Curriculum, learning and teaching
The thesis sits smugly on the shelf International teacher Adam Poole’s reflection on a doctoral journey Research is typically judged on how it appears in the form of a product, such as an article, book or in my case, a doctoral thesis. However, what is not often written about is the process, the journey. The freshly bound thesis sitting smugly on the shelf belies the struggles that led to its creation and eventual completion. My own doctoral research focused on the experiences of a group of international school teachers and how they constructed their identities in terms of the accumulation of what I labelled ‘cross-cultural capital.’ However, rather than focusing on this somewhat esoteric (though very interesting) topic, I want to offer a reflection on my doctoral journey as an international educator. I undertook a doctorate in education for a number of reasons: interest, career development, the challenge. Perhaps most of all I undertook the doctorate because of my experiences as an international teacher. Before undertaking the doctorate, I had a clear, though perhaps slightly naïve, sense of who I was as an international educator. I’d been teaching International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme English and IGCSE literature in various international schools in Winter
Summer |
| 2019
Shanghai for almost ten years. To put it more precisely, I taught international curricula in an international school; therefore, I was an international teacher. This syllogistic logic became axiomatic. However, as I progressed with the doctorate and read more widely around the field of international education, I began to interrogate my assumptions about what it meant to be an educator as well as an international teacher. I found myself constantly sliding between identities: on the week days, I was a teacher; in the evenings and at weekends when writing up the thesis I was a researcher. The more I progressed with the doctorate, the more I struggled with the issue of whether I was a practitioner-researcher or a researcher-practitioner. I also found myself wondering (and wandering) about the nature of international education. Just what was the defining feature of international education? What made teachers ‘international’? I was reading that it was the curriculum or the school, or certain dispositions, such as international-mindedness or a global perspective that truly defined international education. The more I read, the more frustrated I became at the paucity of research on the international teacher experience.
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