International Education Teachers’ Experiences as an Educational Precariat in China

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to extend Bunnell’s (2016) thesis that international education teachers (IETs) are forming a ‘global educational precariat’. The paper draws upon interview data from a larger study of international teachers in two international schools in Shanghai, China. In order to substantiate and develop Bunnell’s thesis, narrative inquiry was employed as a guiding methodology, which ensured that data analysis remained rooted in the participants’ lived experience but also allowed for triangulation, thereby enhancing validity. Findings confirm Bunnell’s thesis by highlighting a lack of agency, financial insecurity, and the marginalisation of professional identities as common experiences of IET precarity. The findings also challenge the notion of a global educational precariat by arguing that it may be more appropriate to conceptualise IETs in terms of a localised educational precariat rather than a global class in and of itself. The paper ends by sketching a research agenda that would involve comparing teachers’ experiences in different types of international schools in China and other contexts.

Keywords

International education teachers international education precariat the precariat China

Introduction

The term precariat was initially proposed by Guy Standing (2011) to denote an emerging class of individuals whose working lives are characterised by a lack of security. The precariat is a class of individuals who, due to the consequences of neo-liberal practices such as market flexibility and de-regulation, find themselves without an ‘anchor of stability’ (Standing, 2011). The precariat has also been understood as a situation or a condition rather than denoting a global class (Frase, 2013). Members of the precariat occupy the margins of citizenship as ‘urban nomads’ or ‘denizens’ (Bunnell, 2016; Standing, 2011). Whilst citizens may have access to civil (equality before the law), cultural (entitlement to participate in the cultural life of the community), social (access to pension and health care), economic (equal entitlement to undertake income-earning activity) and political (equal right to vote) rights, the denizen is someone who has a more limited range of rights than citizens. Although anyone could potentially ‘fall’ into the precariat due to unforeseen economic reasons or even through choice, certain groups are more susceptible to precarity than others due to their marginal status. These groups include refugees and asylum seekers, illegal migrants, temporary and seasonal migrants, and long-term migrants (Standing, 2011).

Recently, Bunnell (2016) has extended Standing’s thesis beyond the temporary or seasonal workers who typically characterise the precariat by proposing that the growing numbers of teachers who choose to teach internationally are increasingly forming a sub-grouping of the precariat. One element of the precarity of international school teachers is the short-term contract nature of their employment – compared with the more ‘permanent’ type of contract they could expect in most national school systems. Although a wide variety of terms are available to describe the teachers who work in international schools, such as ‘international teacher’, ‘expatriate educator’ and ‘transnational educator’, the term mainly used in this paper is International Education Teacher (IET). This term is less ambiguous than the more generic ‘international teacher’ and makes clear that the focus of discussion is on schools and not higher education, where some discussion of international education tends to be situated. However, from time to time, I draw upon alternative terms such as ‘expatriate teacher’ in order to avoid over-using the term ‘International Education Teacher.’ The precariat could be described in more general terms as ‘a social class of people living without job security and a level of predictability, which can impact on their psychological well-being’ (Jenkins et al., 2017, p. 163). The emergence of IETs as a global educational precariat as a topic of research is part of a more general development within the field of international education research, which has seen a shift of focus from an interpretation of international education as idealistic in nature, to a post-idealistic phase, in which international education is understood as an industry, with stakeholders participating in it for pragmatic reasons (Bunnell, 2014; Resnik, 2012).

Bunnell’s argument advances the dialogue about international education teachers and their lives by highlighting the often complex and sometimes inequitable contexts in which they work. Another strength of Bunnell’s concept is its implications for research into intercultural teaching contexts. Whilst recent studies (Blyth, 2017; Burke, 2015; Poole, 2018) highlight the more problematic aspects of working in international schools, the focus of this research is on the significations that individual agents ascribe to their experiences, thereby limiting the utility and validity of the findings due to their lack of generalisability. Given the limitations of focusing exclusively on lived experience, Bunnell’s conceptualisation of the international educator as part of an educational precariat assists the researcher to move beyond the subjective by highlighting the empirical structural inequalities that make international education teachers’ lives increasingly difficult. Moreover, the notion of IETs as forming a global education precariat also dialogues with research on the emerging Global Middle Class (Tarc, Mishra Tarc & Wu, 2019) who are defined as highly educated, mobile middle-class families who move around the world using global frames of reference (Yemini & Maxwell, 2018).

However, due to the exploratory nature of Bunnell’s argument, there are a number of weaknesses that this paper addresses. Firstly, although his argument is backed up with evidence, the examples from which the argument is constructed are mostly anecdotal, appropriated from online message boards. What is required, therefore, is further empirical evidence to substantiate his argument, something which this paper offers. Secondly, whilst the notion of an international educational precariat provides researchers with a framework for understanding international education teachers in a way that takes into consideration the positive and negative aspects of working in international schools, it is left for researchers themselves to adapt this concept into a methodology.

Therefore, this paper extends Bunnell’s precarity argument by exploring a specific group of international teachers, offering a methodology for researching the issue of precarity (in the form of narrative inquiry and in-depth interviewing) and then explaining how this methodology could form the basis for a future research agenda. In order to achieve the aims stated above, this paper presents the experiences of four IETs from two internationalised schools in Shanghai, China. This type of school was selected because the author had access to teachers in this context and also because little research has been done on them or the teachers who work in them.

Next will be offered a definition of IETs, followed by consideration of how they have been researched by international education scholars. This provides a springboard for developing Bunnell’s notion of the precariat, which is then used to construct a framework for analysing the interview data.

Literature Review

Defining international education teachers

Whilst statistics are hard to verify and should be treated with caution, ISC Research’s market data research from January 2018 puts the number of English-medium international schools at 9306, with 5 million students enrolled in these schools (ISCR, 2018). Statistics from ISCR also put the number of staff working in international schools at 470,000 (ISCR, 2018), with this number expected to rise to 581,000 by 2021 (Bunnell, 2016). Although these numbers are open to critique, they nevertheless show that the international education sector is rapidly growing, thus highlighting the growing importance of IETs to the international education industry as a whole. IETs are typically western expatriates (Hayden, 2011), hailing predominantly from either the US or the UK (Brummitt & Keeling, 2013). Although not necessarily qualified to teach internationally, IETs tend to be qualified teachers in their own countries, possessing for instance Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) in the UK or a teaching certificate in the US (Hayden, 2006). Typically, the reasons given for why teachers choose to relocate from national to international teaching contexts include burnout, due to long hours and pressure (Bunnell, 2014; Hayden, 2006), wanting to discover the world (Savva, 2017), increased personal and professional opportunities (Bailey, 2015), and an ideological motive to ‘make the world a better place’ through the embodiment and promotion of international-mindedness (Hill, 2012).

My own research (Poole, 2017, 2018, 2019) contributes to the literature on IETs by exploring the teaching experiences of non-native English speaker, non-Anglophone, non-qualified teachers, as well as local Chinese faculty, in the context of ‘internationalised’ schools in China. In contrast to more elite international schools, also known as ‘Type A traditional international schools’ (Hayden & Thompson, 2013), internationalised schools in China are characterised by a national focus, in that most of the curriculum is focused on delivering the national curriculum with an international curriculum reserved for the final 3-4 years of high school (Poole, 2018). Furthermore, the Chinese national curriculum operates in conjunction with symbolic routines such as the flag raising ceremony to inculcate a sense of loyalty and love for the country, whilst international curricula such as the IGCSE (International General Certificate of Secondary Education) and IBDP (International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme) equip students with the necessary intercultural skills to negotiate a globalised world (Poole, 2018). The construct of the ‘internationalised’ school, based on my research, could be understood as a distinct type of school in its own right within the Chinese context.

Not only do internationalised schools cater to a different student demographic than Type A international schools; they also typically recruit a different type of international teacher. Teachers in internationalised schools can be differentiated from expatriate teachers in Type A schools based on four criteria: experiences, qualifications, passport status, and what I call the accumulation of cross-cultural capital (Poole, 2019). Whilst some teachers in internationalised schools are qualified to teach in their home countries, many are not in fact qualified teachers, possessing instead a wealth of academic and cross-cultural experiences that make them employable within such schools. Internationalised schools also hire local Chinese faculty to deliver national and international curricula. It is thus necessary to differentiate these types of teacher from the more traditional international teacher in order to recognise that their life experiences and the contexts in which they work are fundamentally different from those of teachers who work in more traditional international schools. In order to do this, I employ the term ‘internationalised school teacher’. Moreover, the challenges that these teachers are likely to face are significantly different than those faced by their counterparts in Type A traditional international schools. The skills and qualifications that they possess qualify them to teach in internationalised schools (and perhaps some international schools), but not in state-run maintained schools back in their home countries, leaving them in what could be called a state of ‘advantageous exile’. Bunnell’s notion of a global educational precariat is both timely and relevant in relation to this type of international teacher because it challenges the notion of IETs as forming a privileged Global Middle Class, and also provides space to explore the economic and political structures that both enable and constrain global mobility.

International education teachers as an educational precariat

In order to illustrate his assertion that IETs are increasingly becoming a part of a global educational precariat, Bunnell offers anecdotal evidence from analysis of anonymous postings on message boards, such as internationalschoolsreview.com, that highlights destructive leadership, nepotism and passport retention as recent evidence of an increasingly precarious international school workplace. He also draws upon real-life incidents, such as a Tibetan-Buddhist Chemistry teacher who was dismissed from his job for purportedly insulting Islam, in order to substantiate his thesis that international teachers are a sub-group of the precariat due to ‘employment instability.’ Whilst the anecdotal and real-life evidence does not prove conclusively that international educators are part of an educational precariat, it certainly indicates that the subject warrants further investigation.

The increasing presence of precarity in the international education sector can be attributed to the unregulated nature of international schools. For example, ‘such institutions are often outside the national system yet at the same time nor do they operate within any discernible or organised international system’ (Bunnell, 2016, 544). One colleague once summarised this situation more laconically as ‘the wild west of international education’, although increasingly international schools can and do seek to claim so-called ‘institutional legitimacy’ (Bunnell, Fertig & James, 2016) through organisations offering accreditation services such as CIS (Council of International Schools), thereby holding schools and staff to greater accountability.

However, one of the limitations of utilising second-hand data like message board conversations, is its lack of transparency and potential for bias. As Bunnell (2016) points out, disgruntled ex-employees can use anonymity in order to seek revenge on employers with whom they have ‘an axe to grind’. Moreover, the examples from message boards may provide researchers with examples of precarity, but the examples do not adequately provide an insight into how individuals experience being part of a precariat. In order to expand Bunnell’s precariat thesis, it is necessary to adopt a methodology that captures how individuals actually experience being an international educator, but also allows for data triangulation in order to establish greater validity and generalisability to other international school contexts.

Recent articles (Bailey, 2015; Blyth, 2017; Bunnell, 2016, 2017; Burke, 2017; Cavendish, 2011; Halicioglu, 2015; Poole, 2017, 2018; Savva, 2015, 2017) and books (Arber, Blackmore, & Vongalis-Macrow, 2014; Minor & Duncan, 2017) that explore IETs may offer some suggestions. This burgeoning literature tends to be either practitioner- or researcher-focused. Practitioner-orientated studies (eg Blyth, 2017; Burke, 2017) are more reflexive in nature, employing ethnography in order to expose and deconstruct hidden power differentials of culture, race and knowledge-construction. However, employing ethnography as a methodology for exploring international education teachers’ lives could be critiqued for being overly subjective. This is most vividly illustrated by Blyth’s (2017) autoethnography of her experiences of working in an international school in Hong Kong. Blyth’s methodology allows for the reclamation of her lost agency as an international educator, but it also obscures the role that structural inequality plays in leading to the marginalisation of teachers’ identities in organisations such as schools. In contrast, researcher-led studies (eg Bailey, 2015; Cavendish, 2011; Hayden & Thompson, 1998) adopt a more objective approach to researching international teachers’ experiences by utilising validity enhancing methods such as triangulation and collaboration with researchers (Johnson & Golombek, 2002). Whilst a more objective approach assists the researcher in moving beyond the solipsism associated with autoethnography, it is still necessary to attend to the subjective aspects of being an international educator, as teachers are not just part of a precariat but are also in a situation of precarity. Based on these requirements, narrative inquiry is commensurate with this endeavour. The next section develops this argument in more detail.

Methodology

Narrative inquiry is a way of understanding and inquiring into people’s lived experience (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000). It is underpinned by a belief that telling stories, or storying lives through narrative, is not just a central concern of human beings, but perhaps the central concern (Bruner, 2008). Storying, for narrative inquirers, is the process through which individuals symbolically enter the world (Clandinin, 2006). Therefore, it is possible for researchers to gain an insight into an individual’s inner world through the way they present their experiences in the form of stories or narratives. As such, the act of storying, or writing or speaking oneself into existence, is intimately connected to issues of identity, identity construction and agency (McLean & Pasupathi, 2012). In terms of capturing the subjective aspect of experience, narrative inquiry allows the researcher to gain access to the participants’ lived experiences of precarity. Lived experience is here defined as the subjective understanding of experience and the significations that individuals ascribe to their experiences. Thus, narrative inquiry brings into focus experiences of precarity and the way the participants understand these experiences in relation to their lives as international educators.

However, in order to move beyond merely describing individuals’ subjective experiences and to enhance validity it was decided in this study to adopt a polyphonic narrative in which a range of IETs’ voices were drawn upon. In so doing, it was possible to triangulate participants’ responses, thereby allowing for the exploration of precarity as a complex phenomenon. Furthermore, in order to strengthen validity, interview data were collected from two internationalised schools, thereby ensuring that the teachers interviewed were not homogenised, but differentiated according to their teaching experiences and also the contexts in which they taught.

Semi-structured interviews were selected as the most appropriate method for eliciting data about how the participants articulated their experiences as international teachers. In contrast to quantitative forms of data collection, such as questionnaires, experiments, and surveys, interviews (in their most utopian form) provide a level of depth and complexity that can allow researchers to gain access to respondents’ inner worlds so the researchers can experience the world as the respondents do. Interviews can also generate ‘thick description’ (Geertz, 1973) which can make participants’ inner worlds more vivid for the researcher.

Research design

Participants in the study were interviewed separately on two occasions, with interviews lasting between sixty and ninety minutes. All participants had been employed in their current school for between 8 and 12 months prior to the first interview. The second interview was conducted a few months after the first, although in the case of Robert and Tyron, additional data were collected after the second interview.

All interviews were recorded on Garage Band recording software and later transcribed. Ethical clearance was given by the University of Nottingham as part of a larger research project exploring international teachers’ identities. As part of the university’s ethical procedures, informed consent was requested and given by all of the participants.

Interview questions did not directly use the terms ‘precariat’ or ‘precarity’ but instead focused on eliciting rich data about the participants’ personal, professional and cross-cultural experiences. Interview data were analysed using a framework that synthesised Standing’s (2011), Bunnell’s (2016) and Jenkins et al.’s (2017) definitions of the precariat. Based on the literature review above, being a part of an international teacher education precariat is argued to create:

Uncertainty which can lead to a decline in psychological well-being;

Limited or no representation in labour disputes;

Limited opportunities to find employment in one’s passport country which leads to teachers becoming global exiles;

Liminal citizenry in the form of the denizen.

These factors formed the framework which was employed in order to initially identify narrative chunks that contained experiences of precarity. Once identified, the narratives were analysed using discourse analysis in order to bring into focus how the participants constructed their experiences of precarity. Discourse analysis has been defined as the study of social life, understood through analysis of language in its widest sense – including face-to-face talk, non-verbal interaction, images, symbols and documents (Potter & Wetherell, 1987). Discourse analysis was selected in order to extend Bunnell’s thesis by exploring how the participants narrated their cross-cultural experiences. The construction of precarity within the participants’ narratives provides the researcher with a window onto the lived experiences of precarity within an internationalised school.

A semi-grounded approach to data analysis was also utilised, whereby new or unexpected categories or perceptions of precarity could be identified. This enhanced validity by taking into account how the participants perceived their experiences rather than simply imposing objective criteria (in the form of the framework) on their experiences. An enhanced form of dialogic member checking was utilised in which all transcriptions, interpretations and write-ups were shared with the participants. Member-checking is a technique used by researchers to help improve the accuracy, credibility, validity, and transferability of a study. Typically, member-checking has been employed to enhance validity, check researcher bias, and also act as a measure of trustworthiness (Birt et al., 2016; Lincoln & Guba, 1985). However, taking a cue from Birt et al. (2016) and Harvey (2015), member-checking became a space in which to reaffirm researcher-participant bonds, off-set power differentials and ensure that interpretation of the data remained with the participants.

Research context and participants

Participants for this study were selected from two internationalised schools in Shanghai China with whom the author was affiliated, the names of which in this paper are pseudonyms in order to protect the anonymity of participants. The first, WEST, was a recently opened for-profit bilingual school that claimed to offer an ‘internationalised’ curriculum that combined aspects of ‘Chinese’ and ‘Western’ approaches to learning. However, in practice the curriculum was blocked-out rather than integrated. For example, students, who were primarily host country nationals, followed the Chinese compulsory national curriculum during middle school and then transitioned to an international curriculum in the form of the IGCSE (International General Certificate of Secondary Education) and IBDP (International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme). Although the school had only been in operation for three years at the time of this study, it had expanded to include a second campus, and appeared to be increasing in prestige. However, the interview data indicated that the school had trouble in retaining expatriate teaching staff, due to a lack of transparency and a perceived inequality in hiring and remuneration procedures.

The second school, SOUTH, was a non-profit school that also catered primarily to host country nationals, although at the time of this study the school was pushing to recruit more ‘international’ students. The school was well-funded and resourced, and recently expanded to include a third campus. The school also voluntarily underwent CIS (Council of International Schools) accreditation procedures, ultimately being successfully accredited with only minor issues to be addressed. SOUTH adopted an integrative approach to combining Chinese and Western education by offering the IGCSE and the IBDP alongside aspects of the Chinese national curriculum. Staff turnover was relatively low compared to WEST, with the interview data clearly indicating that teachers were generally content with their contracts and workloads.

A convenience approach to sampling was employed in order to locate participants who had experience of working in international contexts and also had knowledge of international curricula such as the IBDP, and of teaching in China. The small sample facilitated rich description and verisimilitude due to the prolonged nature of the interviews, which created a snowball effect whereby more data were generated through the member-checking process. Participants were approached initially either in person or by email, at which point they were given an information sheet about the study’s aims. In total, eight IETs were interviewed as part of a larger study, but only four were analysed for this paper (two from each school) due to length restrictions and relevance of responses to this paper’s focus. Tables 1 and 2 provide biographical information about the participants, all of whose names are pseudonyms in order to protect their anonymity.

Table 1.

Participants from WEST.

Name	Nationality	Age	Years teaching	Years teaching overseas	Teacher qualification status
Robert	South Africa/New Zealand	60	7	5	License from New Zealand (not renewed)
Tyron	South Africa	48	9	4	License from South Africa

Table 2.

Participants from SOUTH.

Name	Nationality	Age	Years teaching	Years teaching overseas	Teacher qualification status
Nora	America	44	15	10	License from the US
Alice	Australia	55	23	2	License from Australia

The small sample (four participants) allowed for the exploration of IETs’ experiences of precarity in some depth whilst, as highlighted above, providing scope for comparison through triangulation. However, one drawback of utilising a small sample size is the difficulties it poses for generalisability. Therefore, the findings from this study do not claim to be representative of all international schools but rather to substantiate or perhaps even localise Bunnell’s notion of a global educational precariat within a specific context – internationalised schools in China.

Findings

This section presents the findings from the interview data in four teacher narratives. The narratives highlight aspects of international teacher precarity, such as a lack of agency, financial insecurity, and the marginalisation of professional identities.

Robert: ‘There was nothing for me back in New Zealand’

Before becoming a teacher, Robert had spent the majority of his career in banking after he immigrated to New Zealand from South Africa. Having ‘come to the end of the road’ in his banking career after being made redundant, and then working for eight years as a self-employed consultant and becoming in his own words a ‘corporate animal’, Robert finally decided to re-train in order to ‘earn a salary again.’

After teaching in New Zealand for a few years, he made the decision to teach abroad. As Robert explained:

I went to China because there was nothing for me back in New Zealand. Younger teachers probably have different reasons. But a lot of them end up staying overseas because they have no good reason to go home. Being a teacher provides international mobility. But the teaching is secondary.

Robert remains vague about the specific reasons for moving to China; however, the absoluteness of the word ‘nothing’ implies that his reasons to move abroad were complex in nature, with follow-up interviews citing personal and economic issues as significant factors. He also makes a distinction between younger teachers and ‘grey haired’ (senior) teachers. Whereas younger teachers may teach internationally out of a sense of vocation or adventure, Robert adopts a more pragmatic stance: teaching is a means to an end, facilitating global mobility in order to escape from the ‘nothing’ that lies waiting back home.

Before joining WEST, Robert worked in a number of international schools in China. Once at WEST, his initial enthusiasm in helping to develop a new school soon turned into disillusionment and resentment when it became apparent that the school did not value him for his experience and professionalism as both a teacher and a manager (from his banking experiences), but simply as a ‘foreign face’ who was ‘expected to simply do my job’:

In retrospect, I suffered under the naïve delusion that I would help establish a school along liberal pedagogical lines. This, after all, is what IB is about. But it turned out that the school had no interest in what I thought. I was expected to simply do my job.

There is a sense in which Robert feels duped and cheated by both himself and the school. The phrase ‘it turned out’ suggests that he has had time to reappraise his initial expectations of establishing a school along ‘liberal pedagogical lines’ and now considers them to be akin to a naïve delusion – he sees through the veneer of rhetoric and recognises that his identity as a student-centred teacher was incompatible with the hierarchical structure of WEST.

Elaborating on his experiences in WEST, Robert concluded that:

A major problem at WEST was the huge language and cultural gap. WEST uses foreign teachers to achieve its own mysterious ends, which I guess is to be expected. In retrospect, that I stuck it out for two whole years is truly remarkable.

Robert’s inability to ‘get on the same page’ as senior management in WEST is presented as a breakdown in intercultural understanding. Interestingly, Robert does not show any need to adapt to the local Chinese context despite having some understanding of teaching in China. In his own words, he made himself ‘very unpopular’ by being vocal about his criticism of the school to senior faculty. As a result, according to Robert, his contract was not renewed. In fact, as Robert confided, he was ‘let go’ before his contract expired so he would not be present in the school during an important IB authorisation visit. Despite losing his job, Robert was able to ‘reinvent’ himself as a teacher by moving to the Middle East where he was ‘determined to get it right this time’. Overall, his narrative clearly highlights experiences that reflect being in a condition of precarity, such as dismissal without the due process that would be recognised in many national systems, difficulty finding employment in his passport country, and the positives and negatives associated with high global mobility. Age is also presented as a factor that contributes to precarity.

Tyron: ‘I am a mercenary now’

Before becoming an international teacher, Tyron worked in the military police in South Africa as a physical therapist. It was during this time that he completed a Masters degree and a PhD in sports science. After retiring from the police, he became a part-time teacher, and later pursued a post-doctorate position in Canada, unable to find employment in his home country due to the complex sociopolitical consequences of Apartheid, such as labour laws like Affirmative Action – a policy that places quotas on government positions to ensure black South Africans are appropriately represented in the public sector. Afrikaners (a group descended predominantly from Dutch settlers) have complained that the policy is a form of reverse discrimination which is making it increasingly difficult for them to get into public sector employment. Tyron had become ‘unemployable in my own country’ which forced him into the global precariat – that is, into a state of permanent exile and uncertainty as an economic global migrant. In Tyron’s own words:

I was actually immigrating to Canada, but that did not work out. I came to China because of practical reasons. I came because I had no work. And now I’ve been doing this for the last three years. And somebody would tell me ‘it’s kind of funny Tyron that you would go almost around the world to go to find a job’ because I went to Canada from South Africa and then Canada to China.

Tyron laconically and prosaically states that ‘I had no work’, while ‘I had to do it’ conveys a sense of disempowerment and helplessness. The more utopian dream of becoming an academic and making a better life for himself and his family in Canada is replaced with a grittier and more pragmatic reality of having to find a job and continue making money in order to support his wife and three sons in South Africa.

After working in another international school in China for a year, Tyron moved to WEST, initially attracted by the prospect of helping to ‘start this school from scratch’:

I wasn’t very happy with [that school]. And then I got this phone call from the WEST people telling me that they need a PE teacher and would I be interested in coming for an interview. It just sounded like Shanghai was going to be a lot more fun and a lot more modern so that’s when I did the interview and they told me a week later that I got the job. I was pretty chuffed about it.

However, echoing Robert’s narrative, Tyron’s initial enthusiasm soon turned to frustration. For example, he struggled to reconcile his beliefs about international education (as embodied in the attributes of the IB Learner Profile, a set of attributes which all IB students are expected to develop), with the demands of WEST’s principal to construct a Chinese curriculum ‘with a touch of international in it’. This was partly due to the hierarchical structure of WEST, where instructions were issued like communiques with little or no explanation or justification – as Robert explained, ‘there was this very strict pecking order’. However, another issue was the fact that Tyron and Robert were precluded from understanding the organisational culture of WEST as a Chinese school due to an unwillingness or unfamiliarity with Chinese culture and language. Data from a larger study found that another expatriate teacher, Sophie (see Poole, 2017 for a more detailed account), had a more positive experience of working at WEST due to her ability, and willingness, to learn Chinese and understand Chinese culture. This suggests that cultural dissonance can lead to a loss of psychological well-being, thereby leading to a state of emotional precarity.

Tyron’s narrative also highlights how being a global exile profoundly changed his teacher identity:

I sometimes feel like I’m a mercenary now, like a mercenary soldier. Whoever pays me well, I will go there. It doesn’t matter where. I mean, I will go to Kathmandu and Tibet or wherever. If they pay well, I will go there. I will go to Antarctica! That’s how I see myself now.

The word ‘now’ underscores the extent to which Tyron’s identity has changed in just over a year. In contrast to the more positive tone of the interview data collected at the beginning of his time at WEST, Tyron now presents himself as a ‘mercenary’ as a way to underscore the lengths to which he will go in order to survive and provide for his family. The image of the globe-trotting international teacher is thrown into stark relief; while teaching overseas can be exciting for some, for others it can also be precarious and uncertain in nature. Recalling Standing’s (2011) notion of the precariat, Tyron’s existence as an international teacher is imposed rather than chosen, thereby leading to a loss of self-efficacy and agency.

Nora: ‘You are just a visitor when you come home’

In contrast to Tyron and Robert, who became international teachers out of economic necessity, Nora chose to become an international teacher having spent the best part of her teaching career in international schools outside of her passport country, the USA.

Nora’s narrative repeatedly focuses on the advantages and disadvantages of an extended sojourn abroad, which runs like a leitmotif through her narrative. Echoing Tyron and Robert’s narratives, Nora initially felt excited to work at SOUTH, which she considered to be a relatively ‘good’ school due to its CIS accreditation. However, her initial enthusiasm had started to sour a year into her two-year contract:

You know, when I first came here, they sold me on it was new. That can be exciting too. But it didn't really feel like that when I actually got here. It didn't feel like I was involved or asked to contribute my experience from my last school. So it's just kind of a disconnect between what they sometimes say [and] what actually happens.

The word ‘sold’ implies that Nora feels to some extent duped by the school, echoing Robert’s narrative. Meanwhile, ‘disconnect’ accentuates the gap between what Nora expected SOUTH to be like and the reality she found. Her extensive international teaching experience and perception of the school as CIS accredited engendered certain expectations that resonated with her identity as an experienced teacher, but the school failed to live up to her expectations as it did not harness or valorise her experiences, thereby leading to the negation of her professional identity as an educator. The tension between idealism and reality also mirrors the changing nature of the international education landscape, which has seen a shift of balance from an idealistic to post-idealistic perspective, where education as a passport to a top university is increasingly of more significance than making the world ‘a better place’ by promoting greater tolerance through intercultural understanding. Nora continued by explaining that:

As an international school teacher, you want to feel invested in where you are working. And you feel that if you have something to contribute and you’re not given an opportunity to do that you want to start thinking about moving on.

Nora refers to herself as an ‘international school teacher’, signaling that the ‘international’ aspect of being a teacher is a fundamental part of her identity as an educator. The school’s decision not to draw upon Nora’s experiences resulted in her contemplating breaking her contract, perhaps in order to find a school that valorises her identity as an experienced international educator. However, the prospect of moving on to a new school and the security of being able to do that is also empowering:

But there is that certainty of ‘I know I can find a job – I have enough qualifications and if I wait long enough I’ll probably find a pretty good job. But you can’t, you know, go playing games of looking for a job. At some point, you just need to decide I’m going to take a job. Here’s the date: whatever month and whatever and I just need to have a decision made because there is all that paperwork and everything that goes into moving.

While high mobility is empowering, it is also precarious in nature. Nora also touches upon how being an international teacher ‘on the circuit’ has affected her sense of identity:

You still have your original citizenship, but you become further and further from that where you are just a visitor when you come home. And you can't fully adapt to another culture unless you just stayed there and learned everything about it and maybe married and entered into the society. But you are always going to be someone on the outskirts of what's going on.

The narrative chunk conveys a strong sense of liminality or permanent in-betweenness: Nora has yet to adapt to the local culture, but at the same time she also feels increasingly alienated from her passport country. The phrase ‘you become further and further’ suggests that this distancing is only likely to increase the more time a teacher spends outside of their passport country. The metaphors ‘entered’ and ‘outskirts’ vividly convey cultural space in terms of geographical space, with Nora adopting the second person ‘you’ in order to imply that she considers herself to still be a cultural outsider in China (she mentioned that she felt more at home in her previous school in Europe). The term ‘citizenship’ also brings to mind Standing’s notion of the denizen. According to Nora, this permanent in-between led to ‘a little bit of stress’ as ‘you don't have a base to depend on; you've got yourself.’

Alice: ‘For me, it’s more of an adventure’

Whereas the previous narratives highlight the precarious or ambivalent nature of international teaching, Alice’s narrative focuses on the positive aspects of being an international teacher. Alice was relatively new to the international teaching scene, having given up ‘a full-time permanent long-standing position in a very prestigious school [in Australia] where I’d been for twenty-one years’ of her own volition in order to teach in China:

It was most definitely a choice. And I guess too I have security behind me in terms of experience, qualifications, finance. Like I’m not a new teacher who is trying to save for their wedding or save for their first home. So for me, it’s more of an adventure.

Words like ‘definitely’ and ‘choice’ convey a clear sense of agency, with Alice presenting herself as being in control of her destiny. She is empowered due to her experiences, qualifications, and financial security, all of which explain why her narrative focuses on the more positive side of international teaching. The removal of financial considerations means that she is able to appreciate her international sojourn as more of an ‘adventure’ rather than an ‘exile’. She draws upon the discourse of the globe-trotting international teacher in order to differentiate herself from other international teachers who, from her perspective, find themselves teaching internationally due to forces beyond their control. Alice also offers an alternative perspective on age and precarity. Whereas Robert equated being older with more pragmatic, economic concerns and being younger with wanting to have an ‘adventure’, Alice inverts this distinction by presenting younger teachers as motivated by the need to save.

Alice also goes on to cite self-efficacy as another factor that leads to a feeling of security:

One of the things that gives me comfort is that prior to this position maybe I was offered three other positions over the course of six months. So, that is security. But I guess I feel like I’m confident in my abilities.

The ability to choose from a number of jobs empowers Alice. The word ‘comfort’ resonates with other words like ‘security’ and ‘confident’, thereby creating what I term discursive consonance. However, the word ‘comfort’ implies that her current situation is perhaps not quite as she expected it to be. Alice would subsequently go on to leave SOUTH and China, moving to teach in another international school in South-east Asia. Interestingly, Alice’s identity as a teacher is not connected to her cross-cultural experiences, as was the case with Nora, but rather her perceived pedagogical abilities. When asked if she considered herself to be an international teacher, Alice was adamant that she was ‘a teacher that happens to be working in China.’ She went on to explain that:

There’s kind of a prestige, perhaps, amongst teachers that teach outside of their home country. When they talk about the schools that they’ve been in. So ‘this is only your first international school? (whispers) Ah, okay, yeah.’ And that seems to be a fairly defining descriptor of whether you are an international teacher or not.

Once again, Alice distances herself from being an international teacher by referring to this group using the collective ‘they’. Rather, she presents herself as a teacher who teaches internationally. From her perspective as a ‘national’ teacher who teaches in an ‘international’ school, there is a kind of snobbery (prestige) that goes with being an experienced international teacher, as revealed by the use of dialogue in which Alice’s inexperience is met with surprise (use of the interrogative form) and disapproval (the anti-intensifier ‘only’ and the lowering of the voice into a whisper). For Alice, however, international teaching experience may bring a certain amount of cultural or social capital (prestige), but it is economic capital and teaching experience that bring real security. Overall, Alice’s narrative is striking in its absence of precarity, suggesting that financial security and the ability to freely choose where a teacher works are significant factors in whether or not a teacher perceives their international teaching career as secure or precarious.

Discussion

The interview data gathered highlights identity confusion, uncertainty, a lack of financial security, and a lack of representation as examples of precarity in internationalised schools. For example, Tyron’s and Robert’s narratives clearly showed evidence of the international teacher as a denizen or a global migrant, whilst Nora’s narrative presented being an international teacher in terms of permanent liminality, which leads to anxiety and a sense of uncertainty. These findings support previous research studies (Savva, 2015, 2017) that focus on the difficulties of teaching in international schools.

Another significant finding is the prevalence of what could be called a ‘them and us’ discourse which is most vividly seen in Robert’s and Nora’s narratives, in which school leadership is positioned as the negative part of a binary opposition. On the one hand, this kind of discourse can be potentially destructive as it engenders suspicion that can lead to a breakdown in communication and even a decline in physical and mental wellbeing (see Blyth, 2017 for a personal account of this). On the other hand, this kind of discourse could be understood as a form of discursive empowerment in which teachers vilify school leaders or management in order to reclaim a sense of agency and identity. As highlighted in the methodology section, and also corroborated by the participants’ narratives, the hierarchical nature of Chinese bilingual internationalised schools can lead to the marginalisation of IETs’ identities which are formed in relation to a perception of the school as being fundamentally ‘international’ in nature due to the presence of international curricula. This creates considerable conflict, with expatriate teachers’ perceptions of what an international school should be clashing with what an internationalised school actually is within the Chinese context. This finding highlights the need to develop methodologies that allow for the juxtaposition of bottom-up and top-down perspectives in order to capture the complexity of teachers’ lived experiences.

In addition to exposing the more negative aspects experienced by some of working in an international school, the interview data also highlighted the positive nature of teaching internationally, as illustrated in Alice’s narrative. The disconnect between Alice’s positive experiences on the one hand and the other teachers’ more precarious ones on the other can be explained by considering the notion of agency – that is, the extent to which the participants perceived their identities as IETs as imposed or freely chosen. Tyron’s metaphor of being a ‘mercenary’ connotes a lack of agency due to its resonance with being a global exile and not being able to return to his home country. In contrast, Alice’s narrative did not contain any reference to uncertainty or a loss of psychological wellbeing, but rather took the form of a ‘globe-trotting’ narrative where international teaching is seen as an ‘adventure’. Therefore, perception of agency, or a lack thereof, is a significant factor that mediates how teachers in internationalised schools construct and articulate their narratives of international teaching. Alice had accrued enough capital – both economic and cultural – to feel secure about her existence as an international educator. Unlike the other teachers, she could return to her passport country, but chose not to as she wanted to travel and see the world.

However, this binary pattern obscures the fact that agency in the localised context of an internationalised school is multifaceted in nature. Whilst Tyron positioned himself as a ‘global exile’, he was also empowered by his identity as a mercenary to visit places that he would not normally be able to visit. Nora’s narrative also shows how the precarious aspects of international education can in fact be empowering. Whilst acknowledging the uncertainty and liminality of an extended sojourn abroad, Nora also explained how she had become more discerning and stronger as a result of the uncertain conditions that typify an international teaching position. This finding reflects Standing’s (2011) observation that being part of the precariat can in fact be empowering for some groups of individuals. Precarious experiences, therefore, can be converted into what could be termed cross-cultural capital, a term that was developed during this author’s doctoral research into the construction of international teacher identity in an internationalised school (Poole, 2019). Cross-cultural capital is based on Bourdieu’s notion of cultural, symbolic, and social capital, which undergoes a form of transformation whereby economic capital is converted into the immaterial which takes the form of cultural, symbolic and social capital and vice versa (Bourdieu, 2003). In the context of an internationalised school, cross-cultural capital does not reproduce social stratification, as in the original theory, but rather the opposite; it is mobilised by individuals in order to challenge a school’s master narrative (prescribed and proscribed ways of transacting the cross-cultural space of an internationalised school) and also to construct professional identities in teaching contexts that are perceived to be antithetical to teachers’ conceptions of themselves as experienced international educators.

The accumulation of cross-cultural capital can also be understood as part of a more general phenomenon. For example, researchers have noted the emergence of a Global Middle Class who are typified by high mobility that facilitates what Lan (2011) calls ‘flexible cultural capital conversion’ (p. 1669). Cultural capital not only remains intact across borders but also increases in value within certain contexts, as illustrated by the narratives in this study. However, in contrast to the ‘flexible cultural conversion’ that typifies members of the Global Middle Class, the participants in this study tended to possess a less dynamic form of cross-cultural capital. Their cultural capital increased in value in the cultural, symbolic and physical movement from ‘West’ to ‘East’ or North to South. [Though the terms ‘West’ and ‘East’ are problematic as they are reductive and homogenous in nature, Tyron’s interviews clearly presented a West/East dichotomy that I use as an interpretive lens.] For example, Tyron’s cultural and economic value as an international teacher is instantiated in this movement across borders and through transnational spaces. Teaching in China generally and within internationalised schools more specifically thus rejuvenates depleted forms of capital that do not have such a favourable exchange rate in teachers’ home countries. The findings suggest that a global educational precariat is not necessarily homogenous in nature but rather comprised of sub-groups, with teachers like Tyron and Robert forming a distinct group who are global exiles due to economic and political circumstances that make them unemployable in their home countries.

Conclusion

Whilst the methodology for this paper lays the groundwork for future research, there are nevertheless a number of limitations that need to be addressed. Firstly, the relatively small number of participants makes generalisation problematic. Therefore, the findings should only be interpreted within the context of internationalised schools in China, and then with caution. Secondly, establishing validity and reliability from a limited number of narratives might also be problematic for some international education researchers. However, this limitation should be considered in relation to the context of internationalised schools in China and the aim of this paper, which was to develop Bunnell’s notion of a global educational precariat within a specific context. Moreover, the use of a number of narratives from across two contexts, although still small in number, nevertheless allows for data triangulation, thereby mitigating against this limitation to a certain extent.

One of the issues of researching into IETs’ lives is the inherent complexity of the phenomena under investigation. For example, the notion of a global educational precariat suggests that there exist empirical structures that create inequalities that lead to IETs being in a condition of precarity. However, at the same time, how these structures are perceived by individuals also needs to be taken into consideration. Therefore, future research needs to strike a balance between positivist and constructivist perspectives in order to capture the complexity of a global educational precariat, perhaps leading to the development of mixed methods approaches, rather than advocating one approach over another. Another aspect that requires greater attention is the local contexts in which IETs live and work, particularly the international school. Rather than understanding international schools as homogenous or simply places of transience, it is necessary to first understand them as multifaceted and complex in nature (Bunnell, 2016). A good starting point for this might be to differentiate between Type A and Type C international schools as Hayden and Thompson (2013) have done. However, future research also needs to focus not only on differentiating between different types of international school but also on developing typologies for identifying different types of IETs, as their experiences play a significant part in shaping their understanding of precarity.

An emerging research agenda from this paper is the notion that IETs’ experiences of precarity are related to the type of international school in which they work. Therefore, IETs may not necessarily constitute a global class in and of themselves, but rather constitute a number of localised classes that are formed in response to personal and professional experiences (education, race, age) and the different contexts in which they work (the type of international school). Based on this, the internationalised school teachers in this study could be understood as forming a ‘glocalised’ educational precariat. The findings from this paper suggest that educators in internationalised schools form a precariat in and of themselves, due to the nature of their personal, professional and cross-cultural experiences. Future research could develop this research agenda by triangulating teachers’ experiences in different types of international school in China and other countries in order to test this assertion.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the participants for their candid responses and willingness to be a part of this project. I would also like to thank both of the anonymous reviewers for their helpful assistance in redrafting the manuscript.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biography

Adam Poole is a practitioner-researcher currently based in Shanghai, China. He teaches International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme English A and B at an international school in Shanghai, and has just completed and successfully defended his doctoral thesis which was undertaken with the University of Nottingham, Ningbo, China. His research interests include international teachers’ experiences in international schools, teacher professional identity, and developing the ‘funds of identity’ concept.

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