The Preparation of Teachers of English as an Additional Language around the World

This book fills a critical gap in a neglected area in current educational research: international teacher education. The chapters focus on the preparation of teachers of English as an additional language (EAL) in established teacher education programs in 11 countries.

Teacher Identity under Reconstruction: Positional Analysis of Negotiations in an International Teacher Education Programme Negotiations in an International Teacher Education Programme

This paper explores the international learning experiences of Indonesian teachers participating in a Finnish master’s degree programme as an identity reconstruction process. We study the participants’ experiences based on dialogical identity construction to explore the positioning and repositioning occurring during an international learning experience. Given the conception of this experience as a boundary experience, repositioning is a way to create continuity and support the multiplicity of identity. From the narrative analysis of the participants' stories about the programme, we found that the participants' repositioning during the programme involved negotiation with temporality, sociality and spatiality. Throughout this process, the participants' understanding of their identities and practices evolved. The post-conflict and post-disaster context in Aceh, Indonesia, manifests itself through a unique constellation of positionings and stimulates new understandings of its impact on teaching and learning processes. This study contributes to understanding the international teacher programme as a repositioning process for teacher identity reconstruction that supports local meanings and has practical consequences.

Roles, relationships and emotions: Student teachers’ understanding of feedback as interpersonal

This paper reports the findings of a small-scale study seeking to investigate how student teachers, within a three-year undergraduate programme, understand feedback. Feedback has been central to debates and discussion in the assessment literature in recent years. Hence, in this paper, feedback is positioned within the often-contradictory discourses of assessment, including perspectives on student and teacher feedback. The study focused on two first year undergraduate student teachers at a small university in England and considered the relationships between their understanding of feedback as a student, their understanding of feedback as an emerging teacher, and the key influences shaping these understandings. A phenomenological case study methodology was employed with interviews as the prime method of data collection. Themes emerged as part of an Nvivo analysis, including emotional responses, relationships and dialogue, all of which appear to have impacted on the students’ conceptual understanding of feedback as indelibly shaped by its interpersonal and affective, rather than purely cognitive or ideational, dimensions. The paper therefore seeks to contribute to the wider feedback discourse by offering an analysis of empirical data. Although situated within English teacher education, there are tentative conclusions that are applicable to international teacher education and as well as higher education more generally.

International Teacher Education Network

This chapter presents an overview of the design and development of a research project aimed at setting the foundation of an international teacher education network to enhance teacher education from a transversal and interdisciplinary perspective. The network partnership explores the impact of applied educational technology, including digital and transmedia storytelling or augmented reality, to upgrade teacher education. This approach provides tailored training to equip lecturers, teacher trainers, pre- and in-service K-12 teachers, and students with specific competencies, skills, and strategies in instruction and assessment. This training also intends to raise their awareness of educational, social, sustainability, and environmental challenges. Within this framework, educational technology, language, and narrative genres become the articulatory axis of teaching and learning within bilingual and intercultural education contexts. This chapter also serves to define the scope and rationale for the edited volume.

Be(com)ing and the International Teacher

Despite the growth of international schools and the increasing demands for teachers, there remains a dearth of knowledge regarding teachers and their development of praxis within an international setting. Within the study, praxis is understood as the entire skills, knowledge and experience teachers draw upon when developing their work – a process grounded in reflexivity. Praxis moved the static understanding of doing work, by enabling work and practitioner as an ongoing process of becoming. The current study seeks to shed some light into this space. In particular, it aims to explore why and how secondary school teachers become ‘international', and the impact such development has on their praxis. It also seeks to explore how teachers, as front-line workers, position themselves within the discourse surrounding international schools as artificers of a global elite driven by a Western, globalist agenda. An emergent theme is the centrality the International Baccalaureate plays for international teachers.

Mentoring, Role Modeling, and Acculturation: Exploring International Teacher Narratives to Inform Supervisory Practices

As teacher shortages continue in countries worldwide, international teachers may be recruited from other countries to help fill critical teacher vacancies, particularly in high-need subject areas such as mathematics and science. International teachers are a unique group who have specific needs, which could be addressed through school administrators’ supervisory practices. To understand international teacher needs, a review of the literature from 2009 to 2019 was completed to examine the extent to which dimensions of mentoring, role modeling, and acculturation were represented in international teacher narratives in peer-reviewed journals. In the course of the review, a fourth dimension of principals and ITs was found in the literature and explored. Findings from the literature review pointed to four themes related to the three identified dimensions: (a) a need for induction, (b) role modeling as collegial support, (c) international teacher acculturation issues, and (d) principal perspectives of ITs. The international teacher themes discovered through this review of the literature may help to inform the supervisory practices of school administrators as they strive to ensure positive outcomes for international teachers.