Subjectivities and the future of comparative and international education: teacher researchers and graduate student researchers as co-constructive narrative inquirers

ABSTRACT

This article presents a co-constructive narrative inquiry into the subjectivities of three female graduate student researchers (GSRs) from China, Vietnam, and Finland pursuing academic career paths in comparative and international education (CIE). Two American teacher researchers and their GSRs came to this research committed to collaborative action. They explored educational and professional journeys from the local to the global as teachers, educational administrators, cultural ambassadors, service-learners, and global volunteers. This article promotes scholarly conversations about how GSRs’ positionalities, reflexivity, social representations, and cultural practices shape their perceptions of educational norms through reflexive learning. Then, this article proposes scholarly dialogues about the roles of teacher researchers and how their social scientific knowledge, limitations, and suggestions can bolster their GSRs’ subjectivities in CIE research. Overall, this article provides implications for different transnational researchers and urges them to make collective endeavours to promote new insights about emancipatory research in the field of CIE.

KEYWORDS:

• Comparative and international education
• transnational researcher
• academic advisor
• graduate student
• collaborative autoethnography

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 The authors used pseudonyms for this paper. Institutional information is also constrained by the need for anonymity. The second teacher researcher recently moved to another institution, but he is still mentoring his GSR.