Thinking about cross-border experience in teacher education during the global pandemic

If we were to identify one positive outcome of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is the global consciousness that has emerged as a result: The world today is truly interconnected. While global interconnectedness has long been recognised for some time, the incredible speed at which the pandemic has engulfed the globe over the last 12 months has brought home the meaning of this hackneyed concept. The pandemic has given us a very tangible experience of relating to, understanding, or imagining the anxieties and sufferings of those who are located in different parts of the world. Communities now understand the need to help prevent the transmission in a given locality by wearing a facemask or washing hands, for instance. It is now imagined as part of caring for others beyond local and national communities. This emerging sense of global interconnectedness has been hampered, however, by the concurrent rise of populist nationalism, including Trumpism in the US, and the so-called “vaccine nationalism,” where the richest countries monopolise access to COVID-19 vaccines while leaving poor countries of the Global South at greater risk. COVID-19 has exposed both the promises and challenges of developing global consciousness, with many implications for teacher education.

None of these concerns are new to those who work in teacher education, however. Indeed, teacher education programmes in many countries have been proactive in introducing global citizenship or global consciousness as one of the important values to be nurtured among pre-service teachers and to be taught in schools. Though these terms remain highly contested, there has emerged a policy consensus that teachers must be prepared to teach in a highly globalised reality of education and society today, where an increasing number of children come from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds, where more and more teachers are seeking employment internationally, and where many of the challenges today require local, national and global perspectives and solutions, including refugee and ecological crises and, of course, the global pandemic. It is out of this context, where teachers are positioned as part of the “solutions” to these complex challenges, that various cross-border learning, including international professional experience and service learning, are introduced as part of the core component of initial teacher education programmes today.

Indeed, APJTE has recently received a large number of manuscripts focusing on such cross-border experience for pre-service and in-service teachers. Included in this issue are six such studies, undertaken in vastly different contexts and involving different nationalities, including Australia, China, Hong Kong, Japan, the Philippines and the USA. What has transpired from these studies is that “simply bringing the two parties together does not necessarily result in meaningful interactions” (Amos, 2021). Cross-border experience, either overseas professional practicum or service learning within a disadvantaged community, presumes the existence of “differences,” either cultural, socio-economic or epistemological. And negotiating over these differences is considered powerfully transformative for those who dare to transgress the borders. This is because “learning about others is not simply an act of cosmopolitan open-mindedness, but an integral part of learning about ourselves and even viewing ourselves as other” (Kurasawa, 2004, p. 5). Cross-border experience can enable one to particularise and peculiarise the deep-seated cultural assumptions and structural features of her/his “home.” But this self-transformative potential can only be realised, when the encounter with others are carefully curated and mediated by educators.

In “What hypocrites!”: Interactions between Japanese international and white domestic students in a U.S. teacher education program, Yukari Amos shows how cross-cultural experience can easily result in the opposite of what it is intended to produce. Her work demonstrates that unless carefully mediated, cross-cultural encounters could simply reinforce the sense of normativity around language, “race” and culture possessed by the host US students. As Amos’ study amply reveals, cross-cultural encounters take place on a highly uneven ground. Unfortunately, the two Japanese female students, featured in her study, resorted to withdrawal as a form of resistance against cultural insensitivities and indifferences, hence inadvertently reinforcing the cultural stereotypes about Asian female students on US campuses.

The importance of careful curating, planning and support for a successful international professional experience was also stressed in Matthew Thomas’ and Debra Talbot’s paper – Exploring epistemologies: Deepening pre-service teachers’ ways of knowing through international professional experience. In an institutional ethnography of Australian initial teacher education students who undertook part of their school practicum in Bali, Indonesia, Thomas and Talbot vividly recount one dramatic incident in the school playground, where one Balinese student became possessed with evil spirits and underwent a spiritual cleansing treatment. Perplexing and even terrifying for the Australian students, Thomas and Talbot were able to turn the incident into a powerful pedagogic opportunity for deep conversation about different epistemologies within which the students and teachers in Bali operated. While Thomas and Talbot’s research falls short of presenting how students’ exposure to the different epistemology resulted in their serious particularisation of their own pedagogical practices, it does present the potential of such cross-border learning towards exploration of alternative epistemologies. Thomas and Talbot also make an important point about where the resources for epistemological difference reside; meaningful cross-cultural experience does not necessarily involve international travelling; transformative encounters with others can happen within Australia, where Indigenous Australians have developed sophisticated epistemologies that undercut both modern secularity and rationality around education.

Likewise, two more papers also involve cross-border experiences of preservice teachers and in-service teachers, but the others with/from whom the participants are to learn are the disadvantaged within the respective countries. Research by Genejane Adarlo and Mary Francis Therese Pelias, reported in the paper titled Teaching and learning with others: Situated encounters in service learning among pre-service teachers, examines the effect of a service learning programme within a university teacher education course in the Philippines, where preservice students learn to teach in an economically disadvantaged community. Just like the previous studies mentioned here, Adarlo and Pelisa also speak to the importance of programme design and active roles of the program facilitator in making service learning educational meaningful for pre-service teachers’ professional identity development. Perhaps, the study could have complicated the findings a bit by foregrounding the inherently uneven relationship between the pre-service student teachers and the disadvantaged community. It does not indicate, either, whether or not the otherness of the community served as a catalysis for students’ profound unlearning of their culturally coded (middle-class) assumptions about teaching and learning and for their critical awareness of the causes of underachievement of the disadvantaged students.

In the next paper titled, Understanding teachers’ emotional trajectory: Voices from volunteer teachers in an educationally and economically under-developed context, Xiaodong Zhang gives us a glimpse into the voluntary teaching scheme in China designed to address the disparity in educational qualities between urban centres and rural areas. Zhang’s research follows the emotional trajectory of one university lecturer based in a top-ranked university in a metropolis who volunteered to teach in a university teacher education programme in an economically underdeveloped part of China. The research examines the complex interactions between contextual factors and the volunteer teacher’s shifting emotional states. It shows how this particular individual called Peter coped with the new context of teaching, competitive demands for research outputs coming from his home institution, and the consequences of regional underdevelopment on his day-to-day teaching work. While the very research design, including the daily reflective journal writing and interviews, served to support his reflective processes during the one-year voluntary work, the research offers little in terms of how his cross-border experience might have triggered deep questioning and unlearning of his knowledge of teaching and learning. Peter commenced his community service with an aspiration that “I can bring the latest methods I have learned during my doctoral education in the U.S … ” If the voluntary service was meant to be a transformative cross-border learning, then perhaps this initial mindset could have been revisited and questioned so that Peter could learn to transcend the deficit theorisation of underachievement and estrange his own privileged self and knowing.

It is this tenacity of hierarchy of difference that Mun Woo Lee and Sung Yeon Kim explore in the context of English as a foreign language (EFL) teaching in “I may sound like a native speaker, but … I’m not”: Identities of Korean English teachers with transnational experience. In the context of EFL teaching, the “native speaker” ideology powerfully regulates what “real” EFL teachers should look like and sound like. Despite their extensive international experiences and advanced linguistic competencies, the seven EFL teachers, featured in their study, considered themselves as “non-native” speakers and subscribed to the socially constructed notion of “native speakers.” Here, “native speakership” is defined in terms of properties that are innate and irreversible; one has to be born as a White American in order to be recognised as a native English speaker. Lee and Kim argue that these Korean teachers’ self-identification as non-native EFL teachers reinforces the existing binary between native and non-native and the hierarchy among world Englishes and various English-language speakers, wherein monolingual English-speaking White individuals from the US are constituted as the “real” speaker of English. Their study helps us stay vigilant of the persistent cultural, symbolic and institutional forces that lock our understanding of human differences within the pretexting dichotomies and hierarchies.

What has been missing in these studies introduced thus far is the reciprocal nature of cross-border/cross-cultural experiences. That is, these studies tend to focus on how the introduced programme shaped or reshaped the identities, emotions and epistemologies of the participants, while saying little about how they impacted the students, teachers and the communities that hosted them. It is this void that Benjamin Moorhouse and Gary Harfitt fill in their paper Pre-service and in-service teachers’ professional learning through the pedagogical exchange of ideas during a teaching abroad experience. Looking at the effect of teaching collaboration between visiting practicum teachers from Hong Kong and Chinese English language teachers who served as their host, Moorhouse and Harfitt’s research demonstrates how the specific arrangement of the programme – co-teaching between the Hong Kong practicum teachers and Chinese host teachers and their collaborative engagement in the Lesson Study – facilitated productive mutual learning. It is unclear, however, to what extent the Hong Kong pre-service students and Chinese teachers learn to particularise and peculiarise their own assumptions about teaching and learning through the cross-cultural encounter. Perhaps, to foreground the potentially transformative effects of cross-border learning, the study could have been more explicitly situated within the ongoing divide that characterises the Hong Kong–China relationship today; its tense dynamics and the uneven flows of cultural and pedagogical influences that are mediated by them.

As you have seen by now, we have tried to do something beyond the usual cursory introduction of the articles included in this issue; we have critically engaged with them and raised some questions to push the discussion further. This is in line with our editorial stance, expressed in our Call for papers: A new agenda for teacher education research (see Biesta, Takayama, Kettle & Heimans, 2020), where we laid out the eight critical challenges for our field to consider. All the eight challenges have informed our discussion of the six articles above, but the third challenge in particular is the most relevant, which asks us to “engage explicitly with both the transnational and intranational politics of knowledge production and demonstrate strong reflexivity about what one’s research does in relation to such broader politics of knowledge” (p. 457). We think that some of the articles discussed above nicely respond to this challenge. We sincerely hope to see more manuscripts coming over our desks that explicitly address any one of the challenges we posed or even suggest a new challenge for us to include!

Before we let you explore these wonderful articles, we would like to announce the members of our new editorial board for APJTE. In reconstituting the editorial board under our editorship, we attempted to internationalise and diversify it to reflect the regions of the world from which the journal attracts manuscript contributions. We have particularly sought out the experts in teacher education based in the Asia-Pacific region, while at the same time preserving our intellectual links with some of the leading scholars outside the region. We thank the new board members for agreeing to serve the journal. We will rely upon them from time to time for their intellectual and pragmatic guidance.

New Editorial Board Members:

1. Professor Mere A. Berryman – University of Waikato, Aotearoa/New Zealand

2. Professor Xiangming Chen – Peking University, China

3. A/Professor LAM Chi Ming – The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

4. Professor Anne Phelan – The University of British Columbia, Canada

5. Professor Jo-Anne Reid – Charles Sturt University, Australia

6. Professor Leonie Rowan – Griffith University, Australia

7. Dr Eisuke Saito – Monash University, Australia/Japan

8. A/Professor Kabini Sanga – Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa/New Zealand

9. Dr Marnee Shay – University of Queensland, Australia

10. Professor Parlo Singh – Griffith University, Australia

11. Associate Professor Youl-Kwan Sung – Kyung-Hee University, South Korea

12. Associate Professor Charlene Tan – National Institute of Education, Singapore

13. Professor Tom Are Trippestad – Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Norway

14. Professor Hoang Van Van – Vietnam National University, Viet Nam

15. Dr Lew Zipin – Victoria University, Australia

Thank you and stay safe.

APJTE Editorial Team