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Abstract

While current debates on education for children from migrant background often focus on the prevailing problems of self-segregation and racialisation in Australian education, I take my point of departure from such perspectives to ask how the evolution of a burgeoning mobile teacher, who operates on a global scale, can matter to the distribution of educational opportunity and shape of democratic education outcomes for both domestic and overseas-born children. Consistent with the Special Issue, this article seeks to open a space for further research, to ask some old and some new questions about teaching for democracy. To examine how democracy can be fully realised in and through education, this article moves beyond problematising the dangers posed by globalised neoliberal school reform to attend to the cross-border flows of culturally and ethnically diverse transnational teachers in Australian schools. The article has two foci: first, it explores the role ‘transnational teachers’ have in education for democracy by understanding their place in the relations between education and access to sociocultural opportunities. Second, the article deploys a Deweyan approach to democracy and education, to argue for an education that is embedded in contexts, beyond than a locality, to incorporate sustained cross-border relationships and patterns of teachers’ social formation. Finally, the article details key pedagogical considerations for democratic education, moving beyond largely Eurocentric practices to include aspects such as generating diversity, cultivating transnational civic engagement, and advancing transnational aspirations of both teachers and students shaped by processes of globalisation.

Keywords

democracy Dewey transnational teachers transnationalism in education

Introduction

Australia’s transnational teachers come from various countries around the globe. According to the 2006 national census data, about 16.9% of approximately 438,060 teachers in Australia were born overseas. Most transnational teachers are born in the United Kingdom (36%) and other Anglosphere countries such as the United States and Canada (8.9%) and New Zealand (9.29%). Although little is known about the extent of the transnational teacher flows between states, Collins and Reid (2011) provide an indication of their experiences as immigrants in general. Some of these transnational teachers bring with them strong academic preparation and teaching experience gained in their home countries. Their credentials as education professionals mean that they are hired to fill gaps in the Australian teacher labour market. Other transnational teachers come into the teacher labour market through teacher education-migration pathways (Soong, 2016). According to Collins and Reid’s (2012) analysis of 269 transnational teachers teaching in New South Wales, South Australia and Western Australia, these teachers bring with them significant global teaching experience. Of the teachers surveyed, 45% had taught in the United Kingdom and Ireland, 15% in New Zealand schools, 14% in South Africa, 13% in South-east Asian countries and 10% in North America.

Research into the democratic education practices of transnational teachers remains limited, as transnational teachers’ linguistic, cultural and social diversities are often viewed as deficits rather than benefits for education in the host country (Walsh et al., 2011). For instance, drawing on the concepts of power, forms of knowledge and subjectivities, Kim and Patet (2018) used their own narratives to ‘make visible multiple discourses at work in (re)constitution of themselves as faculty of colour within a predominantly white institution’ (p. 1). Such a situation creates challenges to establish education as a condition for democracy. For Dewey (1916), education contributes to democratic citizenship, and he argued that education has the potential to enable children to engage in social opportunities. However, it remains to be seen whether Australia can fully embrace multiculturalism as part of a shared democratic society (Jakubowicz, 2009). If Dewey’s premise remains key to a democratic education for our children, I argue that part of improving democratic education and schooling success for young Australians is making a case to understand the social and cultural impacts of transnational teachers in shaping the education cultures for democracy – where diversity is accepted and understood as a strength.

Australia continues to attract increasing flows of ethnically diverse individuals and families (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2017) as well as skilled and professional applications (Soong, 2016). Megalogenis (2015) predicts that better educated migrants – predominately from China and India – will usher in profound changes to the ‘face’ of Australian society. Under such circumstances, there are complexities and challenges requiring examination regarding the role transnational teachers can play in creating a democratic schooling environment (Soong, 2017). In this article, I explore the role of transnational teachers in democratic education by examining their place in the relationship between education and access to sociocultural opportunities. I then deploy Dewey’s Western humanistic worldview prioritising ‘democracy’ and ‘education’, as conceptual apparatuses to study the complexities and challenges of educating for democracy in a context of transnationalism. I am interested in adopting a transnational analytical approach to explore how education for democracy can incorporate sustained cross-border relationships and patterns of social formation (Vertovec, 1999) through the presence and work of transnational teachers.

I begin with a brief discussion of relevant research on the evolution of Dewey’s views regarding democracy and the purpose of education, followed by a current profile of transnational teachers within and outside Australia. Then, I use a transnational lens to analyse what it means to consider the problem of education for democracy in a globalising world, through a focus on the current logics of education as a ‘transnational social field’ (Levitt and Schiller, 2004) in advancing the construct of transnational teachers. Finally, drawing on Dewey’s concepts of democracy and its nexus with education, I argue that educative practices that can be embraced by transnational teachers for democracy encompass the following features – generating diversity, cultivating transnational civic engagement and advancing transnational aspirations.

Considering education for democracy through a transnational lens

The need to attend to democratic education for our young is essential as it provides students with opportunities to explore, imagine, understand and act as citizens at local, national and transnational levels (Apple, 1995). Transnationalism allows for new ways of thinking about the nexus between democracy and migration, which will help interpret the implications for transnational teachers in reinvigorating education for democracy. The transnational social field reminds us that we are living in a global era. Given that at the heart of globalisation is the effect of living in ‘overlapping communities of fate’ (Held, 2005: 3), which require citizens to think and act globally, the transnational social field can demonstrate how this is done in greater detail. However, being a democratic citizen can mean different things to different people, potentially leading to a lack of clarity regarding aims, content and enactment of education for a democratic society.

In an empirical study of how transnational migration processes can change the hierarchies of social relations and authority structures to empower or disempower, Schiller (2004) categorised the process of cultural transformation that takes place as a result of an individual’s periodic social encounters with a new society. Schiller conceptualised this as ‘social remittances’. Social remittances refer to ‘ideas, behaviours, identities, and social capital that flow from host to sending-country communities’ (Schiller, 2004: 54). Such remittances create a process of micro-cultural change between transnational members who live in the host and home countries. Transnational migration processes also lead to transnational communities being built between the two, where parts of new cultural repertoires are transmitted to families and relatives who remain in the country of origin. In other words, the flow of ‘social remittances’ that many transnational members in the host society are involved in can also lead to multiple and nuanced transnational ways of being and belonging to both home and host countries (Schiller, 2004). While the forces of global governance have expanded in privileging Western normative notions, such as individualistic cultures, they have failed to take account of the ‘invisible’ simultaneity of transnational movement and connections between individuals and human webs of interdependency and responsibility.

A further implication is that transnationalism can address and contribute to the nuanced nexus of globalisation and democracy. Transnationalism, in opposition to globalisation, does not require massive movements of people. Globalisation is an ongoing process towards worldwide integration and interdependence in various areas such as economics, politics, culture, finance, technology and environment (e.g. Held, 2005). However, the real emphasis of transnationalism is understanding the individual’s actions or reactions that occur because of their ‘border-crossing’ practices. For Dewey (1902), what is judged as the work of education for democracy relies on ‘being true to the full growth of all the individuals’ in a society (p. 7). To demonstrate how that happens, Dewey (1902: 6) argues that it depends on the individual interactions between teachers and students and the interchange of thought. In considering education for democracy, it is important to locate teaching as a political and moral act (e.g. Delpit, 1996; Slee, 2011). However, neoliberal criteria and values underpin how countries around the world are now competing in the measurement of their ‘progress’ in education (Ong, 2006). By contrast, transnationalism presents distinct mutations of migration and citizenship (Soong, 2017). The extent, directions and forms of interactions and partnerships between transnational teachers and host society challenge established notions of democracy involving rights and responsibilities, as an informal process, in preparing young people for their roles as democratic actors.

A key characteristic of contemporary global education discourse, amid escalating stakes, is educational attainment and achievement, where individuals’ levels of formal education are not only closely related to their future trajectories but the quality and performance of education systems demonstrate the viability of a nation’s education prestige in international rankings. These rankings lead to the emergence of globally integrated economic and educational flows (Ball, 2012). This raises the question: to what extent are transnational teachers regarded as a window into the dynamics and contradictions of education for democracy and citizenship? Furthermore, how might transnational teachers interrupt the notion of a homogeneous national identity given that their realities as teachers and as migrants are complex? In exploring these questions and issues that transnationalism raises in relation to democratic education, I will next review the concept of transnationalism in more detail.

Transnationalism as a social field: a conceptual lens

The term transnationalism was first used by Bourne (1916) to define the importance of American immigrants maintaining their culture. Maintaining culture for waves of immigration – such as Chinese immigrants (Zhao, 2002) or Irish migrants (Quinlin, 2004) – was vital for them as their move to America was a permanent settlement. According to Basch et al. (1994), transnationalism comes in many varieties distinguishable by the way activities are conducted and by whom. More recently, the nature of contemporary transnationalism has been used with increased frequency, specifically examining new trends in immigration patterns (Vertovec, 2009). To date, several approaches within transnational migration scholarship have fine-tuned concepts and analysed human flows in a nuanced manner. For instance, using mainly ethnographic research on migrant communities, transnational migrant scholars such as Peggy Levitt and Glick Schiller have observed how the outflow of transnationals from non-industrialised countries (e.g. Latin America, India and Nepal) is said to have shrunk the home countries’ capacities for economic autonomy, thereby reducing the lives of migrants to a product of capitalism (e.g. Levitt, 2001).

The effects of transnationalism have also been recognised as a diverse and contested set of practices, giving more space to individual agency (e.g. Levitt and Schiller, 2004). Building on Bourdieu’s (1990) concept of social field, Levitt and Schiller (2004) call for attention to the meaning of ‘trans’ captured as a social field theory of society to analyse the lived experience of border-crossing such as starting a different life in another nation. According to Levitt and Schiller (2004), transnational social fields are not only multidimensional, they also connect actors through direct and indirect relations across borders, which are often unequally exchanged, organised and transformed due to power relations. Such a transnational framework has given way to new insights into immigrant experiences and acculturation, challenging the proponents of classic migration approaches. In this sense, researchers adopting this framework question the ‘nation-state’ as a unit of social analysis (e.g. Wimmer and Schiller, 2003) and place the concept ‘trans’ in front of the term ‘nation’.

Within the education sector, there is evidence of a transnational teacher population embracing principles of free-market capitalism and leaving their home countries for better teaching prospects overseas (Ong, 1999; Reid, 2016). Levitt and Schiller (2004) recognise agency of individual actors as embedded in a social field in light of Bourdieu’s framework where, according to Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992), field is defined as consisting ‘of a set of objective, historical relations between positions anchored in certain forms of power (or capital)’ (p. 16). Furthermore, as transnational teachers encounter fields with rules which are new to them, their habitus must gauge the field, figure out the logic of the field and how to best position oneself. Habitus, as a socialised subjectivity, is a product of embodied social practices and is considered as a tool for helping transnationals to mediate change within a foreign field (e.g. Soong et al., 2018). Exploring experiences of transnationalism for these teachers, I argue, requires tools to theorise how they negotiate their subjectivities in and between the transnational fields. However, much is still unknown how individuals mediate sociocultural complications, and when their personal and professional identities are working against them in the new social field (Soong et al., 2018). This is where I have previously drawn on what Guarnizo (1997) calls a ‘transnational habitus’ to explore the experiences of a group of Western transnational teachers teaching in elite international schools in Shanghai (Soong and Stahl, forthcoming).

Similarly, by recognising that individuals can be embedded in a transnational social field, Levitt and Schiller (2004) distinguished the everyday relationships and relationships of individuals by their ‘ways of being’ and ‘ways of belonging’. ‘Ways of being’ refers to the actual social relations and practices that individuals engage in rather than to the identities associated with their actions. By contrast, ‘ways of belonging’ refers to practices that enact an identity which shows an intentional connection to a specific group. This means that individuals who are embedded within a social field, such as an institution, can choose to act or identify with the cultural politics associated with that field. Such ways of belonging mark the kind of identity that combine visible action, such as wearing a Jewish star or Hijab, an awareness of what that action signifies. Despite the differentiation between transnational ways of belonging and ways of being, studies have shown that individuals within transnational social fields can combine both ways of being and ways of belonging in specific contexts, in a non-sequential way at different points of time. In this sense, the work of becoming an ‘Australian teacher’ – for transnational teachers – can involve a meaningful understanding of ways of being and ways of belonging. Such an approach brings the teacher’s activities of interaction, teaching and learning to the fore, rendering the experiences of ‘trans’ within the social field of transnationalism as visible and humanised. Critical to theorising the experience and identity-formation of transnational teachers involves considering the shift in how their habitus contributes to their transnational teacher subjectivities, deciphering the logic of the transnational social field as intersecting with both the ways of belonging and being.

Thus, transnationalism is defined as a construct that places the experiences of migrants at the core of global mobility (Castles et al., 2014) and seeks to capture the complexities of their mutual adaptations to both home and host countries. However, there is no singular essentialist characterisation of transnationalism (Vertovec, 2004). As such, the experiences of transnationalism should not be theorised as universal and the transnational identities of teachers as permanent. To elucidate in detail about what the transnational social field might mean within the context of transnational teachers and their sociocultural influence for democracy in education, the next section provides a contextual picture of who and where they are located. The purpose is to illustrate the contested picture of the transnational social field – one that is characterised by a contested set of relationships, practices and values which do not always unfold in the same way.

Transnational teachers and their local–global work

There is some consensus that in the current political context, neoliberal forces are shaping teachers’ work in much of the Western world (Ball, 2012; Rizvi and Lingard, 2010). In her examination of the global governance agendas that frame teachers’ work, Robertson (2012) outlines two main approaches: the first centres education as an investment in human capital, influenced by economics of education; while the second approach focuses on championing universal literacy as a key priority for fulfilling the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Both these approaches set about outlining policies of accountability and standards giving the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development symbolic technical and moral control of teacher practice, in regulating the framing of the 21st-century teacher (Reid, 2016; Robertson, 2012). While this is occurring at the level of the nation, the emergence of transnational teachers is inevitably part of an expanding global governance agenda (Robertson, 2012).

Bureaucracy is a major issue described in empirical research of transnational teachers in Australia and around the world (e.g. Beynon et al., 2004; Janusch, 2015). Teachers are often required to pass a language proficiency test if the host country’s language is not their native language. In Australia and other countries such as Germany, it is the processes of (re)certification and taking additional course work or teaching practicums that have been found to be lengthy, costly (Collins and Reid, 2012) and sometimes ‘de-skilling’ (Walsh et al., 2011: 660). For example, teachers from Fiji who are teaching in Australia have reported that they have also engaged in unpaid volunteer work at schools in the hope of securing a teaching position (Voigt-Graf et al., 2007).

Teaching can still be very difficult even for those who have long-term teaching contracts. The challenges continue to persist, more so for those who come from countries where English is not the first language (Bense, 2016). For most of them, their teaching positions tend to be relatively transient with a high turnover (Bartlett, 2009). Such work conditions can lead to marginalisation on many fronts. For instance, Kostogriz and Peeler (2007) have observed a visible delineation of permanent and casual teachers in the arrangement of Australian teaching staff rooms, while there are increasing numbers of restricted employment contracts in Germany (Krüger-Potratz, 2013) and lower salary scales in Brussel (Caravatti et al., 2014). The ‘professional isolation’ some transnational specialist teachers face among their colleagues in school (Santoro et al., 2001: 71) exacerbates the impact of casualisation with some teachers even appointed to teach in subject areas they were not qualified to teach (Maylor et al., 2006). While these studies have focused on transnational teachers, local teachers in many schools do also face similar challenges due to staffing issues (KrÜger-Potratz, 2013 as cited in Bense, 2016).

Similarly, in the United States and England, many transnational specialist teachers in maths and science subjects were concentrated in certain low-income demographic areas (McNamara et al., 2007). Yet, empirical research has highlighted they struggled greatly because of an absence of community knowledge and connections (Collins and Reid, 2012), which leads to challenges related to student behaviour and classroom management. Not only have these transnational teachers moved from their cultural frame of reference (Bartlett, 2014), Collins and Reid (2012) have also reported limited support given to transnational teachers as they adjusted to different teaching practices such as differentiation, unexpected emotional and physical abuse of teachers by students, differing parental expectations and increasing teacher accountability. In fact, 12% of the transnational teachers in Collins and Reid’s (2012) study reported that they experienced some level of language barriers such as having an accent as a cultural hurdle to communicate meanings (Bense, 2016). Bartlett (2014) argued that the success of teacher migration for receiving countries is ‘dependent on teachers’ reception into the labour market and their effectiveness in the education system’ (p. 8).

Capitalist modernity and increasing globalisation have shaped how transnational teachers respond to struggles in reconciling the need to belong to a host society with their hopes to live life on their own terms. Such struggles can generate transformations (e.g. Soong et al., 2018). If transnational teachers are seen as ‘brain gain’ for receiving countries (Collins and Reid, 2011: 45) and are able to find agency within the broader constraints, there are still unresolved questions which need further investigation, especially how they perceive democracy, given that their work and lives in their host countries are constituted by ambivalence and insecurity. Nation-centric policies are continuously disrupted by supranational policy networks (Ball, 2012) and by global flows of people, ideas, finance, media and cultures (Appadurai, 1996), which are simultaneously in flux and bounded. In reading this way, I concur that the notion of ‘transnationalism’ as a social field theory can be understood as a new analytical approach to provide insights into the nature and logics of transnational flows (Vertovec, 2004). Rather than seeing the practices and social identities of transnational teachers as enacted across boundaries as out of ordinary, such theory calls into question the neat divisions of society into local, national, transnational and global.

Implications for education for democracy

Education for democracy involves a commitment to fulfil common humanity and equal ends for all people (Dewey, 1902). To foreground an education which fulfils democratic values across national and cultural borders, I contend that we should take note of the border work in the form of transnational, cross-border mobility and differentiated lived experiences of transnational teachers. For example, according to studies on the needs of refugee students (e.g. Taylor and Sidhu, 2012), countries accepting refugees and asylum seekers for settlement, encounter serious implications for institutions concerned with human rights and civic virtue.

Although transnationalism as a concept places the experiences of migrants at the core, it has importantly placed social responsibility and education for democracy as a key site for constituting the nation. For example, refugee families and children have been found to navigate and negotiate the Australian cultural and sociopolitical conditions in order to reimagine themselves as becoming Australian citizens (Soong and Comber, 2017). Yet, because they were economically and socially marginalised, these refugee families were caught living in a transnational state of limbo, of not knowing whether their previous nationality, religion, ethnicity and culture would be recognised as legitimate forms of social belonging in Australia. Their liminal state of transnational experience raises critical questions about the purpose of education for democracy and its benefits for members, and non-members, of host societies, when their rights to be heard are muted.

Reconfiguring the concept of a changing society through transnationals can help us to make sense of what is happening to democracy and citizenship, and how everyday transnational social relations and contexts experienced by transnational teachers can be a useful conceptual lens to understanding education for democracy. Little and Bartlett (2010) identify the conception of the experiences of the ‘migrant teacher’ as an interplay of global flows shaped by patterns of horizontal differences in locality, language, pedagogy, practices, systems and cultures, as well as patterns of vertical differences including those structured by competition, inclusion, exclusion and unequal resources. However, we cannot deny how successful the doctrine of neoliberalism has been in its translation ‘into the language of experience, moral imperative, and common-sense’ (Apple, 2000: 23), with consequential effects on education policy and practice. In this framing, the neoliberal narrative governing the lives of transnational teachers suggests that teaching in Western societies is seen as an esteemed cultural capital. Such capital can be converted into economic gains for the future (Soong, 2016) as one’s cultural and social worth is measured against one’s contribution to economic growth of society. Such neoliberal perspectives on education impede the possibilities of authentic interaction among different people from various transnational groups and cultural traditions. They are also counterintuitive to the core idea of democracy, where the rights of individuals are a dimension of relationality (Donati, 2011), involved in localities and subordinated to distributive justice (Fraser, 2003).

Transnational teachers are not just another group of individuals subjected to neoliberal policy influence and education market capitalism (Harvey, 2005). Transnational teachers are powerful agents of cultural and social change, effecting transformation as border crossers. In sum, there are three kinds of potential transformation transnational teachers can play, critical to the education for democracy:

Generating diversity as a powerful asset for learning – when transnational teachers are given opportunities to generate their diversities as assets for learning, students learn more about human rights through their own transnational cultural and experiential filters. This might include considering internal transnational diversities, mediated by country of origin, prior schooling and teaching experiences in multiple countries or home country, and one’s multiple linguistic abilities and identities.

Cultivating transnational civic engagement – this directly engenders critical knowledge exchange and agency. In doing so, transnational teachers relate to their own cultural frames of reference for understanding their ethnically diverse students, situating their teaching within their lived experiences of citizenship and democracy. It also helps transnational teachers to respond to local and international ways of reconfiguring their work as teachers.

Advancing transnational aspirations of both teachers and students – it is worth examining how schools have attempted to integrate transnational teachers living in constant ambivalence. It is important to ask how the aspirations of transnational teachers prepares their students for transnational possibilities and futures. Contrary to current Australian citizenship education approaches, I argue that schools working with immigrant, refugee and domestic students should prepare them for multiple possible transnational futures through engaging with the cultural, social and educational experiences of transnational teachers.

Immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers and transnationals are all border crossers and are trans-forming education in important ways. Expanding the work that transnational teachers do, can foster education for democracy, locally and globally, thereby opening possibilities for educational and social equity. For transnational teachers, a distinction is made that foregrounds them as subjects of mobility focusing on their experiences, desires and aspirations in relation to social belonging and as critical, culturally responsive educators who understand teaching as a cultural and political practice. To enable students to better appreciate differences and how these might be understood as sources of strength, I argue that we need to understand transnational teachers from a democratic perspective and allow them to offer conflicting ideas that will reframe education as a public, rather than private good.

Concluding thoughts

Although the Australian government has tasted success in expanding their education and migration pie, there are still isolated policies, including the issues related to refugee children, which remain unsettling and concerning. Transnational teachers can be seen as a model-minority migrant group – hardworking and adaptive. Rather than a study of economic and demographic flows and movement, transnationalism and its various forms can inform our understanding of education for democracy and its use to increase the capacity of education to imagine new forms of identity, nationhood and citizenship (Soong, 2017). This article responds to Apple’s (2000) call to unsettle the current translation of economic doctrines into the everyday language of experience. This unsettling comes from an awareness of the inherent messiness and ambivalence present in neoliberal transnationalism and its nexus with education, providing opportunities to demonstrate how Australian’s education-migration policy can be discriminatory and also plays a role in shaping the education cultures of Australian migrant communities. Although focused on transnational teachers, the debates described implicate much broader social questions regarding teaching about global issues of childhood, human rights and responsibilities, social mobility, class reproduction and the goal of education for democracy. Recognising the world of transnational teachers can provide important insights into the fluid nature of social process and taking a more holistic understanding can help provide nuanced perspectives to the complex contemporary power discourse and structures that reformulate ways of being and belonging.

Footnotes

Funding

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

Author biography

Hannah Soong is a Sociologist of Education in International Education, Teacher Education and Migration. She has specialised interests in the effects of social and cultural forces shaping the education and migration nexus, particularly around developing ethical engagement with global shifts and relations in education.

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Transnational teachers in Australian schools: Implications for democratic education

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Considering education for democracy through a transnational lens

Transnationalism as a social field: a conceptual lens

Transnational teachers and their local–global work

Implications for education for democracy

Concluding thoughts

Footnotes

Funding

Author biography

References