Abstract
The arena of education known as ‘international schooling’ has grown enormously, from a body of 2,500 schools in 2000 to almost 13,500 by 2022. By 2019, China had emerged as having the most schools delivering a non-national curriculum in English outside of an English-speaking nation. The arena continues to be dominated by British and North American educators. One enduring aspect of workplace reality is the short-term contract, normally of between two and three years. The field is acknowledged to be inherently precarious and insecure, with high levels of turnover, and a bleak ‘negative’ lens of imagination has always persisted. This paper focuses attention on the lived experiences of expatriate teachers among the growing body of ‘non-traditional international schools’ that might be best termed ‘Chinese Internationalised Schools’. Through in-depth phenomenological interviewing of six expatriate teachers, the reality of ‘short-termism’ was examined. Whilst the findings highlighted, as expected, the negative aspects of short-term employment, the findings also identify many positive outcomes. These include opportunities for developing resilience, agency, and reinvention. This offers scope for a new vision, based upon the accumulation of ‘resilience’, which helps to explain the continuous growth of the arena despite the presence of precarity.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 590-609 |
Number of pages | 20 |
Journal | Beijing International Review of Education |
Volume | 4 |
Issue number | 4 |
Early online date | 3 Mar 2023 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 31 Mar 2023 |
Funding
Supported by Chinese Society of Education (cse) Research Foundation (2021010104wt2)
Keywords
- China
- international school teachers
- international schools
- precarity
- resilience
- short-term contracts
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous)
- History
- Philosophy
- Education