TESOL Teacher Education in a Transnational World

Turning Challenges into Innovative Prospects

Osman Barnawi, Anwar Ahmed, Osman Z. Barnawi, Anwar Ahmed

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000283549
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

TESOL Teacher Education in a Transnational World critically examines theories and practices in contemporary TESOL teacher education to shed new light on the intersection of transnationalism and language teacher education. It emphasizes the scholarship of transnational mobility of language teachers, and showcases critical research from diverse contexts.

The book fills a critical research gap by more fully examining the theory and practice of teacher education in a changing time when national identities and cross-border mobilities continue to figure prominently in scholarly discussions. Through a diverse set of epistemological, historical and theoretical perspectives along with methodological innovations, contributors of this volume not only index the dynamism of the scholarship of teacher education, but they also offer new forums for lively pedagogical debates. Featuring contributions from diverse educational and geographical contexts, including Europe, Asia, North America, and Latin America, the book moves the existing scholarship forward to more fully examine TESOL teacher education in relation to transnationalism.

This book will be of great interest to academics, scholars, post-graduate students, teacher educators, policymakers, curriculum specialists, administrators, and other stakeholders interested in language teacher education, TESOL and applied linguistics

1Introduction

Preparing language teachers for a transnational world

Osman Z. Barnawi and Anwar Ahmed

A rich body of research has emerged in the last three decades under the banner of transnationalism. A growing concern for globalization and its capitalist bent, a right-wing populism and a neo-nationalist protectionist approach to borders have inspired many social scientists to turn to transnationalism as an analytical tool. Today, as we write this introduction, the political borders of most nation-states are closed as an unprecedented measure to curb the spread of the COVID-19 virus. The mobility of people and goods has come to a halt in a way that no one has seen in the recent past. What does transnationalism tell us in this kind of situation? As members of a global TESOL community, what can we learn from transnationalism? Before answering these questions, we should take a look at the meaning and etymology of this important keyword.

What does transnationalism mean?

The prefix “trans” originated from the Old French and Latin. It refers to actions, movements, changes, and shifts as mentioned in the Etymology Dictionary:

“across, beyond, through, on the other side of, to go beyond,” from Latin trans (prep.) “across, over, beyond,” perhaps originally present participle of a verb *trare-, meaning “to cross,” from PIE *tra-, variant of root *tere- … “cross over, pass through, overcome.”

(Online Etymology Dictionary, www.etymonline.com/search?q=trans)

The term “national” originates from Middle French national and Old French nacion. It means:

“of or pertaining to a nation or a country regarded as a whole; established and maintained by the nation; peculiar to the whole people of a country,” 1590s, from Middle French national (16c., from Old French nacion), and also from nation + -al … Opposed to local or provincial (or in the U.S., state). Meaning “peculiar or common to the whole people of a country” is by 1620s. From 1802 as “established and maintained by the nation or its laws”. As a noun, “citizen of a (particular) nation,” from 1887.

(Online Etymology Dictionary, www.etymonline.com/search?q=national)

The suffix “ism” implies a doctrine, theory, practice, or system. It originates from:

French -isme or directly from Latin -isma, -ismus (source also of Italian, Spanish -ismo, Dutch, German -ismus), from Greek -ismos, noun ending signifying the practice or teaching of a thing, from the stem of verbs in -izein, a verb-forming element denoting the doing of the noun or adjective to which it is attached.

(Online Etymology Dictionary, www.etymonline.com/search?q=ism)

Taken together, trans-national-ism refers to multiple ties, interactions, and activities that connect people, institutions, and cultural practices across the borders of nation-states (Vertovec, 1999, 2009). Transnational activities operate in complex and multidirectional ways in today’s age of mobility; i.e., mobility of knowledge, ideas, cultural practices, capital, languages, goods, and people. Additionally, recent advancements in information and communication technologies (ICTs) have added a new dimension of “virtual mobility” to an already mobile world. ICTs increase the speed and efficiency of transnational activities in myriad ways. Notably, multiple ties, interactions, and activities in transnational spaces are manifested “in between the life-world of personal interactions, on the one hand, and the functional systems of differentiated spheres or fields, such as the economy, polity, law, science and religion, on the other hand” (Faist & Bilecen, 2017, p. 5). It is for these reasons that transnationalism has been conceptualized and institutionalized differently in different contexts and settings. The primary goal of this volume is to engage with the ways in which transnationalism intersects with the field of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). More specifically, the volume examines how transnationalism has been conceptualized, negotiated with, enacted, contested, and justified in different contexts and settings of TESOL teacher education (TE).

Conceptualizations and institutionalizations of transnationalism

Although scholars have investigated transnational practices since the 1980s (see, for example, Appadurai & Breckenridge, 1988; Kearney, 1995), transnationalism as a research paradigm first gained ground and popularity in the field of anthropology back in the early 1990s. Specifically, in their seminal book entitled Nations unbound: Transnational projects, postcolonial predicaments, and deterritorialized nation-states, Basch, Schiller, and Szanton (1994), the American anthropologists, used transnationalism as a research paradigm in order to investigate issues surrounding international migrations. Through their work, the concepts of transnationalism and “transnational social field” gained popularity. Basch, Schiller, and Szanton (1994) called for the development of a “transnational analytical framework” by conceptualizing “transnationalism as processes and of the construction of identities that reflect transnational experience, individuals, communities, or states” (p. 9). Since then “transnationalism” has become an important analytical concept and category in various disciplines including history (Iriye, 2004; Saunier, 2013), sociology, language education (Duff, 2015), higher education (Phan, 2017), political sciences (Sikkink, 1998), and curriculum studies, to name a few.

The project of transnationalism, historically speaking, was first developed in the United States. As such, epistemologies, theories, and research practices in the field of transnationalism were predominantly US-oriented during the past decades. Today, however, transnationalism has gained a firm footing in different settings and contexts across Europe, Asia, Africa, the Arabian Gulf, and Latin America with different ontological, epistemological, theoretical, and pedagogical orientations. Scholars in diverse geographical locations have used disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and multidisciplinary approaches to understanding transnational activities—political, economic, social, cultural, and educational—within their respective contexts. Such diversity of scholarly endeavors are evident, for example, in You’s (2018) Transnational writing education: Theory, history, and practice and Phan’s (2017) Transnational education crossing “Asia” and “the West”: Adjusted desire, transformative mediocrity and neo-colonial disguise. The field of higher education has recently witnessed numerous scholarly endeavors, including projects (e.g., Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation—APEC Transnational Education Data Collection Project—Cross-Border Provider Mobility), special issues (e.g., Mok, Han, & Jiang, 2018; Windle & O’Brien, 2019), edited collections (e.g. Garcés-Mascareñas & Penninx, 2016; You, 2018), articles (e.g., De Fina & Perrino, 2013; Duff, 2015), conferences (e.g., International Conference on Transnational Education), and books (e.g., Phan, 2017) on transnational scholarly activities.

Transnational activities and their durability, in one way or another, have been examined through “their degree of institutionalization” as Mügge (2016, p. 11) and other scholars (e.g., Van Amersfoort, 2001) noted. Transnational activities are institutionalized through “high” versus “low” as well as “below” versus “above” degrees. Other scholars have also “categorized transnational activities by distinguishing between various types of transnationalism” (Mügge, 2016, p. 112; see also Nell, 2007). These categorizations may take five different forms:

The first is transplanted homeland activities, where habits or conflicts between ethnic groups in the homeland are transplanted to the immigrant community … The second type is transplanted immigrant activities, which emerge when migrants return to the homeland with skills and ideas acquired in the host country … The third type is homeland-directed transnational activities. Here, migrants in the country of settlement direct their activities towards their country of origin. The fourth type, diaspora activities, is a subset of homeland-directed transnational activities for groups that do not have a homeland. The fifth category is country of residence-directed transnational activities.

(Mügge, 2016, p. 112)

What is clearly evident in the aforementioned climate is that transnational activities, broadly speaking, are manifestations of globalization and neoliberal free market ideologies. That is,

globalization has given rise to unprecedented levels of mobility of people and ideas across national borders, [and] it has also drawn attention to the growing levels of cultural diversity in most communities, raising the possibilities of both cultural exchange and conflict.

(Rizvi & Choo, 2020, p. 2)

Social actors in different contexts and settings have their own conceptions of transnationalism guided by commonly held (generalized) beliefs that we all “belong to a single global community” (Rizvi & Choo, 2020, p. 2). These beliefs, within the current turns and debates about Global English (GE), and the use of English in multilingual contexts, are located in a diverse sets of epistemological, theoretical, ideological, linguistic, cultural, ethical, and pedagogical practices (see, for example, Alim, Ibrahim, & Pennycook 2009; Blackledge & Creese, 2010; Blommaert, 2010; Duff, 2015; Li, 2012; Rumbaut, 2002). Collectively, in these scholarly works, the discussions and arguments that English, as a global language, has a potential to bridge boundaries in a transnational world are the key. One recent case in point is Rose and Galloway’s (2019) work on Global Englishes for language teaching. In it, the authors argue that “[t]he spread of English as a global language has resulted in the emergence of a number of related fields of research within applied linguistics, including English as an International Language, English as a Lingua Franca, and World Englishes” (p. xx). The emergence of these different fields of research also has numerous implications to TESOL policies, curricula, and pedagogical practices. Rose and Galloway’s (2019) arguments in many ways support Duff’s (2015) position that the field of TESOL/Applied Linguistics is now “increasingly concerned with identity construction and expression through particular language and literacy practices across the life span, at home, in diaspora settings, in short-term and long-term sojourns abroad for study or work, and in other contexts and circumstances” (p. 57).

In this volume, we will not only acknowledge the current debates and key theories about Global Englishes, English as a Lingua Franca, language teaching and multilingualism, transnationalism, and identity in relation to mobility, but we will also endeavor to move the existing scholarly debates forward. Specifically, we will take the position that despite the existence of numerous studies on transnationalism in relation to the field of TESOL, the nexus between transnationalism and TESOL teacher education remains relatively silent.

TESOL teacher education in a transnational world

As a profession and as a multidisciplinary field of scholarly study, TESOL is fundamentally concerned with various aspects of English language education, including pre-service teacher education and in-service teachers’ professional learning and development. In 1996, Karen Johnson called on TESOL teacher education programs to “find ways to situate learning about teaching within authentic contexts” so that teachers could make sense of their professional knowledge and act upon it “within the context of real teaching” (p. 770). Since the time of Johnson’s writing, the contexts of real teaching have changed so much! One of the changes with a significant impact on teaching and learning of the English language is the transnational mobility of people, ideas, pedagogies, and cultural practices. The contexts of teaching are no longer defined and negotiated primarily by nation-states and their priorities. Additionally, recent advancements in ICTs have added a new dimension of “virtual mobility” to an already mobile world. While, as stated earlier, issues of transnational mobility of language, identity, culture, ideol...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1 Introduction: Preparing language teachers for a transnational world
• PART I Epistemological, theoretical, and historical interventions
• PART II Spatial interventions
• PART III Technological and virtual interventions
• PART IV Policy, curricula, and professional learning and development
• Index