The Making of an International Educator: Transnationalism and Nonnativeness in English Teaching and Learning

Abstract

In the last decade, international teacher recruitment has accounted for an unprecedented number of nonnative‐English‐speaking teachers (NNESTs) from around the world hired to work in public schools in urban areas in the United States. However, the worldwide trend of international teacher recruitment, and its implications for issues of language, power, and identity involving NNESTs in the United States, continue to be an underrepresented area of study. In this article, the author looks at her own journey as a Costa Rican English teaching professional recruited to work as a teacher of English for speakers of other languages (ESOL) in the United States. Using critical applied linguistics, she framed this study within the theories of linguistic imperialism and World Englishes. Through autoethnography, and more specifically narrative inquiry, she illuminates the local processes of socialization and globalization that contributed to her participation in the phenomena of international teacher recruitment, and reflects on her contestation and appropriation of the various linguistic and racial positionings that she experienced as a NNEST from Latin America in the United States and back in her country of origin. This article portrays the process of boundary‐crossing and identity expansion of one NNEST going back and forth between countries in the expanding and inner circles of World Englishes.

Identities and ideologies in a language teacher candidate's autoethnography: Making meaning of storied experience

“…For the first two installments, I encouraged TCs to focus on recounting their past and recent language‐related experiences. Before installment 1, TCs read six sample autoethnographies (Canagarajah, ; Corah‐Hopkins, ; Donnelly, ; Manara, ; L. E. Park, ; Solano‐Campos, ) for the purpose of familiarizing themselves with the genre of autoethnography as a legitimate research methodology. Additionally, I devoted class time to the discussion of the intertwined nature of teacher learning and identity (Olsen, ), as well as the concepts of discourse and language ideologies in education (Pavlenko & Blackledge, ).…”

“…Autoethnography is an established qualitative methodology in the social sciences (Denzin, ). It has recently gained traction as an emerging genre of research in language education (Canagarajah, ; Mirhosseini, ; Solano‐Campos, ). Autoethnography is based on narrative ontological and epistemological commitments.…”

“…Scholars have examined LTI vis‐à‐vis emotions (Benesch, ; Song, ), agency (Kayi‐Aydar, Gao, Miller, Varghese, & Vitanova, ), investment (Barkhuizen, ), ideologies (Menard‐Warwick, ; Sayer, ), and privilege/marginalization (G. Park, ; Yazan & Rudolph, ). They have theorized the relationship between professional identity and sociocultural identities (Duff & Uchida, ), race and gender (Motha, ; G. Park, ), linguistic identities (Aneja, ), translingual identities (Ishihara & Menard‐Warwick, ), and transnational identities (Solano‐Campos, ). Scholars have also explored LTI emerging through (non)participation in communities of practice (Clarke, ) and negotiation of professional discourses (Trent, ) in TE coursework (Yazan, ), teaching internship experiences (Martel, ), and TE programs (Ilieva, ).…”

Exploring TESOL teacher educators as learners and reflective scholars: A shared narrative inquiry

“…Studies in the second strand include critical autoethnographies in which TESOL scholars (e.g., Canagarajah, ; Solano‐Campos, ) highlight how their transnational/translinguistic identities intersected with racial and sociopolitical discourses to shape their professional journeys as teachers and as scholars, but not as teacher educators. While these studies provide important insights about the developmental trajectory of some dimensions of TESOLers, they do not shed light on their work preparing teachers.…”

The ghost of nativespeakerism: The case of teacher classroom introductions in transnational contexts

“…Mirhosseini () argued that despite the growing interest of autoethnography in other fields of studies, its presence in the TESOL field has been marginal and scattered. Although this might be true, I think autoethnography has demonstrated a steady popularity as a method of choice in interrogating the nativespeakerism ideology embedded in TETs’ teacher identity construction when teaching in English‐dominant countries (Canagarajah, ; Jain, ; Lee, ; Liu, ; Manara, , Park, ; Solano‐Campos, ; Widiyanto, ) as well as in other non‐English‐dominant countries (Ng, ). These studies have demonstrated the significant, oftentimes unexpected ways in which autoethnography has created a dialogizing space to unravel the conflicting narrative voices surfaced by the nativespeakerism ideology.…”