EDDi XXVII
November 2020
Dear subscribers
Are you an ‘Accidental Teacher’, a ‘Lifestyle Teacher’ or an ‘Idealist’. Perhaps you are a ‘Newbie’ or one of the ‘Curious’.
Well, in this week’s EDDi you can find out.
Our Lead Writer, Dr Stephen Whitehead, outlines three recent pieces of research which deal with teacher ‘types’. If you are an international schoolteacher you may well find yourself listed and examined in one of the summaries. Read below to discover your ‘type’.
We also have a single traditional EDDi digest. This time it’s a case study:
NEGOTIATING IMAGINED COMMUNITY IN NATIONAL CURRICULUM: THE TAIWANESE CASE
Click the link to read our summary of this fascinating clash of curriculum and culture.
Finally, we are delighted to report that International Schooling: The Teachers’ Guide (2020) is now available via Book Depository. You can purchase the book via:
Amazon (UK)
Amazon (US)
Barnes & Noble
Book Depository
Books A Million
You can also buy via Amazon in most countries; just search for 'International Schooling’ and click on the book’s (very cool…at least we think so) cover:
As ever, thanks for subscribing and happy reading.
EDDi
INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL TEACHERS: WHICH TYPE ARE YOU?
There are a number of words which arguably define the early 21st century. For example, covid, globalisation, MeToo, popularism, global warming, toxic.
But the one which stands out for EDDi is – IDENTITY.
Just a few decades ago, ‘class’ was the word which most readily tripped off sociologists’ tongues. Today, that focus on class has largely been replaced by a focus on identity.
Similarly, where once world politics was a blatant and often brutal battle between communism and capitalism, that conflict has largely disappeared to be replaced by a battle between identities (white, black, gender, race, BAME, straight, LGBT, religious, ethnic).
Whereas class association and belonging can readily be compartmentalised into a limited number of discrete categories, how to categorise and classify something as complex, unique, variable, contingent and changeable as identity?
Well, as ever, sociologists have the answer. Typologies.
If stuck for a way of explaining distinctive patterns in human behaviour, simply roll-out the good old list.
And I admit to doing precisely that in some of my own (mainstream) writings: The Many Faces of Men (27 different types in my book, published in 2004); my co-authored 16 Faces of Women (2011). I’ve even come up with three global types of masculinity: toxic, progressive and collapsed. To learn more about modern masculinities read this – as you’ll discover, typologies might be simple descriptors but they can also reveal a lot.
My most recent excursion into listing humans is here.
But more on that later.
Before we get into some of the different types of international schoolteacher, perhaps we need to ask ourselves what value or use are such typologies?
Typologies: Useful Tool or Over Simplistic Trap?
As a sociologist I’ve long recognised that identity is work in progress, not a fixed outcome.
Who we are today will be slightly different to who we are in the not too distant future, and greatly different from who we are in, say, 30-year’s time.
We are in constant flux, and the direction of our altering sense of self may not always be apparent to us in the moment.
One needs only to reflect back on one’s own past self to recognise the truth in that.
For example, can you recognise your teenage self, or the self who first experienced romantic love? What about the self who first stood in front of a babbling cohort of students, or interviewed for its first teaching post?
The whole essence if not point of human existence is evolution, both as a species and as an individual. And if nothing else evolution demands adaptation and adaption is simply change that has reacted to or responded to circumstance, environment, learning, experience.
But it is also the case that we can distinguish patterns within the human species. Patterns of behaviour, motivation, communication, reaction, and character. You will no doubt be able to spot such patterns in your own circle of friends, in your work colleagues, and most definitely in your students. This is not to suggest such patterns are absolute and pre-determined, but these patterns exist and therefore it is helpful to recognise them and understand them because if we can recognise the primary patterns then it helps us to identify possibilities and potential within an individual. It enables us to better predict a person’s reactions, responses, expectations and adapt our own behaviour accordingly.
My approach to any sort of human listing is, therefore, to place the list before the individual. In other words, the patterns of human behaviour are recognisable, discrete and primary. But which individuals’ slot into which categories only the observer can suggest. Or maybe only the individual themselves really knows? Moreover, people may well move from one category to the next over a period of time. In fact, my research as a sociologist suggests that for a great many of us, migration from type to type is pretty much inevitable, as is having an identify which straddles two or more types.
So, don’t go looking for nuance when you explore human typologies, because nuance is not what these lists are all about. Expect to see macro patterns which stand out for you, which are readily recognisable, and which resonate with your own experience.
Of course, there is an inherent risk in all typologies and that is the stereotype.
If you imagine a person slots into a particular category because they are gay, lesbian, male, female, black, white, brown, Asian, European, American, Arab, Jew or Buddhist, or of a particular age, then you are falling into a trap of your own making.
Who are the International School Teachers?
All of the above said, it has certainly become more acceptable for sociologists to use typologies when exploring human identity, and not just in mainstream writings. A recent example is the 2019 paper by Bailey and Cooker, entitled ‘Exploring Teacher Identity in International Schools: Key Concepts for Research’.
If you are an international schoolteacher then you may well find your own identity listed and examined in their paper, based on interviews with non-qualified teachers.
During the past decade international schooling has become a global success story, albeit currently curtailed by Covid-19. In 2000 there were just a few thousand international school teachers. At the end of last year there were well over half a million. These teachers may all do a similar job, but they most definitely are not all alike.
So, what patterns of international schoolteacher identity do the researchers suggest we can or should look out for? This is not an easy question to answer. In fact, just a few years ago we couldn’t have answered it at all.
Firstly, back in the early part of this century there were relatively few international schoolteachers and they were thinly spread all over the world. Secondly, and related to the first point, few if any sociologists and psychologists recognised the value of undertaking research into international schools and teacher identity.
Fortunately, that situation is now changing, albeit slowly.
“International school teachers remain an under-researched group in the field of international education. Not only is there a paucity of data examining teachers’ work in international schools, but little has been said about the realities of working in international schools, or about who became international school teachers and why. Previous attempts to develop typologies of international school teachers have been critiqued for being ‘insufficiently nuanced to capture this group’s motivations and identities” (Poole, 2020, p. 1-2)
As I say, we are all drawn to listings, especially of our fellow humans, just don’t expect any single listing or typology of human identity to be the definitive answer to the complexity of human behaviour.
If only it were that simple!
It is with that proviso in mind that I now explore three separate typologies of international school teacher identity. The first is offered by Bailey and Cooker (2019), the second by Poole (2020) and the third by myself and co-researcher/writer, Dr Denry Machin in our newly published book: International Schooling: The Teachers’ Guide (2020).
Bailey and Cooker’s Typology
1. The Accidental Teacher: This describes a teacher who enters the world of international teaching almost by happenstance. For example, they may have taken a holiday in a sunny clime and decided to stay, finding that the only way to make a living is to teach English. These teachers tend to be non-qualified, though many do get qualified at a later date, not least in order to secure a teaching licence in their newly adopted country. The Accidental Teacher didn’t choose the teaching profession as a vocation, but came to teaching in order to fund a particular lifestyle or as an ‘incidental result of other events in their life’.
2. The Third Culture Teacher: This type of teacher is first and foremost an international schoolteacher. Their primary association is with this rather nomadic professional identity. They will have QTS in their home country but not see themselves as professional teachers in their home country. They are professional global teachers, moving from school to school, country to country. This type of teacher has fully and willingly embraced the nomadic lifestyle of the professional international school teacher and is most unlikely ever to return to their ‘home’ country.
3. The Lifestyle Teacher: This teacher is in the profession primarily in order to fund their lifestyle and enable travel to places and regions they couldn’t otherwise visit. Being an international schoolteacher gives them a professional identity which is inherently mobile and for many such teachers that mobility is the reason they are doing the job.
4. The Ideological Teacher: Their primary motivation is to change the world, preferably for the better. They see themselves as liberal, open-minded, and with a clear and unshakable belief in the benefits of international mindedness, globalisation, internationalism, and multiculturalism. Yes, they may be a little idealistic but if an international schoolteacher cannot be idealistic then who can?
5. The Local Teacher: They have landed in a spot somewhere on the planet and are determined to remain there until that inevitable retirement party. They may well have married a local and had a family. They are, therefore, very firmly rooted, pretty much content, and the teacher most likely to become a permanent fixture of the school in which they spend most of their professional life.
As you can already see, while the list offers some insight into international schoolteacher motivations, using it to examine identity can be a challenge. Even within these five types one can see where there might be overlap. For example, who is to say an ‘accidental teacher’ cannot become (or might also be) an ‘ideological’ one?
Not surprisingly, the criticism which always gets wheeled out where typologies are concerned is that they lack nuance. My answer to that is to point you in the direction of in-depth psychoanalytical and sociological theories. In other words, if you are looking for an explanation of identity in all its messy and unpredictable manifestations then you are better off reading Foucault or Lacan.
Bailey and Cooker are, of course, only too well aware of the weaknesses of typologies, so what they also offer as a sort of additional identity filter, is to link their listing with Hayden and Thompson’s (2013) typology of international schools:
Type A: Traditional international schools (originally designed to cater for the children of globally mobile expats)
Type B: Ideological schools (serving an ideological purpose, e.g. United World Colleges)
Type C: Non-traditional international schools (market-orientated, corporate operations)
The suggestion is that certain types of teacher are likely to be attracted to those types of school which mirror or substantiate their inherent belief system, motivation, raison d’etre. Thus, by connecting a particular type of teacher with a particular type of school one gets a little closer to recognising the way in which organisational structures influence identity construction.
Which leads us to Adam Poole’s 2020 paper ‘Constructing Teacher identity from Lived Experience: A Fresh Conceptual Framework’ (PDF Available).
Adam Poole’s Typology
Actually, Poole doesn’t offer a typology at all.
What he does is argue that a more postmodern (fluid and contingent) approach needs to be taken when looking at teacher identity. He bases his argument on his doctoral research on teacher’s experiences of working in China. For this 2020 paper, he offers one case study from this larger research – Tyron, a South African teacher in his late forties. What emerges are a range of influences and factors, all of which led to Tyron eventually working in a Chinese internationalised school in Shanghai.
These include:
1. Experiences of school: Tyron’s experiences of school in South Africa in the 1980s are presented as playing a significant role in shaping his identity as an international schoolteacher. (“I was a naughty student, but good naughty”)
2. Role of significant actors: Tyron’s experiences of authoritarian education especially reflected in the character of his childhood school headmaster (“he was an awful man”).
3. Experiences of university: Tyron is released from oppressive compulsory education into the more liberal and freer environment of university. (“I found the difference between school and university so huge that it was actually difficult for me”)
Having established Tyron’s educational and personal background, Poole then looks more closely at Tyron’s reasons for becoming a teacher
1. Parental influence: “I was actually surprised when my parents told me “do you know you will make a good teacher.”
2. Character and Personality: People told me that I had the personality to be a good teacher.”
So, it is less the case that Tyron came to the conclusion himself that he could be a teacher, but more that he was heavily influenced by how others saw him and the supportive comments they made about his personality and character.
What brought Tyron to China?
1. Global economic exile: In contrast to the more positive tone of his teacher epiphany narrative, the reality behind Tyron leaving South Africa and ending up teaching in China, is money. (“sometimes I feel like I’m a mercenary now, like a mercenary soldier. Whoever pays me well, I will go there. It doesn’t matter where.”)
“Unable to find employment in his own country, due to the complex socio-political consequences of Apartheid, such as labour laws like Affirmative Action, Tyron has become in his own words “unemployable in my own country’, which has forced him into the global precariat – that is, into a state of permanent exile and uncertainty as an economic global migrant.” (Poole, 2020, p. 11)
In that respect, Tyron appears to be an ‘escapee’ (see the final typology below) from economic hardship, from a career cul-de-sac. He doesn’t choose global exile, global exile chooses him.
Which raises the question as to what extent Tyron is an ‘international’ schoolteacher?
Recognising this, Poole critiques Tyron’s cross-cultural experiences as an international schoolteacher. What emerges are areas of tension between teacher identity, curriculum and school identity. (“I have wondered many times are we – they say we are – a Chinese school with a touch of international (laughs). But what is that? What is international? They first said to us we have an international curriculum. We didn’t. The Principal eventually said we have to have a Chinese curriculum ‘with a touch of international in it.’)
Tyron is no passive actor in the teaching professional – from my experience of teachers not many are. So, when it comes to actually trying to define the sort of international teacher Tyron is, it becomes a little tricky, as Poole acknowledges.
In the narrative revealed in the paper, Tyron does not explicitly refer to himself as an international school teacher. Rather, he draws upon the Learner Profile and its attributes as a discourse for articulating an international teacher identity.
I think I am an international school teacher. If you think about it, I am bringing something to the table, something different, something from the southern tip of Africa, my experiences, what I think about how a lesson should be taught. So, I think I am an international teacher in that sense, definitely.”
Tyron is an international schoolteacher, even though this identity exists tenuously in his subconscious. In contrast, he presents himself in an unambiguous way when describing his ‘mercenary’ identity and his ‘global exile’.
Thoughts on Identity and Typologies in International Education
Over the years I have met many Tyron’s in international education and in international schooling.
Indeed, I am one myself. So are you.
We are identical to Tyron in that we each have a unique and interesting story to tell. Tyron got to tell his to Adam Poole, who dutifully made it public in the Journal of Research into International Education.
The vast majority of international school teachers never get to tell their story but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a fascinating story to tell.
And each story is different.
Different history, experiences, background, influences. Some events in our story may be planned but most are not. Life is game of chess and none of us are making the moves ourselves. Well, not most of the time.
Don’t ask me to speculate how we get from there to here, I’ve no idea. I’m still trying to work it out for my own life experience. Each year I live merely leaves me more amazed at the way in which fortune and fate interact to produce the individual, the self.
So how do we overlay this complexity with typologies? Indeed, should we even try?
I think we can, just so long as we also recognise that no single typology or list of human types can ever get below the surface. Like an iceberg, we maybe get to see a fifth of what is real, the important four-fifths being invisible to us. Indeed, few of us really know our selves so what chance does an academic researcher have in understanding what makes us tick?
Also, one of the intriguing aspects of identity is the way in which we can deny that in ourselves which otherwise appears evident to everyone else.
For example, Tyron doesn’t appear comfortable with the international teacher identity which is tied to his professionalism, working life, lifestyle. I have met many managers and leaders in organisations, including international schools, who likewise find their given title to be at odds with their sense of self, their self-perception.
Dealing with this ambiguity, if one can ever deal with it, can take a lot of emotional energy.
Which is where typologies might be able to help.
They do so by giving us a readily accessible starting point for examining ourselves. Sure, they only reveal a portion but maybe that portion is revealing in itself and enough to get us asking questions about where we are, where we came from, and maybe where we are heading.
Machin and Whitehead’s International School Teacher Typology
Which brings me to the latest teacher typology to make the rounds of international education – the typology developed by myself and my EDDi colleague, Dr Denry Machin.
This typology comes from our recently published book: ‘International Schooling: A Teacher’s Guide’.
In the book we identify six predominant types of (overseas) international school job applicant:
The Newbee: Western, unqualified, and still at university, or perhaps in a gap year. The world of international travel and adventure beckons brightly, and in order to fund that lifestyle the Newbee most likely works in one of the many thousands of English language centres, kindergartens and childcare centres around the world which offer both part-time and full-time jobs to young Western adults. These jobs invariably last no longer than a year, though they can be extended. Those who get the teaching bug (or who don’t shake the travel bug) will look to international schools for more permanent, more secure employment. If they do then they’ll need to get qualified (See Chapter 9).
The Curious: Likely a UK/USA/Canada/Australia-based early career teacher. She/he has already made a commitment to a career in education, but is only flirting with the idea of leaving the security of their state education system (and the security of their friends and family) to try their hand in an international school. They’ll be fully qualified, with some teaching experience under their belts. The big issue for the ‘curious’ is risk: Do they leave behind the relative security of state education in exchange for the adventure of a lifetime? Typically aged between 23 and 30, at least they know they can always return.
The Escapee: This person has established their professional identity as a state (or independent) schoolteacher and has plenty of experience, probably in more than one school. In fact, it is their extensive experience of (Western) education – its endless demands, restrictions, expectations, inspections, and stresses – which has turned this previously enthusiastic teacher into a potentially desperate escapee. Years ago, dropping everything to work in an international school was considered rather unusual. Nowadays, it is considered a sensible career option, especially by disillusioned state schoolteachers.
The Old Hand: Every international school has its quota of ‘old hands’; Western qualified teachers who have been there, done that, and have the t-shirts and metaphoric scars to prove it. They long ago fled their Western homeland and have since taken root in countries who names they once could not even spell, never mind find on a map. Some settle in just one spot, one school, and never move. Others are more nomadic.
The Adoptee: The long-time expat. Will have lived in-country for some time, years perhaps, has assimilated into the lifestyle and adopted the country as her/his own. Some will speak the local language fluently, many will be married to a local national. They’ll work in a support role; maybe as sports coach, a learning or English support teacher, or in an administrative position. Likely has experience of work outside of education. Studying for, or qualified with, a PGCEi or equivalent (discussed in the book) these teachers recognise the rewards of international school teaching (especially in better quality schools) and want in.
The Trailing Spouse: Trailing, but not reluctantly, this person hitches a ride into the world of international schooling with their partner leading the way. Their partner being a fully qualified and experienced teacher. Some couples also have children in tow. Such couples and families now make up a sizeable percentage of the international school community. The trailing spouse may not end up with a teaching job (unless they embark on a PGCEi) but they could very well undertake an administrative role. The couple will work together in the same school, enjoy similar benefits and conditions (something we cover in the book) and raise any children as Third Culture Kids (also covered in the book).
While it is impossible to pigeon-hole all international schoolteacher, each one these is sprinkled with the dust of adventure. Perhaps not quite Indiana Jones but neither a homely Hobbit. Indeed, if you are the sort of person who prefers the comfort of the familiar and whose idea of cultural experimentation is a Chinese take-away, then forget working in an international school.
Denry and I are fairly confident that if you are an international schoolteacher reading this, then you’ll see yourself in one of these six categories (or in the others above).
If not, please let us know.
We’ll try and ensure your identity is included in any updated typology!
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