to suggest that International Schools are hotbeds of precarity but rather to recognise that precarity is a fundamental feature of International Schooling (Poole & Bunnell, 2020). This is particularly the case for expatriate teachers’ experiences of Chinese Internationalised Schools, which tend to be characterised by adversity and struggle, as illustrated in this book. Therefore, it is necessary to explore the whole range of experiences and emotions in terms of lived experience. Resilience has also been theorised in relation to teachers’ professional lives and changing notions of professionalism within neoliberal structures (Flores, 2020; Sachs, 2001). Within this context, resilience is defined as ‘the interaction between the internal assets of the individual and the external environments in which the individual lives and grows (or does not grow)’ (Gu & Day, 2007, p. 1314). This definition is echoed by Clarà (2017), who defines resilience as ‘something that happens when a teacher adapts positively to an adverse situation’ (82). Both of these definitions acknowledge the role of the environment in mediating teachers’ development of resilience. The environment can foster resilience, or it can stunt its growth. The idea of ‘adapting’ suggests that resilience is not just a reserve or ‘resource caravan’ (Hobfoll, 2002) but, instead, a complex process that unfolds over time and, in relation to Chinese Internationalised Schools, across contested intercultural spaces. Clarà also goes on to distinguish two types of resilience (Clarà, 2017, p. 83). The first is called ‘existential work’ and involves the objective modification of the adverse situation. The second is called ‘experiencing’ and involves the transformation or modification of the ways in which one sees and experiences the adverse situation (Clarà, 2017, p. 83). As this distinction is integral to my argument, I offer an illustration of both in relation to my own experience of working at WEST. The reader may recall the section in which I recounted my frustrated

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experiences of trying to renegotiate my contract, which led to my decision to seek a new teaching position. In this example, the adverse situation was the uncertainty of whether or not my contract would be renewed. My objective modification of this adverse situation was to look for a new job. In so doing, looking for a new job also led to a modification of how I perceived the situation, thereby resulting in a form of ‘experiencing’ resilience. Initially, the act of having to apply to a new school was one of resignation and defeat. However, the application process became one of defiance and agency, a reassertion of my professional worth. The objective modification of this adverse situation led to a transformation in how I perceived it. It was not the school that did not want me but rather me who chose not to want the school. It can be seen that ‘existential work’ and ‘experiencing’ are not necessarily distinct; they also overlap.

6.5 Deepening Resilience from the Perspective of Perezhivanie The notion of ‘experiencing’ can also be deepened by situating it within the concept of perezhivanie, introduced in Chapter 1. Whilst perezhivanie has traditionally been used to explore how individuals relate differentially to their environments (Vygotsky, 1994), others (Blunden, 2014, 2016; Clarà, 2016) have noted that the word perezhivanie in its original Russian is far more nuanced than its rendering in English as ‘lived experience’. According to Blunden (2016, p. 276): Perezhivanie comes from the verb perezhivat. Zhivat means ‘to live’ and pere means carrying something over something, letting something pass beneath and overleaping it, something like cutting out a piece of space, time, or feeling. So perezhivat means to be able to survive after some disaster, that is, to ‘over-live’ something.

For Blunden (2016), perezhivanie is not a singular psychological process but can be thought of in terms of countable self-contained units of experience, each with a beginning, a middle, and an end. In Dewey’s words, experience as a non-countable noun can be understood as being comprised of self-contained episodes, ‘each with its own plot, its own inception and movement toward its close, each having its own particular rhythmic movement’ (Dewey, 1939, p. 555). It is therefore possible to speak of perizhivanya, self-contained episodes of struggle that involve

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experiencing some form of crisis, reflecting on this experience, catharsis (a working-through of the crisis), and finally integrating the crisis into the personality as lessons learnt. Perizhivanie are also more than just self-contained units of experience—they are also tied up with one’s orientation or commitment to various life projects, and it is in the fate of these projects that psychological challenges arise (Blunden, 2016). The concept of perezhivanie complements and deepens Clarà’s notion of ‘experiencing’ and also helps us to move from considering International School teaching as merely surviving to considering how teachers’ experiences of struggle and adversity can lead to a more fulfilling life. The process of working through difficulty leads to a transformation in how teachers come to perceive that initial experience. The difficulty itself remains unchanged, but how teachers relate to or perceive it has changed. This adds a subjective dimension to International School precarity and resilience that has yet to be adequately explored. The literature has identified types of precarity but has not considered how teachers relate to the same type of experience differentially. The unit of analysis, therefore, is shifted from the structural level—precarity as objectively out there in the world—to the subjective level—precarity as perceived and experienced by teachers. On the subjective level, absolute distinctions between negative and positive become smudged. By attending to this ontological smudging, it is possible to get a more nuanced picture of how teachers individually perceive precarity and how they respond to it in the development and deployment of resilience. The concept of perezhivanie also helps to explain why teachers tend to remain in the arena of International Schooling rather than exiting it altogether (Bunnell, 2019). They relate differentially to difficulties and gradually work through them, subjectively modifying them in the process. It is also necessary to acknowledge the role that age plays in the development and deployment of resilience. International School teachers may indeed be privileged and have transnational agency, but age is a significant factor that can result in older teachers struggling to cope with experiences of precarity or unexpected changes in their circumstances, such as illness, not having contracts renewed, or being dismissed. This has been referred to as ‘differential capacities’ (Koh, 2020). In my work, I have talked about teachers accruing ‘reserves of resilience’ (Poole, 2020, p. 234). As I explained it, ‘Resilience capital is produced when teachers take a more positive attitude towards negative or precarious experiences, utilising them to develop skills, dispositions and endurance, which also

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can be converted into more traditional economic and cultural forms of capital’ (Poole, 2020, p. 234). This idea is predicated upon resilience being a form of capital accumulation, very much in the tradition of Bourdieu’s notion of cultural and social capitals. The notion of reserves, however, assumes a somewhat positivist stance. It suggests that teachers carry around ‘reserve caravans’ (Hobfoll, 2002) which they are free to develop and deploy as and when they please. However, as Koh (2020, p. 5) quite rightly asked, ‘To what extent can later-life teacher expatriates develop “reserves of resilience... that would make them more employable” (Poole, 2020, p. 234) when they are arguably at the tail end of their careers?’ This question is particularly germane to Robert, whose ability to bounce back from adversity was increasingly circumscribed by a lack of options due to his age—he was quickly approaching retirement. Whilst older teachers’ ‘reserves of resilience’ may not help to make them more employable, as I initially proposed, these reserves may help them cope with their difficulties. I now recognise that insisting on the transubstantiation of negative experiences into positive ones commits the same sins for which positive psychology has been critiqued. Firstly, assuming that the negative is the soil from which a more positive and generative life springs displaces the negative to a marginalised position. As the critical psychology perspective makes clear, negativity, or ‘the brutality of reality’ (Beales, 2018) is a fundamental part of life. It is also a fundamental part of Chinese Internationalised Schools. However, it is necessary not to overstate the negative too much. Whilst it is true that International School teachers often experience struggle and adversity, it is also necessary to keep the positive in focus, as this is also part of the range of human experiences and emotions. Therefore, it is necessary to move beyond polarising experience into either positive or negative, hence the utility of perezhivanie as a concept, which shows how these experiences are interconnected. Secondly, assuming that it is possible to transform adversity into something positive overstates the agency of teachers. Even younger teachers may struggle to objectively transform an adverse situation. This is clearly seen in Rey et al.’s (2020) study of indebted younger teachers. They may be young, but they are still unable to extricate themselves from indebtedness. In a sense, they become locked into the International School system. However, as I show next, it is possible for teachers of all ages to subjectively reorient themselves to the negative in order to view it more positively. This adds nuance to the notion of ‘differential capacities’

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by suggesting that teachers’ capacity to respond to adversity or bounce back takes on multiple dimensions, including the psychological and the affective.

6.6 6.6.1

Teachers’ Lived Experiences of Resilience ‘What I Realised Was All That I Could Do Was Things That I Could Control’

As established in the previous chapter, Robert’s experiences of precarity primarily revolved around the negation of his professional identity as an educator. In our final interview together, he shared three examples of failed projects that help to illustrate his frustration and provide a context for understanding the strategies he developed to deal with this frustration and, as he put it, ‘disillusionment’: I tried to get leadership and the teachers engaged in a shared strategic management process, which was desperately needed. The idea seemed to get support from senior management, but when it came to going through the process only a few curious teachers participated. I also tried to start a PLC (Professional Learning Community) for teachers at the school to focus practice on achieving shared objectives. I was told that I could do it for expat teachers but not to expect support from the school, or involvement of Chinese teachers. I also tried to help with the computer system by forming an IT committee but meetings were poorly attended and required action was not taken.

In order to deal with the frustrations he experienced, Robert developed a number of coping strategies. One such strategy was to utilise the shortterm nature of International School teaching in order to move on from a school when things inevitably got too difficult: I realised pretty quickly wherever I went if I stayed there a long time it wasn’t really going to get me anywhere. Because I was so frustrated, I didn’t stay anywhere very long. And if I moved, I could experience something different. I left before the two years was up in the last two jobs. The previous teaching jobs in China jobs were one-year contacts and I didn’t renew. So, I guess it was a bit of a coping behaviour. That is why I had so many jobs in such a short time.

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Significantly, short-term contracts, which are typically identified as a feature of International School precarity, offer Robert a way to objectively, albeit temporarily, modify his situation. The short-term contract becomes a kind of ‘get-out clause’ or a ‘circuit breaker’ that allows Robert to temporarily escape from frustration. Interestingly, Robert utilises an aspect of precarity (short-term contracts) in order to address even more severe forms of adversity, namely, disillusion and frustration. Despite his qualifications and commitment to teaching, Robert believed that the school did not value him for his professional capital but, rather, for his ethnic capital (Farrer, 2019): We were never taken seriously as professionals. They were not really interested in our input as teachers. They needed to have us there because that’s what the parents wanted. They also needed us as far as IB was concerned.

Robert expressed ethnic capital in terms of being a ‘commodity’. He eventually realised that his efforts to contribute to the growth of the school were not welcome and, so, chose to redirect his energy elsewhere: I think what I realised was all that I could do was things that I could control really within the classroom. I put more energy into what I was doing in the classroom and trying to make the material I was dealing with more accessible to the students, using things like Quizlet and various Internet resources and different types of project work and so on to engage the students and get them more involved.

This rechanneling of energy into the classroom can be thought of as another coping strategy. In this scenario, Robert does not project an idealised version of how things should be but rather keeps the ‘brutality of reality’ (Beales, 2018) within view and takes succor from what is in fact possible/permissible. Not only does this allow Robert to cope with frustration, but it also gives him a space in which to reclaim a marginalised professional identity and exercise some agency. Robert’s dawning realisation that he could not change the structure of the school can also be thought of in terms of a modification of how he perceives the situation. Whilst he cannot change things objectively, he is able to redefine the scope of his professional identity from the public domain of wanting to change the school structurally to the private domain of the classroom. Ironically, whereas the school endorsed and helped to promote Sophie’s art

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projects, which had symbolic and promotional value, Robert’s attempts to initiate deep pedagogical and organisational change did not fit into the time/space/place of the school’s timeline. Once again, this gestures towards the ‘reality’ of Chinese Internationalised Schools like WEST: they are primarily market-driven and, therefore, value contributions that are geared towards generating profit or positive publicity. Another strategy that Robert used to deal with frustration was informal support groups. The following is an excerpt from an exchange between myself and Robert where I introduce the value of informal support networks, which Robert then expounds upon: Me: I feel with WEST, we had a pretty good informal support network. I think that made it more bearable. Especially, you and Tyron, for me. We were on the same page because we had the same frustrations, and we liked to drink beer. That made it so much easier to deal with. Robert: The developing of those kinds of relationships was another thing which I guess we all did to try and deal with the situation we were in and the frustrations we were having. But as far as the actual job was concerned, there wasn’t really a lot that one could do. One could focus on doing things that one could control, but it didn’t really solve the problem. Me: So that’s the bit about surviving, right? The things you could control, just enough to help you survive.

Tyron also remarked that, ‘I don’t think I would have made it without that friendship and camaraderie’. Because the school did not provide their expatriate teachers with any suitable orientation programme or support network (perhaps because it was a new school and was gradually finding its feet), it fell to the teachers to assemble them. One such informal support network involved meeting on Friday evenings at the local German brewery. These meet ups were primarily frequented by the expatriate male staff, although occasionally local and expatriate female teachers would attend. I recall one German patron overhearing our conversation and asking whether he could ‘join our therapy session’. Whilst the patron may have been trying to mock us, he did have a point: those Friday night beer sessions were not just social in nature; they also served a deeper, psychological function. It has been argued that resilience is not just in the mind of the individual but can also be examined in the context of the culture and society in which a person participates (Murakami, 2020). Recalling the notion of perezhivanie as a working-over of a trauma (Blunden,

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2016), these bar get-togethers became a kind of group perezhivanie, where we would collectively talk through the difficulties of the week. Our conversations would often attempt to make sense of the general opaqueness that characterised the principal’s approach to leadership. Robert described this situation well: The principal basically said what happened and everybody else followed their orders. It’s also very closed. There isn’t much open discussion going on with the expats but also amongst the Chinese teachers. The whole decision-making process was behind closed doors. You were only told as much as it was thought you needed to know.

Sophie’s partner, Michel, however, was on hand to explain what was going on ‘behind closed doors’. Because he could speak Chinese and occupied something of a privileged insider position, he was privy to information from which the other expatriate teachers were excluded. In this sense, Michel embodied a similar role to that of Daisy as a cultural mediator (explored in Chapter 4). Returning to the bar get-togethers, the act of ‘venting’ was one of catharsis and purging where we collectively worked through our frustrations. This collective problem solving may have provided support and resilience, yet, from Robert’s perspective, it did not modify the objective difficulty, which was the school’s lack of transparency and perceived disregard for expatriate teachers’ professionalism and professional capital. Another coping strategy that Robert employed was to stay active: I think another thing which I did outside of school was try and get around, and I got that kayak, a bicycle. I tried to move around and have a bit of fun that way; otherwise, I would have gone crazy.

Robert was a keen kayaker back in New Zealand so the canals that surrounded the school offered him a chance to resume his hobby. I recall Robert vaguely talking about buying a kayak but dismissed it as whimsy. Sometime later, however, a large, yellow kayak appeared downstairs in the school lobby. A group of us volunteered to carry this unwieldy thing onto the waiting coach that would take us home. In order to use it, Robert had to wheel the kayak a good mile to the canal. In time, he would stash it away in some bushes. Although the canal was not built for kayaking, Robert was never stopped by the many bao’ans (security guards) that

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patrolled the area, nor did he seem concerned about getting caught. At the time, I thought purchasing a kayak was perhaps a bit unnecessary. However, in writing this book, I now realise that the kayak, like our informal therapy sessions, was another strategy for dealing with frustration and also a means of developing resilience. It was also a symbolic link to home, New Zealand. Figure 6.1 is a picture Robert took of his kayak in New Zealand. In Robert’s words, ‘The peaceful emptiness resonates with me’. The kayak also became a way for Robert to exercise some control over what he considered to be an uncontrollable situation. He could control the speed of the strokes, where he went, and how long he chose to remain on the water: ‘It was also something I could do on my own terms. I often stretched my physical abilities, going out for the whole day, and I found completion of these challenges very satisfying’. Whilst the strategies employed by Robert offered him ways to cope with his situation, to survive, he was nevertheless unable to thrive because he could not objectively modify his situation. One benefit of Robert’s hyper-mobility was that he never had to endure the frustrations he faced for too long. The short-term contract functioned as a get-out clause, allowing him to easily change schools whenever the frustrations become too much to handle. On the one hand, this was advantageous. He was

Fig. 6.1 Robert’s kayak on Moturoa, and the Bay of Islands

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able to deal with his frustrations in the short term by keeping the ‘benefits’, which were primarily monetary, firmly within sight. On the other hand, his constant moving made putting down roots and establishing deep friendships difficult: I hadn’t been in China long when I decided that I wasn’t going to stay here forever. I’ll just stay here for a while and then go back home. And that sort of attitude does put a slant on everything you do and how you think about it.

Despite having worked in a number of Chinese Internationalised Schools, Robert did not consider his experiences to have led to a transformation in his thinking or to have helped him develop resilience. As he put it: Did it really change the way I think about myself? I don’t know. Not profoundly. None of these experiences made me stronger. They just helped convince me that I needed to move on. All the frustrations did make me even more cynical than I was.

Although Robert’s experiences did not make him stronger, they did allow him to accept the fact that he could not objectively modify his situation. This was something of a self-realisation, which gave him a deeper insight into where he fit ‘within the world’: So yes, the international teaching experience has driven personal growth that may not have happened in New Zealand. So, from that point of view, it was a useful learning experience. It did enable me to understand where I fit within the world a bit better.

This international teaching experience also enabled Robert to become more reflexive: That whole experience did give me insights into things I was unaware of beforehand. Challenges with management and how the school was run forced me to analyse the underlying requirement, especially the pedagogy. I did this with reference mostly to the IB way of thinking as it helped make sense of the situation. This helped with teaching in this environment. My impression of the whole thing was that China is not that suitable for people who are serious about what they are doing because it’s going to be very frustrating for them.

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The underlying requirement here can be understood in epistemological and philosophical terms. Robert does not try to understand WEST on its own terms but, rather, through the lens of the IB. From the ‘IB way of thinking’, learning is premised on a humanist tradition (Walker, 2010) that stresses individual agency, giving the individual an ‘Archimedean point from which to view the world’ (Byram, 2018, p. 72). The ‘IB way of thinking’ is also premised on constructivist assumptions about learning (Bullock, 2011) that reflect a Western-centric way of thinking about learning. Tarc (2009, op. 42) puts it well when he writes that ‘Western metaphysical assumptions about being and learning are naturalised and … made universal’. Both of these assumptions are largely antithetical to the reality of Chinese Internationalised Schools, which are largely collectivist and transmissive in nature. Whilst Robert believes that ‘the IB way of thinking’ helped him make sense of the situation, it could also be argued that utilising a Western frame of reference (‘the IB way of thinking) also helped him create some of the difficulties he faced, such as his struggle to introduce more student-centred approaches to learning in his classroom. Rather than meeting the school on its own terms, as Sophie and Daisy did, Robert understands it from an ethnocentric perspective, the mismatch of which creates—as noted in Chapter 4—‘cognitive dissonance’ (Shaules, 2007). The retrenchment of ethnocentrism was the result of a tug-of-war between seemingly antithetical perspectives. The more the school insisted on doing things the ‘Chinese way’, the more Robert dug in his heels. Finally, though perhaps more serendipitously than by design, Robert’s experiences paved the way for his return to New Zealand: I jumped at the opportunity to become an IB examiner. It was good forward planning and gave me something I could build on. I have since been able to add the External Advisor role. So, I guess in a way the WEST experience did in fact produce a positive outcome.

6.6.2

‘I Did Achieve Some Personal Growth and Also Professional Growth’

As the reader may recall, Daisy’s main struggle in WEST was ‘conceptual precarity’. She struggled to understand the nature of international education and how to adapt it to fit Chinese Internationalised Schools and Chinese high school students. As such, her interviews did not touch upon resilience in the same way as Tyron and Robert’s. However, it is

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worth exploring some of the strategies that she employed in order to deal with her conceptual confusion. Given that there are many Daisies in Chinese Internationalised Schools—young, novice Chinese teachers who are coming to international education for the first time—her situation needs to be explored alongside those of expatriate teachers. Her struggles may well be less precarious in nature, but this does not make them any less phenomenologically significant. For Daisy, this conceptual confusion was subjectively understood as a form of conflict or adversity. Therefore, the strategies she proposed are relevant. One strategy Daisy employed to resolve her conceptual confusion involved attending an IB Category 2 course in English Language B (language acquisition). Another strategy involved studying for a Master’s degree in International Education. Whilst the IB workshop gave Daisy a ‘clearer idea of the international education to some degree’, and the Master’s degree gave her a ‘deeper conceptual understanding’, she still considered ‘the experience I gained through teaching, my thinking, reflection more influential in shaping my view of the international education’ to be more significant. It appears for Daisy that there is something of a disconnect between theory and practice. Whilst the workshop and further study offered a theoretical perspective, they did not really help her understand how to implement international education in practice. More profitable for her was a form of self-initiated professional development, where Daisy took it upon herself to find the answers that the more prescriptive IB workshop and Master’s degree were unable to provide: I tried to overcome the struggles by being more exposed to international cultures and visiting other International Schools and talking to teachers from different backgrounds but not Chinese teachers, maybe expatriate teachers, and talk to them and to try to get their view of international education and also, I read some books and some papers about international education. I think it helps because I can get different ideas from different aspects.

Interestingly, Daisy does not consider the other Chinese teachers to be a useful resource in trying to better understand the nature of international education. This may be because she considers them to be in the

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same situation as herself—struggling to understand international education. Daisy also considered the information she got from other teachers to be second-hand: I think it is not enough for me to get a full picture of the international education because people have different ideas of that concept. It is secondhand information when it came to me. But still, there is no or right or wrong answer.

Daisy needs to experience, first-hand, international education in a more authentic setting. For her, schools like WEST do not offer a genuine form of international education. To quote the words of another teacher at WEST, ‘Their way of doing international education is fake—international things that are covered by the international appearance’. In order to experience a more genuine or ‘real’ form of international education, Daisy decided to intern in a prestigious International School in Shanghai: But when I did an internship, I could see the differences in the students. The Chinese students are different from the western students. I don’t know whether that’s because they came from western families, those family cultures shape them, or because of the school. I think family is a more important element.

This experience provided her with a much-needed point of comparison. Previously, she had only worked in Chinese Internationalised Schools, which offered one version of international education. Whilst Daisy’s experience of interning did not make her more resilient per se, it did provide her with an alternative perspective that she was then able to use in order to critically understand some of the limitations of the international curriculum being implemented by WEST. Another strategy that Daisy employed to deal with her conceptual confusion was to approach adversity pragmatically. On the one hand, she was new to the world of international education, and she faced a steep learning curve. On the other hand, she was also the principal’s secretary. This secondary role included, amongst other things, arranging meetings, interpreting, and translating. As Daisy put it, ‘I need to deal with two completely different things at the same time, so it takes me double the time to deal with it’. This situation is not just temporal in nature (how to

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strategically allocate tasks within a given timeframe) but also existential: she has to constantly negotiate dual identities that do not speak to each other, one of which (being a secretary) was not voluntarily chosen. Rather than becoming frustrated or disillusioned, Daisy was quick to see the advantages that the secretary role afforded: The secretary job also let me get closer to the leadership in the school, so I was able to get more of an idea of their understanding of the international education and their school policies. So, because I’m closer to them, I got to know more about their views, which also gave me aspects of a Chinese principal’s idea of operating a Chinese bilingual school, their thinking and opinions.

This is yet another example of the interconnection between ‘existential work’ and ‘experiencing’. Daisy could not objectively modify her situation but she could reorient herself to the situation, thereby creating a new, subjective understanding of the situation, which was more positive in nature. What Daisy lost in time, she made up for in other ways, such as the cultivation of guanxi or connections. Guanxi has been understood as a social network of obligations that allows some individuals to gain privileges over others (Leung & Wong, 2001). Guanxi can also be described as being complementary to, but conceptually distinct from, Bourdieu’s notion of social capital (Gold et al., 2002). Guanxi makes ‘possible the achievement of certain ends that in its absence would not be possible’ (Coleman, 1988, p. 98), or, more bluntly, the cutting of corners. An example will suffice to illustrate this concept. Daisy and I both attended the same IB Category 2 workshop in Vietnam. However, because of her ‘insider’ status, we were provided with a car to take us to the airport. A car was also arranged to pick us up. This would not have been offered to me if Daisy had not been so close to the school leadership due to her role as a secretary. Another benefit that came with the role was the cultivation of cultural capital. Because Daisy was physically close to the ‘inner sanctum’ of the leadership (she worked in the principal’s office and sat in on meetings), she was privy to insider information that helped her understand the principal’s vision for the school. And even though working at WEST ‘did not give [her] a very clear idea of how an International School should be’, Daisy could at least appreciate what the school was trying to do, as she was privy to the ‘decisions [that] were made behind closed doors’, as

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Robert put it. Daisy was also far more forgiving than Robert. She recognised that WEST was a new school and was, therefore, ‘still developing their idea of a Chinese version of international education. They are still shaping whether there is a good way to balance both the Chinese and international elements’. She also recognised the need, and difficulty, of trying to balance Chinese and international elements: ‘I think the international concept is more inclusive and that includes a Chinese version of international education, not just a western world’. Daisy was more forgiving because she could view the school as a Chinese insider, appreciating what the school was trying to do and the reality of the Chinese Internationalised School market. Recalling her time at WEST, Daisy considered it to have driven her personal and professional growth: During the process of learning more, I did achieve some personal growth and also professional growth. Personally, because I really like the experiences of knowing about the other cultures and knowing about the international education. Through the process, I can get a clearer picture of what the international education is like. Because it’s just a concept. So, I will have my understanding of that education, trying to combine the thing with the Chinese thing. It is a really interesting process for me, personally. I can get more insights and more understanding of different things.

Ultimately, Daisy chose to leave WEST and find employment in a different industry. Whilst she did not consider her experiences of teaching to be directly related to her new role, she did consider her formative experiences useful in helping her deal with the day-to-day issues associated with working in a company: Maybe some invisible things I have not realized, such as some basic capabilities, like dealing with people or something. Because it’s my first job, there are lots of things to learn. Not just the work things, but also how to deal with people, how to get used to a workplace that is different from the campus place. That’s also something to learn.

6.6.3

‘It Also Comes with Emotional Consequences’

As established in the previous chapter, Tyron struggled with the emotional effects of being away from his family and the anxiety created by WEST’s culture of performativity. In our final interviews together, I asked

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Tyron to reflect on some of the strategies he had developed in order to deal with these struggles. One of the strategies he shared involved staying as busy as possible: I like to stay at school quite a bit because it helps me to keep focused on my work and also, I have the interaction with the other teachers. But I really, really do not like to go home at night. Because you go home and start thinking of the bad…that you are alone. So, I try to make my stay at home as little as possible. The thing is I focus so much on my work. But at the end, it’s like a double-edged sword because the school rely on me so much; they just want to use me more. But I’m so dedicated because it’s the only thing I’ve got. It keeps you busy. And if I keep busy, I don’t think of home. That’s why training and exercise is so important for me because it helps me a lot to stay positive. Otherwise, if I have to stay home all day and start thinking of home it will be pretty bad for me.

Like Robert, Tyron did not view WEST through the lens of positivity, the proverbial rose tinted spectacles, but rather, accepted ‘the brutality of reality’ soberly. In order to deal with this brutal reality, Tyron stayed as busy as possible, working overtime and exercising in order to deal with frustration and to retain a sense of positivity. Ironically, Tyron’s strategies for dealing with one aspect of precarity—missing his family— involved spending more time at work, which exacerbated another aspect of precarity—the school relying on him and expecting him to continually ‘perform’. Tyron expressed this irony in terms of the metaphor of a ‘double-edged sword’ and the maxim of being ‘damned if I do, damned if I don’t’. Tyron also dealt with the ‘brutality of reality’ in a strategic and pragmatic manner: But I have another strategy. I think it’s kind of funny. The CIA and all these secret agencies, they’ve got a slush fund. I have a slush fund too. So, I keep some money in my apartment, a couple of thousand ren min bi (Chinese currency), so if I decide to leave at short notice I can just leave. I know it sounds crazy, but I want some money just in case I do want to leave quickly.

Figure 6.2 depicts Tyron’s slush fund as photographed by him. The ‘slush fund’ offers Tyron a way to expediently modify his situation by escaping from it altogether. There is a sense in which he is anticipating

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Fig. 6.2 Tyron’s slush fund

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a day when he has to escape, when the proverbial hammer will fall. This situation could be interpreted as a form of ‘precarious privilege’ (Rey et al., 2020). Tyron may be ‘locked’ into the system, unable to return home, but his privileged status enables him to move within the system by finding employment in another (Chinese) International School. A final strategy that Tyron employed to develop resilience and to cope with being away from his family was to exercise and maintain a strict eating regimen. This is illustrated by the following excerpt where Tyron and I discuss the role of food and control as a coping strategy: Me: One of the strategies you have developed to deal with being away from your family is to do a lot of exercise. Would you say that that is one physical way of dealing with your difficulties? Tyron: For sure. The other thing is I’m very strict with my eating regime. I feel that that helps me a lot. The stricter I am with my eating regime, because eating and food is such a huge issue in anybody’s life. If you’re strict with that you’re strict with everything else. Me: It’s like discipline? Tyron: Yeah, if you have that discipline with food then you have discipline with almost anything. You can have discipline with getting to work early. Me: It’s also about control, right? Tyron: For sure. I have more control over my food. Maybe the more control I have the better I can survive. Also, the communication thing that I always struggle with. I can control that a bit too. Me: So, it’s like almost because you don’t have so much control in terms of what you teach and where you teach, you’re able to get that control with your diet and your exercise. It’s like ‘that is my little space I can really control’. Tyron: Yeah, for sure.

Tyron, like Robert, used exercise as a way to deal with frustration. He also used other pedagogically unrelated day-to-day routines, like eating, as a way to maintain self-control and balance. My experience of International Schooling has shown how easy it is for teachers to use food and drink as a mechanism for coping with their difficulties, such as over-eating (comfort eating) or alcohol abuse. Some teachers may also turn to drugs as a strategy to survive. Whilst there is little empirical evidence to support this claim, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence. Once again, this strategy for dealing with precarity is also precarious in nature, as illustrated by the case of sixteen expatriate teachers and students who were arrested in a

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drug raid in the city of Xuzhou in Jiangsu province (Kuo, 2019). Whilst any teacher arrested on drug charges will certainly be deported, sentences can also carry prison time and, in some cases, the death sentence. Despite China’s increasingly tough stance on drugs, use of illegal drugs continues largely unabated (Levin, 2015). Whether this is indicative of precarity (the situation is so difficult that teachers resort to drug use, despite the consequences) or the follies of youth (they know the dangers but do not take them seriously), only future research will tell. Whilst abusing food, drink and drugs can be thought of as strategies for dealing with adversity, they do not lead to a more productive or generative life. Using Clarà’s (2016) language, comfort eating and drinking and drug abuse cannot modify the situation objectively. They simply allow teachers to deal with their problems, thereby reaffirming the ‘the brutality of reality’. Arguably, comfort-drinking and drug use allow for the temporary subjective modification of adversity, but that adversity remains, and there is no attempt to work through it. More productive is Tyron’s strategy, which is to channel the control and discipline he has over his diet to other areas of his life at school. Despite the difficulties, Tyron identified some benefits of working at WEST. Some benefits included the development of resilience and the development of his teaching practice: I think mentally, I’m a little bit stronger than I once was five years ago. Even though I might have been strong, I’m a bit stronger now. Also, maybe I developed my teaching skills quite a bit. I can teach almost any grade now. I won’t say it’s easy, but a lot easier than it was. Stuff like my music skills. Developing other skills that I never thought I had. Like my personal skills. Talking to people, communication skills, have improved. Just my teaching. If you think about what makes a great teacher. Communicating well to the students. A good listener. I think my knowledge about the subject has improved. Maybe I lost my stats knowledge, but I guess I gained a little bit of the other knowledge.

In contrast to Robert, who considered his experiences to have had minimal impact on the development of resilience, Tyron considered himself to have grown stronger. It has to be pointed out that Tryon considered himself to be resilient even before teaching in China (‘even though I might have been strong’). This strength can be attributed to his formative experiences of working as a member of the riot police in South Africa. Tyron had been confronted with ‘the brutality of reality’ of

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Apartheid in the 1990s as part of his job with the police force, witnessing riots, beatings, and even dead bodies. Tyron reflected that: So many times, when I trained in the intervention unit, or SWAT, we had to get over these obstacles, 1.8 metres, 2 metres, 2.5 metres, and 3 metres obstacles. And we were always taught to get over it, either on my own or with the help of others. I guess that’s taught me to get over stuff. In China, there will be obstacles, but I can get over it if I just work hard enough.

Whilst the obstacles were physical in South Africa, they became emotional in China. Tyron’s ‘reserves of resilience’ from his days working with the riot police are another example of ‘differentiated capacities’ (Koh, 2020). These ‘reserves of resilience’ became invaluable in negotiating the ‘brutality of reality’ of WEST. However, Tyron recognised that his development had also been at the expense of other things. He may have developed as an educator, but by focusing his time and energy on this development, he was unable to develop academically, hence why he considers himself to have ‘lost his stats knowledge’. Tyron captures this trade-off well when he says: ‘Like I say, I’ve developed. But it’s damned if I do and damned if I don’t. I’m a lot better teacher than I was five years ago, but it also comes with emotional consequences’. These emotional consequences included having to spend an extended period of time away from his family and having to cut himself off emotionally in order to survive (see Chapter 5 on precarity). Tyron also suggested that he considered experience and age to be a prerequisite for developing and deploying resilience: Mentally, me and you, I guess we are much stronger than that younger teacher, remember? At the end of the day, when they send you to a town that’s very small and remote and it doesn’t have a lot of people, it’s going to have an influence on you. It did play a big part. It felt for me like an old place, where old people retire. For me and you, it’s okay; we are mentally strong enough. For a young guy, a teacher, that might be problematic.

That ‘younger teacher’ was Anders (pseudonym), a young teacher in his early twenties. Anders was a very pleasant and enthusiastic young man who was employed as a middle school English teacher. Despite a positive start, he was soon overwhelmed by his teaching load, which was twentyfive periods a week. Tyron put it well when he remarked that: ‘For me

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and you, we have ten years teaching experience. Imagine a young guy that comes to this place. There’s no support. Nothing. The kids are horrible to him’. One morning in December, Anders was not there on the bus that took us to school. The entire day, no one could get hold of him. This struck us all as being very strange since Anders was a very friendly and sociable person. Then, in the evening, it was announced on the group WeChat that Anders had left the school. We had not known Anders long, but his leaving affected us profoundly. Perhaps most of all it reminded us, particularly the expatriate teachers, that we were all vulnerable. As one teacher put it, ‘All we have is each other’. But even the informal support network we had established was not enough to help Anders. A few weeks later another teacher was hired who was able to handle the heavy teaching load. Over time, Anders became ‘that teacher’. The episode is a reminder that even younger teachers, whom most might consider to be more resilient than older teachers, can be vulnerable in unexpected ways. It is also a reminder that trauma and struggle are not always perceptible. The struggles and battles that have been recounted here were largely waged within the silent space of the mind. It is therefore necessary to understand the notion of ‘differential capacities’ (Koh, 2020) as involving a social and a psychological nature. This concept appears to be more nuanced than would first appear. Whilst older teachers may struggle to deploy their ‘reserves of resilience’ in order to foster mobility (Koh, 2020), Anders’ sudden disappearance suggests that younger teachers are likely to possess fewer ‘reserves of resilience’ and are, therefore, more vulnerable and less prepared to deal with the difficulties of working abroad. This is where the notion of perezhivanie can help to develop the notion of resilience and differentiated capacities. Expatriate teachers’ intercultural adaptations to Chinese Internationalised Schools can be thought of as perezhivaniya. Each teacher works through the same experience, but in their own way. The notion of decontextualised reserves of resilience, or ‘resource caravans’ (Hobfoll, 2002), needs to be combined with phenomenological approaches in order to foreground teachers’ differentiated capacities.

6.7

Summary of Chapter

This chapter explored the strategies that the participants used to cope with and work through the difficulties they faced. Whilst the struggles

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or adversity that teachers face may be relatively homogenous—shortterm contracts, conceptual confusion, frustration—the strategies that they adopt are far more diverse. In Vygotskian terms, the teachers exist in the same environment but work through the same struggles in their own idiosyncratic manner. Teachers work through or live with adversity by utilising unique strategies. These different strategies help to explain the participants’ differentiated capacities to respond to adversity. It is not just a question of age—although this is a significant factor—but also the nature of their perezhivanie and where they are in relation to its workingover (Blunden, 2016). The nature of a person’s perezhivanie plays a part in how well they are able to adapt. Having worked through a number of perezhivaniya previously as a result of working with the South African riot police, Tyron was able to not only survive, but also to thrive in China. However, this could at best be described in terms of sur-thrival. In the next chapter, I develop the notion of sur-thrival and tie the book’s arguments together by articulating its contributions to the International Schooling scholarship.

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Byram, M. (2018). An essay on internationalism in foreign language education. Intercultural Communication Education, 1(2), 64–82. Caffyn, R. (2018). ‘The shadows are many…’ Vampirism in international school leadership: Problems and potential in cultural, political, and psycho-social borderlands. Peabody Journal of Education, 93(5), 500–517. Clarà, M. (2016). The many lives of the word perezhivanie. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 23(4), 339–342. Clarà, M. (2017). Teacher resilience and meaning transformation: How teachers reappraise situations of adversity. Teaching and Teacher Education, 63, 82–91. Coleman, J. S. (1988). Social capital in the creation of human capital. American Journal of Sociology, 94, 95–120. Day, C. (2018). Professional identity matters: Agency, emotions, and resilience. In P. A. Schutz, J. Hong, & D. Cross Francis (Eds.), Research on teacher identity: Mapping challenges and innovations (pp. 61–70). https://doi.org/ 10.1007/978-3-319-93836-3_6. Dewey, J. (1939). Having an experience. In J. J. McDermott (Ed.), The philosophy of John Dewey, two volumes in one (pp. 554–573). University of Chicago Press. Farrer, L. (2019). International migrants in China’s global city. The new Shanghailanders. Routledge. Flores, M. A. (2020). Surviving, being resilient and resisting: Teachers’ experiences in adverse times. Cambridge Journal of Education, 50(2), 219–240. Frawley, A. (2018). ‘Unhappy news’: Process, rhetoric, and context in the making of the ‘happiness problem’. Sociological Research Online, 23(1), 43–66. Gold, T., Guthrie, D., & Wank, D. (2002). Social connections in China: Institutions, culture, and the changing nature of guanxi. Cambridge University Press. Gu, Q., & Day, C. (2007). Teachers resilience: A necessary condition for effectiveness. Teaching and Teacher Education, 23, 1302–1316. Hobfoll, S. (2002). Social and psychological resources and adaptation. Review of General Psychology, 6, 307–324. Illouz, E. (2020). Resilience. The failure of success. In D. Nehring, O. J. Madsen, E. Cabanas, C. Mills, & D. Kerrigan (Eds.), The Routledge international handbook of global therapeutic cultures (pp. 83–91). Routledge. Kalkin, P. (2018). Toward a well-spoken explanatory style. In N. J. Brown, T. Lomas, & F. J. Eiroa-Orosa (Eds.), The Routledge international handbook of critical positive psychology (pp. 161–172). Routledge. Koh, S. Y. (2020). Disrupted geographical arbitrage and differential capacities of coping in later-life: Anglo-western teacher expatriates in Brunei. International Migration Review. https://doi.org/10.1177/0197918320926910. Kuo, L. (2019, July 12). Four Britons arrested in China after drug bust involving foreigners. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/ 12/four-britons-arrested-in-china-days-after-drug-bust-involving-foreigners.

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Leung, T. K., & Wong, Y. H. (2001). The ethics and positioning of guanxi in China. Marketing Intelligence & Planning, 19(1), 55–64. https://doi.org/ 10.1108/02634500110363826. Levin, D. (2015, June 24). Despite a crackdown, use of illegal drugs in China continues unabated. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/ 01/25/world/despite-a-crackdown-use-of-illegal-drugs-in-china-continuesunabated.html. Luthans, F. (2002). Positive organizational behavior: Developing and managing psychological strengths. Academy of Management Executive, 16(1), 57–72. Luthans, F., & Youssef-Morgan, C. M. (2017). Psychological capital: An evidence-based positive approach. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 4, 339–366. Luthans, F., Youssef-Morgan, C. M., & Avolio, B. J. (2015). Psychological capital and beyond. Oxford University Press. Murakami, Y. (2020). Learning in retirement: Developing resilience and becoming a resourceful practitioner of life. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lcsi.2020.100463. Parks, A. C., & Biswas-Diener, R. (2013). Positive interventions: Past, present, and future. In T. B. Kashdan & J. Ciarrochi (Eds.), Mindfulness, acceptance, and positive psychology: The seven foundations of well-being (pp. 140–165). New Harbinger. Poole, A. (2019). International Education Teachers’ experiences as an educational precariat in China. Journal of Research in International Education, 18(1), 60–76. Poole, A. (2020). Internationalised School Teachers’ experiences of precarity as part of the Global Middle Class in China: Towards ‘resilience capital’. The Asia-Pacific Education Researcher, 29(3), 227–235. Poole, A., & Bunnell, T. (2020). Developing the notion of teaching in ‘International Schools’ as precarious: Towards a more nuanced approach based upon ‘transition capital’. Globalisation, Societies and Education. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/14767724.2020.1816924. Rey, J., Bolay, M., & Gez, Y. N. (2020). Precarious privilege: Personal debt, lifestyle aspirations and mobility among international school teachers. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 18(4), 361–373. Sachs, J. (2001). Teacher professional identity: Competing discourses, competing outcomes. Journal of Education Policy, 16(2), 149–161. Shaules, J. (2007). Deep culture: The hidden challenges of global living (Vol. 16). Multilingual Matters. Tarc, P. (2009). Global dreams, enduring tensions: International Baccalaureate in a changing world. Peter Lang.

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Vygotsky, L. S. (1994). The problem of the environment. In J. Valsiner & R. Van der Veer (Eds.), The Vygotsky reader (pp. 347–348). Blackwell. Walker, G. (2010). East is east and west is west. http://www.ibo.org/globalass ets/publications/east-is-east-and-west-is-west-en.pdf.

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion

7.1

Introduction

This chapter develops the idea of sur-thrival, which was introduced in the previous chapter. This concept combines notions of precarity and resilience in order to develop the theorisation of teachers’ experiences in International Schools. The aim is to move beyond simply understanding International School teachers’ experiences in terms of survival. As the interviews with the participants clearly show, there is more going on than simply coping. Despite the precarity, or perhaps because of it, the teachers in this study were able to develop and grow. The concept of sur-thrival is used to sketch a new research trajectory. This chapter also raises implications for researching Chinese Internationalised Schools. It draws upon the notion of ‘legitimacy’ and ‘primary institutional purpose’ (Bunnell et al., 2017) in order to develop the idea introduced in Chapter 2 that Chinese Internationalised School should be ‘decoupled’ (Poole, 2020) from normative models of the ‘Traditional International School’ (Hayden & Thompson, 2013). Finally, this chapter proposes a number of research trajectories that future research could develop.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Poole, International Teachers’ Lived Experiences, International and Development Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78686-1_7

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7.2

Sur-Thrival

Although the term sur-thrival was inspired by Beltman et al.’s (2011) review paper entitled ‘Thriving not just surviving: A review of research on teacher resilience’, the term itself has been in use for some time. The portmanteau was coined by former Dell executive, Joel Kocher, denoting a state of not just surviving, but also thriving (Simmons, 2015). Sur-thrival has also been used in organisational theory. For example, surthrival (with a hyphen) ‘conjures up the image of uniting for a common cause or recognizing adversity, yet seeing it as a challenge’ (Albrecht & Wellik, 1997, p. 76). For the authors, individual sur-thrival requires developing stress management techniques, learning to cope with ambiguity, and seeking emotional support. Finally, ‘surthriving’ has also been used to conceptualise the experiences of ‘Persons of Colour’ struggling to orient themselves within ‘a reductionist political climate’ (DelaRosa, 2018, p. 83) whilst ‘caught in the exhausting pendulum between surviving and thriving’ (DelaRosa, 2018, p. 83). Within the context of teachers in Chinese Internationalised Schools, sur-thrival is a potentially useful concept that helps us to move beyond the bifurcating concepts of the precariat and the Global Middle Class. Much like the psychological notion of ‘the brutality of reality’ (Beales, 2018), which holds that negative experiences should or cannot be replaced by positive ones, sur-thrival suggests that life is a combination of struggling and thriving. Sur-thrival could be thought of as a complement to the notion of ‘precarious privilege’ (Rey et al., 2020). Whereas precarious privilege is a sociological concept and considers economic, social, and mobility capital, sur-thrival, is a psychological concept, and considers psychological or resilience capital. Sur-thrival also captures the contradictory nature of teachers’ experiences in Chinese Internationalised Schools. Whereas perezhivanie is a working-over of an issue, with a beginning, middle, and an end, surthrival suggests that surviving and thriving are ever-constant; they are fundamental aspects of a person’s life. For me, this concept more accurately reflects teachers’ experiences in Chinese Internationalised Schools, as vividly illustrated by the participants’ stories. As suggested by DelaRosa (2018), sur-thrival is like a pendulum, with teachers oscillating between surviving and thriving over time. This pendulum-like motion reflects Daisy’s experiences of working at WEST, where she gradually moved from thriving (she was initially positive about working at a new school), to

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surviving (she struggled to overcome her conceptual confusion), and back to thriving (she left the school and started a new career outside of education). Tyron’s experiences also oscillate between surviving and thriving. He began his time at WEST simply surviving but over time found ways to develop and grow professionally, if not emotionally. It can be seen from these two examples that surviving and thriving are inextricably linked. Surviving necessitates the construction and deployment of strategies that help to foster resilience and development. However, the linear movement from surviving to thriving does not quite capture the complexity and ambivalence of all expatriate teachers in WEST. For example, Robert, was barely able to survive in some contexts (his frustrated attempts to implement a professional learning community), but able to thrive in others (developing student-centred approaches to learning for his students). Similarly, Tyron struggled to deal with the pressures of performativity where he felt that he had to constantly perform, but he was able to thrive in other areas, such as developing as a teacher. In relation to my own experiences of working at WEST, I also experienced surviving and thriving simultaneously. On the one hand, I struggled to cope as a teacher, due to the workload. Teaching had become inauthentic, a form of ‘emotional labour’—the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display (Day, 2018). On the other hand, my career as an academic started to thrive. I was nearing the end of my doctoral studies, starting to publish papers in peer-reviewed journals, and tentatively thinking about making the jump from International School teaching to academia. Based on the examples above, surviving and thriving are not just separated temporally, as suggested by DelaRosa’s (2018) pendulum, but are also separated spatially. It can be seen that teachers’ experiences in Chinese Internationalised Schools cannot easily be characterised in terms of surviving (a struggle) or thriving. Rather, teachers’ experiences of struggle and adversity are comprised of numerous smaller domains or projects, some of which are characterised by surviving, and others by thriving. These smaller projects can be harmonious, as illustrated by Sophie, who was able to fuse her role as an artist and an art teacher in projects that complemented each other. Sophie was able to thrive because of her teaching position, which afforded many opportunities to develop social and professional capital by staging art shows. These smaller projects may also be in conflict, as illustrated by Robert’s experiences. His professional development projects were continuously frustrated, but his

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attempts to develop teaching and learning in the classroom were more successful. He did not have much control over what he could do in the school, but he was able to exercise more control outside of it, as illustrated by the significance of his kayak, which was a tangible connection to home and an outlet through which he could regain control. Whilst it would be tempting to say that Robert was unable to thrive, adopting a multimodal approach to experience reveals a more subtle and nuanced picture. He was unable to thrive in the school but was able to gain control outside of it. These peripheral, seemingly unrelated projects, also need to be included as part of teachers’ lived experiences. For teachers like Robert, these side projects become the main source from which they are able to top-up their ‘reserves of resilience’ (Poole, 2020).

7.3

Implications for Research

What does the concept of sur-thrival offer researchers? Firstly, sur-thrival helps to bring into focus the complex and ambivalent nature of teachers’ experiences. If we are to identify and capture this complexity, we need concepts and tools that can do more than just survey the typography of the terrain; these concepts and tools also need to be able to dig beneath the surface. The current tools available to international education researchers—such as the typologies of International School teachers— are not so effective in unpacking complex phenomena, such as how individuals relate differentially to the same experiences (precarity) or environment (Chinese Internationalised Schools). In bringing into focus the ambivalence of teachers’ lived experiences, sur-thrival could be understood as a form of what I describe as ‘ontological, epistemological and axial smudging’, which is based on the idea of the bricoleur and the tenets of the bricolage. The origins of the term bricoleur come from anthropologist LéviStrauss’s work, The Savage Mind (1966) and was intended as a metaphor to assist in the development of a structuralist analysis of myth-making and ritual (Yardley, 2019a). The bricoleur or bricoleuse (though the bricoleur is usually a ‘he’) is someone who draws upon what is at hand due to resource scarcity and who re-combines available materials in a creative manner. The bricoleur can also be understood as a handyman or handywoman who makes use of the tools available to complete a task, something of a ‘Jack of all trades’ or a ‘professional-do-it-yourself man’ (Johnson, 2012).

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Developing Lévi-Strauss’s notion of the bricoleur, Denzin and Lincoln (2000) have applied the idea to the field of qualitative research by seeking to overturn the positivist notion that objective certainty is a possibility in an ever-changing world (Yardley, 2019a). The authors called for an amalgamation of paradigms in the form of interdisciplinarity (Kincheloe, 2001). The term bricolage is now a term that encompasses a diverse collection of methods and theoretical positions used in qualitative inquiry across a wide range of research disciplines, encompassing critical pedagogy, social ecology, biology, and remix studies (Yardley, 2019b, p. 2). At its heart, the bricolage is about ‘avoiding the reductionistic knowledge of externally imposed methods, the bricolage continues its pursuit of complexity by sidestepping monological forms of knowledge’ (Kincheloe, 2005, p. 326). In order to capture this complexity, it is necessary for researchers to draw upon multiple methods and perspectives, even if they are incommensurate, a critique that has been levelled at bricolage (Hammersley, 1999). Bricolage also recognises how power regulates and shapes our lives. By drawing upon a variety of methodological, epistemological, and cultural traditions, bricoleurs make previously repressed features of academic disciplines (Kincheloe, et al., 2018) and the social world (Kaomea, 2019) visible and seek to challenge the hegemonic status quo. The verb ‘smudging’ suggests something irreverent. Rather than showing deference to received ways of knowing and being, the teacherresearcher as bricoleur actively and knowingly defaces the canvas of convention. The act of smudging is a political/oppositional act—by smudging, we not only expose the inherent weakness(es) of seemingly inviolable boundaries of knowledge and relations, but we also create the possibility for new assemblages of being and knowing. Bricolage may begin with deconstruction, but should end in reconstruction, hence why I nested this project in a relational ethics. Ontological smudging problematises the taken-for-granted assumptions about how researchers understand and theorise the lives and experiences of teachers. It calls for the interrogation of conventional notions of experience and reality and the recognition of multiple realities. The notion of sur-thrival as bricolage helps to move International School Teacher research from a positivist stance, where teachers are assumed to embody seemingly universal traits and characteristics, to a phenomenological one, where the significations that teachers ascribe to their experiences

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of precarity become a significant unit of analysis. It has to be acknowledged that there is a certain expediency and necessity in affixing labels to individuals (teachers) and things (International Schools). For example, it is necessary to make generalisations about teachers, particularly in the formulation of policy. However, these labels should not function as ends in themselves, but rather, as means to an end. This argument will be developed below. Epistemological smudging calls for the hybridization of new forms of knowledge based on a polyphony of voices, something which this book adumbrates by privileging the teacher’s voices. Epistemological smudging demands the decentring of entrenched relationships that place the researcher as the knower and the creator of knowledge and the teacher as the known and the receiver of knowledge. In many respects, this hybridised positionality is embodied in my own experiences as a teacher and a researcher. Finally, axial smudging calls for development of new forms of ethics that are able to accommodate a more democratic and radical approach to researching and empowering teachers. Labelling teachers dehumanises and reifies them as objects. Research is done on, rather than with, teachers, whose identities are conferred upon them by researchers. It is necessary, therefore, for researchers to select research designs that pay explicit attention to what forms of knowledge are generated, and how, why, where, and by whom (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016). It is imperative that researchers ‘attend to the ways in which normatively powered dynamics are reinscribed in the roles and relations between researchers and the “researched”, and deliberately work to disrupt or create new roles and relations to achieve transformative ends’ (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016, p. 173). One way to disrupt these normatively powered dynamics is to situate the researcher–teacher dyad within a relational form of ethics (Pollard, 2015), which encourages researchers to ‘come alongside’ (Clandinin, 2016, p. 45) individuals in the research process, treating them as active agents. When we come alongside participants, we not only draw closer to those we research, but we also draw closer to our assumptions and biases. To mix metaphors, we need to develop empathy and respect by walking around in the participants’ shoes, but we must not lose sight of the fact that one foot is always in our own shoe. The implication here is that the researcher can never be detached from the research act but is always implicated in the research process. Involving teachers in the research process can help to give voice to and, thereby, empower

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them; at the same time, coming alongside teachers can lead to a transformation in how researchers think about teachers, their realities, and the kinds of knowledge claims their experiences can make. The approach developed in this book—foregrounding voice, mixing genres, and challenging the researchers’ taken-for-granted authority—is an attempt to put this transformational idea into practice. However, it also needs to be asked whether the entrenched differentials of power that have come to define the researcher–teacher dyad can, in fact, be transformed so easily, if at all. The approach offered in this book is premised on a humanist tradition that underscores the value and agency of human beings. However, such an approach is arguably at odds with the more dehumanised and technocratic technologies of rationality (Ball, 2003) that have come to dominate the neoliberal university through which researchers are interpellated (Althusser, 2008). What cannot be ignored are the wider discursive forces that are always at work— regardless of whether a school is a Chinese Internationalised School, a Traditional International School, or a state school—in shaping teachers’ and researchers’ identities. What is missing from my argument are the vital discursive connectivities—the local (the school) and wider (political) context of the national curriculum—in which teaching and teacher education sit. This is something that future research must address. This book also develops the ‘Accidental’ teacher label (Bailey & Cooker, 2019) by showing that teachers’ experiences within this group are more diverse than the label suggests. Accidental teachers are not just differentiated by their motivation or reasons for becoming International School teachers but also by their experiences of precarity, their ability to adapt interculturally, and their development of resilience. Moreover, this book has shown that notions of interculturality, precarity, and resilience are multifaceted in nature, as teachers relate differentially to the same experiences (working in Chinese Internationalised Schools). Therefore, whilst it is possible to make generalisations (such as, ‘expatriate teachers struggle more than local teachers’), it is necessary to attend to the differences between and within teachers in a particular group in order to get a more nuanced picture of teachers’ lived experiences in Chinese Internationalised Schools. The label of the ‘Accidental’ teacher (or other labels such as the ‘Maverick’ [Hardman, 2001], ‘the adventurer’ [Rey et al., 2020], or the ‘Vampire’ [Caffyn, 2018]), still play a role in International School research, albeit in terms of a heuristic. A heuristic is ‘a mental shortcut

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that allows an individual to make a decision, pass judgment, or solve a problem quickly and with minimal mental effort’ (Psychology Today, 2020) However, whilst heuristics can simplify a complex phenomenon (i.e. different types of International School teachers), they can lead to ‘unjust biases’ (Psychology Today, 2020). This is most keenly seen in Hardman’s labels, such as ‘the Penelope’ and the ‘Maverick’, which are not only rooted in Western-centric assumptions of the individual but are also pejorative in nature. The approach adopted in this book refines and complexifies the International School teacher typologies. In order to differentiate between teachers, it is necessary to move closer and acknowledge individual differences. This points towards a mixed-methods approach for researching International School teachers’ experiences that differentiates between levels of experience. Figure 7.1 offers a visual illustration of how these two approaches relate to each other. Level 1 might be thought of in terms of the macro-level. The International School teacher typologies (Bailey & Cooker, 2019; Caffyn, 2018; Garton, 2000; Hardman, 2001; Rey et al., 2020) or labels, such as ‘The Maverick’ (Hardman, 2001), ‘The Adventurer’ (Rey et al., 2020), or ‘Accidental teachers’ (Bailey & Cooker, 2019) function as a starting point for identifying a particular group of teachers. The following two steps

Fig. 7.1 Multimodal approach to resilience

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zoom in on the level of lived experience and can be further subdivided. Level 2 involves differentiating between teachers’ experiences, which enables researchers to identify the similarities and differences between teachers. Level 3 involves differentiating within teachers’ experiences. This is likely to reveal areas of incongruence or congruence between experiences. It is at this level that we find ‘ontological smudging’. Robert’s interviews, for example, highlighted how he was simultaneously surviving in some areas (unable to implement a Professional Learning Community) but able to thrive in others (socially, and in outdoor pursuits, such as kayaking). Meanwhile, Sophie’s experiences highlighted how she was able to thrive in all of her projects because they were commensurate with the needs and expectations of the school. (This will be developed in the next section in relation to the notion of legitimacy.) This multileveled analysis reveals that differences exist between and within teachers’ experiences. Teachers’ experiences are thus multimodal in nature, comprised of smaller projects that may or may not be in conflict. The final turn involves returning to the label and modifying it in light of the findings from Levels 2 and 3.

7.4

International Schooling

The findings from this book also raise implications for the theorisation of International Schools generally and Chinese Internationalised Schools (and Type C schools) specifically. Before discussing these implications, I return to and develop the notion of ‘institutional legitimacy’ introduced in Chapter 2. The notion of legitimacy is intimately tied up with a school’s ‘primary institutional task’ (Rice, 1958, p. 32), which is defined as ‘the task an organisation was created to perform’ (Rice, 1963, p. 17). This definition would later be augmented to include ‘the task an organisation must perform to survive’. Appropriating Rice’s ideas, Bunnell et al. (2017) asked, ‘What makes a school’s claim to be an International School legitimate?’ (p. 304). In answering this question, the authors proposed that the provision of an international curriculum, such as the IBDP, emerges as the central and dominant characteristic of International Schools and is an International School’s ‘primary institutional task’, the foundation on which its legitimacy rests. Whilst the primary institutional task of Type A and Type B International Schools may be to offer a truly international curriculum, Type C schools, as illustrated by WEST, have a different primary institutional task, which results in alternative claims

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to legitimacy. These alternative claims need to be recognised and understood if we are to understand Chinese Internationalised Schools on their own terms. It can be seen that Bunnell et al. (2017) offer a normative framework that assumes that Type C schools’ claims to legitimacy should be based on the primary institutional task of Type A and Type B International Schools (see Chapter 2 for a summary of these schools). However, it is argued that Type C schools, or ‘new International Schools’, might struggle to establish legitimacy as they do not typically provide an international curriculum, which ‘undermines the legitimacy of their claim to be International Schools’ (Bunnell et al., 2017, p. 306). Whilst this might be true of some Type C schools in China and other territories, this book clearly shows that WEST offered an international curriculum and also received external validation from both Cambridge Examinations and the IBO. Therefore, Type C schools in general, and Chinese Internationalised Schools in particular, should not be understood in relation to traditional models of the International School. This is because these models, as embodied in Hayden and Thompson’s (2013) typology of International Schools and Bunnell et al.’s notion of ‘institutional legitimacy’ (2017), are normative in nature, birthed from an International School landscape that was based on the dominance of the global North. Given the rise of the global South, which is now the main arena of International Schooling (Brummitt & Keeling, 2013), models derived from the global North are not only out of step with the transition of influence and power from global North to global South, but could also be said to perpetuate a neocolonial discourse that relegates schools in the global South to the periphery (Poole, 2020). When positioned in relation to normative models of the International School, Type C schools, like WEST, can only be understood in terms of what they lack. This deficit discourse is clearly seen in the labels used to describe these schools, such as ‘Type C nontraditional international schools’ (Hayden & Thompson, 2013, emphasis added) and ‘non-premium’ schools (Bunnell, 2019, emphasis added). The geographic change from global North to South should not be seen as ‘diluting the distinctiveness of the [International School] model’ (Hallgarten et al., 2015, p. 3) as has been argued. Rather, it should be seen as symptomatic of the reconfiguration of the International School landscape due to ‘creeping globalisation’ (Hayden, 2011) and changing market forces, hence why I have argued previously (Poole, 2020) that

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Type C schools need to be ‘decoupled’ from normative models derived from an International School landscape that is now outdated. This is not to say that Traditional International Schools no longer exist or that they do not collectively form a landscape. The children of the Trans-National Class will always need an education, and Traditional International Schools will continue to provide this type of education. However, by far, the most numerous type of International School is the Type C variety, which is primarily found in the global South. Given this radical shift in geography, Type C schools, like WEST, should be taken on their own terms. They are not incomplete or ‘illiberal’ (International School, 2019) International Schools. They are complete Chinese Internationalised Schools in and of themselves. Therefore, research needs to develop approaches that are emergent rather than a priori in nature, based on the local context in which Chinese Internationalised, and other Type C schools, are situated. Having decoupled Type C schools from normative models of the International School based on Type A and Type B schools, it is possible to view their primary institutional purpose and their claims to legitimacy in a new light. This is in fact a point made by Bunnell et al. (2017, p. 306) who argue that ‘such provision does not underpin the legitimacy of claims by schools of this kind [Type C schools] to be “International Schools”’. Whilst there may be a need for some Type C schools to legitimise themselves in relation to other schools and stakeholders, the notion of legitimacy within the context of China and Chinese Internationalised Schools is more complex in nature. The legitimacy of schools like WEST rests on being accepted as such by their primary stakeholders—the students and parents. The legitimacy of these schools, therefore, rests not on the perception of intrinsic international curricula legitimacy (i.e. the extent to which the school enacts the principles on which the IBDP is premised, such as international-mindedness or intercultural awareness) but rather, on the social and cultural capital embodied by international curricula. To put it bluntly, the Chinese Internationalised School’s primary purpose is to get students into a top 500 university. The reason for this purpose stems largely from the for-profit nature of these schools. In fact, all International Schools, regardless of mission or type, must function as a business and guard against losing ‘social legitimacy’ (Stout, 2015). Surviving in the market is the defining goal of these schools (Gardner-McTaggart, 2020). Survival is dependent upon

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a school’s accrual of ‘reputational capital’ (Hayden, 2011), which is inextricably linked to notions of legitimacy and the primary institutional task. Legitimacy is also localised in nature. There is no overarching, metanarrative of legitimacy, just localised ‘legitimacy games’, to adapt Wittgenstein’s (1953) notion of language games.1 For Bunnell et al. (2017), legitimacy rests on the curriculum, which is taken to be the foundation of the International School. Whilst this may be the case for Type A and Type B International Schools, the nature of Type C schools, like WEST, and the complex contexts in which they are situated calls for a more expansive and multifaceted understanding of legitimacy. Another aspect that complicates the notion of legitimacy in the context of Internationalised Schooling in China is the notion of politics and control. Chinese Internationalised Schools are not as autonomous as Traditional International Schools. As such, there is an additional political/ideological layer of legitimacy that needs to be uncovered. Because Chinese Internationalised Schools are partly regulated by the local government (Young, 2018), they need to conform to certain symbolic and curricular regulations that are typical of local public schools (Gaskell, 2019). This will include symbolic routines, such as the Chinese flag raising ceremony and the singing of the Chinese National Anthem (Poole, 2018), as well as compulsory politics classes during Middle School (Zheng Zhi), which cover moral education and core Socialist values. Chinese Internationalised Schools need to bid for ideological legitimacy in order to remain open. Any discussion of legitimacy needs to take the complexities of the local context into consideration, lest, like the International School teacher, the International School becomes decontextualised and reified according to a normative model. To summarise, researchers should accept Chinese Internationalised Schools on their own terms. To judge them according to models derived from the West or Traditional International Schools is to misread their primary institutional task, which is localised in nature. Secondly, researchers need to situate Chinese Internationalised Schools, and other types of Type C school, within their local contexts rather than in decontextualised notions of the curriculum (i.e. the IBDP). Taking the curriculum as the defining characteristic of an International School assumes that it is immanent in nature, able to transcend time and space. However, the curriculum operates on multiple levels, including the intended—curriculum standards, frameworks, or

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guidelines that outline the curriculum teachers are expected to deliver (Porter & Smithson, 2001)—and the enacted—the specific content as it is taught by teachers and studied by students during the course of learning and instruction (Prevost, et al., 2010). Even in Traditional International Schools, there is likely to be a great deal of contention regarding how the curriculum is perceived and implemented. For example, studies of the IB Learner Profile (Cause, 2009, 2011) have shown that teachers understand the Profile in differing ways, and in some cases (Poole, 2017), actively resist the intended meaning of the Profile’s attributes. Therefore, it is necessary to include the stakeholders’ understanding and implementation of the curriculum as a key characteristic of legitimacy.

7.5

The Emergence of an Internationalised School Landscape in China

In relation to schools like WEST, if a normative model is to be used then it should be derived from Chinese Internationalised Schools and local contexts. A normative model based on the Traditional International School can only result in Chinese Internationalised Schools being positioned in deficit terms. It is beyond the scope of this book to offer a normative framework for Chinese Internationalised Schools— that will be the work of a future book. Such a framework would need to consider Chinese Internationalised Schools’ primary institutional task (to get students into a world-class university) and stakeholders’ perceptions of this task. It would also need to ascertain where an international curriculum fits within this primary task and its function (i.e. To what extent do Chinese Internationalised Schools value the more utopian aspects of the IBDP—international-mindedness—as ends in themselves?). Such a framework would also need to recognise that the Chinese Internationalised School is but one of many types of Internationalised School in China. In addition to Chinese Internationalised Schools, it is possible to identify at least three other types of school that cater to Chinese host country nationals: American-style International Schools, British-style International Schools, and Canadian-style International Schools (Wu & Koh, 2021). These satellite branches reflect a new breed of International School, implanted from overseas in order to meet ‘agglomerated patterns of local demand’ (Kong et al., 2020, p. 2). I briefly summarise these schools next by drawing on Wu and Koh’s study in order to show how these schools

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are similar to and different from the Chinese Internationalised School under investigation in this book. 7.5.1

American-Style International Schools

Schools are commonly accepted to be American-style International Schools as long as they have some connection with the US, but Wu and Koh (2021) found a great deal of diversity across different schools. Whilst some American-style International Schools integrate the Chinese national curriculum with preparatory courses for American standardised examinations needed for US college applications, others import academic programmes developed by US-based education organisations. The authors also found differences in relation to ownership and management. Most American-style International Schools are for-profit. However, some take ‘semi-public forms’ (Wu & Koh, 2021) that are affiliated with Chinese local high schools, with a vast array of operating bodies being involved, such as individual investors and educational institutions. 7.5.2

British-Style International Schools

According to (Wu & Koh, 2021), British-style International Schools in China fall into two types. The first type adopts international curricula from the UK, such as the International General Certificate of Secondary Education (IGCSE) and A’ Levels, which are operated under local brands. The second type includes branch campuses under the same name with UK independent schools. These schools have also been referred to as ‘satellite colleges’ (Bunnell et al., 2020). Their main function is to replicate the success of the original school in the UK within its Chinese counterpart. This type of school serves as a symbolic endorsement of quality and distinction, making parents feel that the branch campus in China would provide the same privileged experiences and opportunities that one would have in the UK (Wu & Koh, 2021). Even though these schools present themselves as ‘true’ British schools, they are nevertheless owned and managed by local Chinese operators. 7.5.3

Canadian-Style International Schools

These schools are known as ‘Canadian off-shore schools’ and are established as joint programmes between Chinese high schools and the

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Canadian provincial ministries of education (Wu & Koh, 2021). Whilst British-style International Schools try to hide their ‘Chineseness’ underneath a UK brand, Canadian offshore schools combine aspects of both Canadian and Chinese education. Because these schools are granted an in-province status, they offer students a fast track to Canadian universities. According to Bunnell (2019), there are eight Canadian offshore schools in China that are authorised to deliver the Ontario Secondary School Diploma. Meanwhile, there are a further 37 schools in China that are designated as ‘British Columbia Offshore Schools’.

7.6 Mapping the Typography of the Internationalised School Landscape in China What distinguishes Chinese Internationalised Schools from the American, British, and Canadian varieties is the fact that they are not modelled on schools derived from Western countries but are fundamentally Chinese in nature. They are also more highly regulated than these other schools. Therefore, it is necessary to understand Chinese Internationalised Schools as just one type of school catering to host country nationals. Clearly, the International School landscape is far more diverse than I first assumed when I proposed the Chinese Internationalised School model (Poole, 2020). As argued in Chapter 2, these schools can also be divided into two types: premium and non-premium (Bunnell, 2019). Premium Chinese Internationalised Schools are similar to British-style International Schools in that they present themselves as being elite in nature (Bunnell et al., 2020); for all intents and purposes, however, they are still Chinese in practice. In contrast, non-premium Chinese Internationalised Schools form what Bunnell (2019) refers to as an ‘underbelly’ (p. 6) that are hard to classify as they offer a fusion of different curricula, mixing the IBDP with the Chinese national curriculum. Although I have argued elsewhere (Poole, 2020) that the term ‘underbelly’ may not necessarily capture the reality of these schools, Bunnell’s distinction nevertheless adds nuance to the International School landscape in China. The diversity of schools in China echoes Bunnell’s (2019, p. 7) observation that ‘we can now make few assumptions about identity, or purpose and task, and this fact epitomises the “New Era”’. Clearly, not all schools that advertise themselves as International Schools should be labelled or

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classified as such. Rather, as Bunnell (2019) argues, what is needed is a more nuanced and stratified approach. Although back in Chapter 2 the International School landscape in China was conceptualised in the singular, the sheer number of schools calling themselves ‘International’ suggests that there are, in fact, multiple International School landscapes. One could be referred to as the International School landscape, which is comprised of Type A and Type B International Schools (Hayden & Thompson, 2013). The other landscape, referred to as the Internationalised School landscape, encompasses the Internationalised Schools mentioned above, namely, American-style, British-style, Canadian-style, and, as argued throughout this book, Chinese Internationalised Schools. This suggests that there exists a continuum of Internationalised Schools for Chinese host country nationals. Rather than trying to make sense of this emerging landscape from the perspective of the International School landscape, which can only lead to incommensurability, it is necessary to develop bespoke tools, concepts, and approaches that reflect the local sociopolitical exigencies and narratives of the Internationalised School landscape. See Fig. 7.2 for a visualization of this continuum. Chinese Internationalised Schools have been placed at one end of the continuum as they are a fundamentally Chinese in nature. Whilst these schools do have international orientations, such as international curricula and expatriate teachers, they are largely monocultural in nature. This blend of national and international orientations has been referred to as ‘cosmopolitan nationalism’ (Maxwell et al., 2020) and ‘recognises how global education trends are always interpreted and taken up in nationallocal contexts where aspects of nationalism persist and reemerge’ (Wright et al., 2021, p. 4). Meanwhile Canadian-style International Schools are placed at the other end of the continuum as they represent a more ‘international’ perspective. Whereas Chinese Internationalised Schools’ integration of national and

Fig. 7.2 Continuum of Internationalised Schools for Chinese host country nationals

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international orientations is mostly rhetorical in nature, Canadian-style International Schools integrate these two orientations in a more substantive manner (Wu & Koh, 2021). The British-style International School has been placed closer to the national side of the continuum, as beneath the façade of exoticism it shares many similarities with Chinese Internationalised Schools, such as being owned by Chinese investors and being run for-profit. American-style International Schools are closer to their Canadian counterparts in terms of their commitment to an international perspective. Although the typography of this Internationalised School landscape has been mapped in relation to China, it could have applicability to other Type C school contexts, particularly in the Global South, such as Vietnam and the Philippines, where such schools are growing in number (Civinini, 2019). Further research is needed to investigate the extent to which teachers’ experiences of precarity and resilience in British-, American- and Canadian-style International Schools are similar or dissimilar to teachers’ experiences in Chinese Internationalised Schools. In what follows, I sketch a number of research trajectories that lay the groundwork for developing tools, approaches, and concepts for mapping and theorising the Internationalised School landscape. 7.6.1

Comparing Teachers’ Experiences of Precarity, Resilience, and Interculturality Across Multiple Chinese Internationalised Schools

So far, the majority of studies that have explored Chinese Internationalised Schools (e.g. Kostogriz & Bonar, 2019; Poole, 2020; Poole & Bunnell, 2020; Young, 2018) have focused on Tier 1 cities, such as Shanghai and Beijing, where expatriates have greater access to the facilities and lifestyles comparable, if not superior, to those found in their home countries. What has yet to be explored are teachers’ experiences in Chinese Internationalised Schools in non-urban (i.e. rural) contexts. Given the lack of access to the comforts of home, it is not unreasonable to assume that expatriate teachers are likely to struggle more in rural contexts. However, empirical evidence is required in order to substantiate this hypothesis. An interesting development in this regard is the work of Jennifer Cutri. Her doctoral thesis explores expatriate teachers’ experiences in a Chinese Internationalised School located in a Tier 3 (developing) city. An interesting development would be to compare

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teachers’ experiences of precarity and resilience in both urban and rural school settings. It is interesting to ask what coping strategies teachers in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities adopt in order to survive. Are they able to thrive in such a situation? As Cutri puts it: A comparative collaboration regarding rural and urban internationalized schools would shed new light upon this topic. When discussing rural/urban, there is the hukou 2 factor which has led to the rise of these schools. However, in terms of admission, hukou is not a requirement, rather the families’ ability to pay the high fees. To distinguish between rural and urban, I would say developed vs developing. The school is surrounded by open fields and empty buildings. The local town is very rural with only three restaurants, although I would say the word restaurant is a stretch, more so a takeaway shop. This is where the teachers are living. The teachers must take a 45-min bus route to the nearest city (J. Cutri, personal communication, May 22, 2020). 7.6.2

Exploring Different Types of Chinese Internationalised Schools

Although Chinese Internationalised Schools can be divided into two types—premium and non-premium—my ongoing research into Chinese Internationalised Schools is starting to suggest that these schools are far more diverse than I first assumed. I have recently identified a type of Chinese Internationalised School that I provisionally call ‘Cambridge Centres’. Technically speaking, these Cambridge Centres are accredited by Cambridge Examinations. However, in terms of facilities they are more like training centres. For example, these centres will typically rent their premises from other educational institutions. They will also be relatively small in nature, ranging from eighty to a few hundred students. These schools have Chinese/expat teachers and Chinese students, and also deliver an international curriculum (i.e. IGCSE and A’ Levels). What differentiates them from the Chinese Internationalised Schools like WEST are their size and relative autonomy from local educational requirements. Therefore, future research would need to explore these types of schools to establish the extent to which they conform to or differ from Chinese Internationalised Schools.

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Developing the Continuum of Internationalised Schools

Future research could also explore the continuities and discontinuities across the four types of Internationalised School in the continuum. The focus would be less on the stakeholders, and more on exploring phenomena such as the curriculum, symbolic routines, the physical space of the school, such as the layout of classrooms, and student demographics.

7.7

Summary of Chapter

This chapter offered the notion of sur-thrival as a promissory concept that could inform future International School research. This concept adds nuance to teachers’ experiences in (Chinese) International Schools by situating the unit of analysis within a phenomenological perspective that foregrounds teachers’ lived experiences. When analysed through the prism of lived experiences, the Chinese Internationalised School experience is seen as both nuanced and contradictory. This book explored this nuance in terms of three interconnected dimensions: the intercultural, the precarious, and the resilient. Not only is the International School teaching experience comprised of these three interconnected dimensions, but there is further nuance within each of these dimensions. Although the small sample size makes generalising problematic, it is possible to make some ‘fuzzy’ generalisations arising out of case study (Bassey, 2001). The intercultural dimension of working in Chinese Internationalised Schools shows that expatriate teachers tend to deploy Western frames of reference in order to understand their schools, which reinforces ethnocentric ways of thinking. Yet, this retrenchment of ethnocentric thinking is also partly attributed to the monocultural nature of the Chinese Internationalised School, which requires teachers to be familiar with Mandarin and with Chinese culture in order to fully understand what is going on. The precarious dimension of working in Chinese Internationalised Schools shows that short-term contracts impact on teachers’ well-being, creating what Standing (2011) refers to as ‘existential insecurity’. Nevertheless, the short-term nature of the teachers’ contracts also enables them to swiftly move from school to school. They may not be dealing with precarity as such, but they are able to survive by exploiting one of its features—short-term contracts. The resilient dimension can be seen in terms of sur-thrival, with teachers surviving in some areas and thriving in others. As mentioned earlier, sur-thrival is both temporal, with

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teachers oscillating between surviving and thriving, as well as spatial, with teachers thriving in some areas and surviving in others. This chapter also explored the notion of ‘legitimacy’, arguing that within the context of Chinese Internationalised Schools, legitimacy is not just related to the curriculum but is also inextricably bound up with issues of politics and parental expectations. This chapter ended by sketching a number of avenues that future research might consider. Although the three dimensions of teacher experience (the intercultural, the precarious, and the resilient) emerged from one Chinese Internationalised School, it is possible that the findings could have significance for other types of Internationalised/International School. It would be interesting to explore the retrenchment of ethnocentric frames of reference in other contexts—for example, Western/Chinese expatriate teachers’ experiences in Internationalised Schools in South America, Southeast Asia, or the Middle East. Is this process of retrenchment unique to the Chinese Internationalised School context, or is it something that occurs when schools are monocultural in nature? It would also be interesting to explore the extent to which short-term contracts are a driver of precarity in other types of International Schools outside of the Asia–Pacific region. Does the cultural context mitigate some forms of precarity (e.g. marginalisation of professional and linguistic identity) when it is in alignment with a teacher’s identity? For example, what kinds of marginalisation occur when, say, Anglo-Western teachers work in Internationalised/International Schools in English-speaking countries?

7.8

Epilogue: International Schooling and Covid-19

This book ends at a significant time for the International School industry due to the impact of Covid-19. Although this book has only made cursory references to the virus as the data was largely collected before the outbreak, it is nevertheless necessary to acknowledge the virus’s impact. It seems that so far, the impact of Covid-19 on the Internationalised School landscape in China is minimal, at least in terms of student recruitment. Given that Traditional International Schools are dependent on a largely transitory student body, who often relocate from country to country, Type C schools would appear to have an inbuilt advantage as they recruit from a student demographic that does not need to cross borders and is in plentiful supply. It is not too much of a stretch to speculate that Type C

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schools will emerge relatively unscathed in the post-Covid-19 landscape due to this inbuilt advantage. One area where the impact of Covid-19 has been felt is teacher recruitment. Data is hard to come by at this stage, but based on my conversations with other teachers, it is possible to make some observations. Many teachers were caught off guard by the pandemic. Taking the long Chinese New Year holiday (2–4 weeks) as an opportunity to return to their home countries, they found themselves unable to return to China as, one by one, countries around the world closed their borders. Those teachers who remained in China scrambled to adapt their teaching to fit an online model. Many teachers outside of China had to deliver classes based on China Standard Time. One former colleague had to deliver classes (for his Chinese students) at 2:00 AM (Greenwich Mean Time), as he found himself in lockdown in the UK. Other teachers found themselves out of a job, as they were unable to fulfill their teaching requirements. Some schools got lucky as many of their staff remained in China. Other schools lost most of their expatriate teaching staff overnight. Once again, Chinese Internationalised Schools were able to deal with this issue as the majority of faculty are host country Chinese nationals. Based on this informal data, the Chinese International School industry will likely emerge from this pandemic in a position of strength, which will only help to aid its growth. All of the suggestions for future research proposed above will need to be situated within a post-Covid-19 world. The notion of sur-thrival, particularly, takes on very different shades of meaning against a backdrop of Covid-19. What does it now mean to survive in International Schools? The insecurity and unpredictability of teachers’ work is likely to be exacerbated by the pandemic (Bailey, 2021). As I write this chapter, in November of 2020, the UK has gone back into a national lockdown. Arguably, it is just a matter of time before China goes the same way. The pandemic is creating new forms of precarity that did not exist before 2020. This precarity includes increased labour insecurity as well as other psychological forms of precarity brought on by living in or living with the threat of lockdown, such as depression, isolation, and uncertainty (Bailey, 2021). At the same time, the move from face-to-face to online or blended learning has brought about some positive outcomes. For example, many teachers have developed digital literacies that under normal circumstances they most likely would never have developed. It also has to be asked what thriving will look like in a post-Covid-19 world. To what extent can teachers thrive when the threat of another lockdown

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is always a possibility? Any discussion of resilience and precarity will need to wrestle with these questions. The notion of sur-thrival seems particularly well-suited to capturing the complex reality of a post Covid-19 International School landscape. I end this book with the words of the participants, who were asked to speculate on what they thought the future held for them. Although the responses were collected about six months before the pandemic, they now represent a simpler, more certain time. And indeed, simpler and more certain times are what the world needs right now. Sophie: I want to share my knowledge or my experience about art. Maybe I cannot save lives—it would be a bit arrogant to say that. But in a way, it’s what I felt when I was a teenager, when I met my high school art teachers and they completely changed my life. Robert: I may stay a bit longer after completing my three-year contract, but for me, the teaching journey is getting near the end. I have no desire for senior admin duties. At this late stage I am focused on doing my best for the students. I will stay in an environment in which I can do what teachers are supposed to do until I retire at age 65. I may do some volunteering after that, which would involve a different set of teaching challenges. Tyron: I’d like to find a school that has the same vision as me. I would like to end up in a school and just stay there and enjoy it and try to maximise a holistic international vision. So yes, let’s see where it takes me. I’m quite positive because I know there are a lot of schools that are like that. Daisy: I am still an internationalising teacher, but I am making progress!

Notes 1. That is, specific areas of our language with their own grammar and relation to other language-games. 2. A household registration system that limits where a person is allowed to live, especially if one is born into a rural hukou. Attempting to change to a more attractive residence or to an urban hukou can be extremely difficult (Juneja, 2017).

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Index

A Accidental teachers, 4–7, 16, 71, 130, 173, 174 Arena, 2, 3, 10, 18, 27, 31–34, 37, 38, 41, 45, 111, 115, 138, 140, 141, 144, 176 Axial smudging, 170

B Bauman, Z., 73 Bourdieu, P., 16, 32, 33, 74, 125, 145, 155 Bricolage, 16, 76, 171 Bricoleur, 170, 171 Bunnell, T., 3–5, 8–10, 16, 18, 19, 27, 28, 30, 32, 34–39, 41, 44, 46, 61, 64–66, 90, 111, 113, 115–117, 120, 123, 138–140, 142, 144, 167, 175–178, 180–183

C Cambridge examinations, 111, 176, 184 Advanced levels (A’ levels), 184 International general certificate in secondary education (IGCSE), 44, 48, 184 Chinese internationalised schools context, 6, 17, 26, 27, 44, 46, 50, 90, 95, 96, 101–104, 131, 168, 177–179, 183, 186 curriculum, 41, 179 non-premium, 30, 45, 51, 181, 184 premium, 30, 45, 181, 184 remedial, 46, 51 students and parents, 44, 177 teachers, 7, 9, 10, 15, 17, 33, 45, 62, 67, 88, 91, 92, 94, 99, 101, 104, 105, 117, 120, 122, 124, 130, 131, 139, 142, 162, 168–170, 173, 183, 185 Cognitive dissonance, 97, 98, 152

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Poole, International Teachers’ Lived Experiences, International and Development Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78686-1

193

194

INDEX

Cosmopolitan capital, 5, 64, 114, 115, 130, 139 Covid-19, 19, 121, 186–188 Critical interculturality, 18, 73, 91–94 Critical psychology, 145 Cultural capital, 44, 66, 100, 102, 132, 155, 177 Cultural chauvinism, 96 Cultural mediator, 102, 104, 126, 149

D Dervin, F., 18, 91–94 Dewey, J., 9, 143 Differential capacities, 16, 144, 145, 162

E Epistemological smudging, 172

F Field, 4, 6, 15, 16, 30–34, 36, 39, 60, 62, 66, 70, 89, 112, 115, 117, 118, 125, 131, 138–140, 171, 184

G Gao Kao, 77, 78 Global middle class (GMC), 5, 16, 18, 46, 112, 114, 115, 122, 127, 130, 132, 139, 168 Guanxi, 155

H Hayden, M., 2–4, 19, 25, 27–30, 35, 38, 40, 44, 61, 62, 64, 68–70, 88, 90, 116, 117, 167, 176, 178, 182

I Identity liquid, 73, 93–95, 103, 105 postmodern accounts of, 73 Intercultural competence, 90, 91 Interculturality, 15, 90, 91, 104, 173 critical, 15, 18, 73, 91–94 ethnocentricism, 92, 93 International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme (IBDP), 4, 26, 28, 41, 42, 45, 48–51, 62, 87, 89, 97, 102, 109–111, 115, 118, 123, 124, 128, 131, 175, 177–179, 181 curriculum, 41, 42, 123, 175, 178 learner profile, 97, 131 International school arena, 34, 37, 138, 144, 176 context, 15, 17, 25, 31, 36, 38, 52, 66, 90, 131, 138–140, 178, 186 definitions, 17, 25–28, 30, 35, 37 field, 4, 30, 32–34, 36, 39, 63, 66, 70, 112, 115, 139 landscape, 19, 25, 27, 30, 34–37, 52, 176, 177, 181, 182, 188 type A traditional, 28, 40 type B ideological, 28 type C non-traditional, 2, 25, 28, 30, 41, 176 type D illiberal, 38, 39 International school teachers country of origin, 4 motivations for relocating overseas, 52, 60 numbers, 17, 52, 61 typologies, 5, 15, 17, 30, 52, 60, 61, 67, 70, 71, 94, 141, 170 International school teacher typologies, 68, 93, 94, 141, 174 Interviews, 4, 7, 10–15, 19, 59, 76, 77, 89, 90, 94–96, 98, 99, 103,

INDEX

104, 111, 112, 116, 119, 121, 126, 127, 129, 139, 146, 152, 156, 167, 175

L Labelling, 73, 74, 172 Legitimacy, 19, 26, 35, 37, 38, 104, 116, 128, 141, 167, 175–179, 186 Lived experiences, 3–13, 16–18, 26, 60, 71–74, 76, 77, 88, 92, 94, 99, 105, 112, 122, 130, 132, 139, 142, 143, 170, 173, 175, 185

M Monocultural, 18, 89, 90, 104, 182, 185, 186

N Narrative inquiry, 16 Negative discourse of international schooling, 8, 34

O Ontological smudging, 144, 175

P Paradoxical privilege, 67 Perezhivanie, 8, 9, 130, 132, 143–145, 148, 149, 162, 163 Performativity, 65, 66, 113, 116, 120, 132, 156, 169 Phenomenological interviewing, 11 Polyphony, 6, 7, 172 Positive discourse of international schooling, 8 Positive psychology, 16, 18, 141, 145

195

Precariat, the, 5, 16, 18, 112, 115, 132, 139, 168 Precarity dismissal, 5, 113, 132 marginalisation of professional identity, 6, 32 micro-politics, 4, 5, 32, 114, 125 short-term contracts, 3, 5, 111, 113, 123, 125, 130, 132, 147, 185, 186

R Relational ethics, 13, 14, 75–77, 171 Resilience capital, 5, 6, 10, 88, 130, 139, 141, 144, 168 existential work, 142 experiencing, 141, 143 multimodal approach, 174 reserves of, 2, 111, 141, 144, 145, 161, 162, 170 resource caravans, 141, 142, 162

S Segmented incorporation, 50 Social capital, 100, 112, 115, 122, 132, 145, 155 Solid modernity, 93 Sur-thrival, 10, 18, 19, 88, 130, 132, 137, 141, 163, 167, 168, 170, 171, 185, 187, 188 Su zhi jiao yu, 48

V Voice, 4, 7, 11, 12, 14, 15, 17, 72–74, 76, 77, 172, 173 Vygotsky, L.S., 8, 9

196

INDEX

Y Young, N.A., 6, 36, 41, 44, 46, 50, 51, 120, 178, 183

Z Zhong Kao, 41, 48