Precarious privilege: personal debt, lifestyle aspirations and mobility among international school teachers

Abstract

Recent decades have seen an exponential growth in the field of international schools, and a concurrent rise in the number of young Anglo-Saxon teachers overseas. Such mobile teaching careers have largely been presented in terms of emphasising exploration, travel and lifestyle-related migration. While acknowledging such factors, we also draw attention to financial constraints, and in particular, to the challenge of personal debts, which weighs heavily over many Anglo-Saxon teachers. We therefore discuss international teachers' mobile trajectory in terms of a balancing act of negotiation between lifestyle and financial factors and point to a strategic trade-off between the two. Moreover, by emphasising the neglected aspect of indebtedness, we argue that, while a key point of appeal for such teachers' participation in the international school sector lies in the ostensible participation in the carefree, privileged environment of lifestyle migration that would have been out of reach for them otherwise, in reality, such horizons of opulence are limited, as teachers are locked into a precarious system that offers little protection and is highly unpredictable. In this context, the accumulation of professional experience provides only a limited pathway for assuming control over one's future destiny/destinationbe it professional, geographic, or financialand at times may even backfire.

Constructing International School Teacher Identity from Lived Experience: A Fresh Conceptual Framework

“…The authors’ paper advances our understanding of non-qualified (and perhaps even qualified) teachers in international schools by proposing three conceptual lenses for understanding international school teacher identity: ‘The Accidental Teacher’, ‘Third Culture Teachers’, and a ‘Typology of International School Teachers’. More recently, Rey, Bolay and Gez (2020) have also proposed an ‘original typology of international teachers’ (p. 4) which consists of three teacher types: the ‘expat’, the ‘local’, and the ‘adventurer’. Although this paper does not engage with this typology directly (it was published whilst this paper was in the course of production), many of the arguments made in relation to Bailey and Cooker’s use of a typology are equally salient.…”

Developing the notion of teaching in ‘International Schools’ as precarious: towards a more nuanced approach based upon ‘transition capital’

“…Resilience is a general term for teachers' overall positive mind-set for dealing with precarity; transition capital is an instantiation of resilience capital. We believe that 'transition capital' complements Rey, Bolay, and Gez's (2020) related concept of 'precarious privilege' by capturing the ambivalent and complex nature of the lives of teachers in International Schools. However, it also develops it by suggesting a specific strategy that teachers employ in order to overcome their precarity.…”

“…In addition to wanting to see the world, Rey, Bolay, and Gez (2020) argue that the 'young Anglo-Saxon' grouping of teachers is drawn to the International Schooling arena largely due to economic concerns; namely, personal debts. This in itself is a significant move forward in the academic discussion since few attempts have been to explain why teachers enter the arena.…”

“…The work by Rey, Bolay, and Gez (2020) is much welcomed, offering a basis for further critically analysing and theorising the growing scene. Firstly, it has been noted that there is a lack of research and comment on teachers in the field of International Schooling in spite of the enormous growth over the past two decades (Bunnell 2016).…”

“…This paper is our response to a recently published article in this journal entitled 'Precarious privilege: personal debt, lifestyle aspirations and mobility among international school teachers' by Rey, Bolay, and Gez (2020). That paper focuses on a sub-set of teachers in the rapidly growing body of 'International Schools', namely 'young Anglo-Saxon' educators.…”