Developing the notion of teaching in ‘International Schools’ as precarious: Towards a more nuanced approach based upon ‘transition capital’

This paper is a response to a recently published article in this journal entitled ‘Precarious privilege: personal debt, lifestyle aspirations and mobility among international school teachers’ by Rey, Bolay and Gez (2020). In this follow-up paper, we take the notion of ‘precarious privilege’ as the starting point for theorising an emerging concept derived from our recent research into teachers’ experiences of turnover in the field of International Schooling. We call this concept ‘transition capital’, which imagines the social reality of being a teacher in International Schools as being a mixture of both the negative and positive. We believe that the concept of ‘transition capital’ complements the notion of ‘precarious privilege’ by recognising the paradoxical nature of the teacher experience. It also attempts to go beyond it by showing how the positive and the negative are dialectical in nature. We also seek to flesh out the burgeoning concept of ‘transition capital’ by explaining its origins in the notion of ‘resilience capital’ and sketching a future research agenda. This agenda includes exploring the ‘coping strategies’ of teachers and focusing more on teacher attrition rates and longevity in the field, rather than merely turnover, which we argue should be viewed as ‘transition.’