Teaching Abroad

Teacher participation in cross-cultural experiences is often associated with the broadening of perspectives and increased intercultural sensitivity. While these qualities provide an overarching and important framework for intercultural development, they remain highly abstract. What exactly do we mean when we refer to these qualities? And in what ways, if any, do they translate into the classroom or school setting? Drawing on interviews from thirty Anglophone educators working in overseas international schools, this article focuses on links between broad-based changes in perspective and concrete changes in professional practice. Findings highlight an important relationship between personal and professional transformation, with the most noteworthy instructional changes emerging in the areas of language, communication style and religious/gender considerations. Most importantly, data from the study illustrate that the prolonged cross-cultural experience was not limited to changes in general disposition but had direct implications on the professional practice of participating educators.

This paper aims to determine the problems and gains of Turkish teachers employed in Europe. The research was designed in the survey model and the basic qualitative approach. The sample group of the study consists of 210 Turkish teachers who work in Germany, France, England, and Switzerland. The data were collected by an open-ended survey and analysed by the descriptive analysis method. The results revealed that teachers experienced adaptation problems in language and communication, housing, a feeling of loneliness, prejudices, a new educational environment, and cultural diversity. Besides, they had social problems, family affairs, relationships with associations, health, and economic issues. Furthermore, teachers had professional, personal, social, and financial gains.

I reviewed literature on teaching abroad to increase global competencies among pre-service teachers, seeking specifically papers which evaluated programmatic models embedded in universities or consortiums. I found a relative lack of publications and, of them, a lack of critical voices speaking to aspects of programming which could be approved, or to the externalities of such programs. I close by posing several questions for scholars working in and around this topic.

This article examines the working lives of creative-class professionals in the Global South using two case studies: university educators and museum professionals employed in Qatar. A small country on the Arabian Peninsula, Qatar is an ideal site for the study of professionals in a developing yet authoritarian nation. We argue that the cultural attributes of the professorial and curatorial communities, including creativity, autonomy, and intellectual freedom, are in conflict with the authoritarian political context, giving rise to professional dissonance. Professional dissonance occurs when the norms, values, and ideas embraced by a particular occupational group conflict with the norms, values, and ideas in the settings in which they work. To cope, university educators and museum professionals turn to five strategies—resistance, subversion, submission, conversion, and exit—although variations in the content and institutional structures of their work lead each group to deploy them in somewhat different ways. These strategies may be replicated in other contexts of high professional dissonance, caused by authoritari-anism or otherwise.

This paper looks at how personal struggles associated with the overseas setting caused changes in the intercultural perspective of 30 Anglophone educators working in international schools. Situated within a social constructivist framework, interview methods were utilised to build a collective narrative shared by educators. Findings reveal that although prolonged exposure to new cultural norms elicited changes in intercultural perspective, these changes were not related to traditional notions of cultural immersion but – rather paradoxically – to educators' inability to integrate into the host cultures. Obstacles educators faced while abroad included a lack of language proficiency, living in countries that were sometimes antithetical to Western ideals and discriminatory practices based on national and/or race affiliation.

This study explored the characteristics of the international educator through a qualitative analysis of initial decisions to teach abroad. Using interview data from thirty Anglophone educators based across three international schools in China and the Netherlands, the investigation looked beyond surface motives to explore the deeper values which propelled educators overseas. Dominant characteristics included a high value ascribed to travel, as well as a high value ascribed to change and/or risk. How international educators came to ascribe these values was often explained through critical incidents during their formative or young adult years. Analysis of critical incidents suggest that early or repeated exposure to travel, including study abroad experiences, contribute significantly to the development of predispositions towards international employment.