Disruptive Navigating the Discomfort of International Teaching Placements: Resistance or Flexibility?

• In Event: Disruptive Learning Narrative Framework: Analyzing Race, Power and Privilege in Post-Secondary International Service Learning

Proposal

Classrooms within Canada and elsewhere are becoming increasingly culturally diverse, and this has led to the critical need for teachers who possess the skills and understandings to work across cultures (Smolcic & Katunich, 2017). Consequently, many teacher education programs now include alternative teaching and international opportunities that combine academic instruction and community-based service in an international context as part of their Bachelor of Education degrees (Larsen & Searle, 2017). While the popularity for these programs has increased, so has the complexity of the power dynamics. Questions have arisen around the degree to which the host community benefits from international service learning placements and how access to such placements is itself a product of the white power and privilege in academia (Thomas & Chandrasekera, 2014). The range of reported benefits of international service learning for teacher candidates are extensive, yet so are the possibilities for negative consequences in host communities. In this presentation we speak to a study of an international teaching practicum in a rural community in Uganda that draws on the lived experiences of ten teacher candidates and members of the local host community to reveal unintended consequences.
The Disruptive Learning Narrative (DLN) framework, comprising three intersectional elements: (a) disidentification, (b) dislocation, and (c) displacement allows identification of how some teacher candidates resist conforming to local teaching contexts and helps to explain the implications for the host communities. Disidentification is evident as some teacher candidates resist immersing themselves within the ebbs, flows, and expectations of the local context and instead, when faced with the very different context of teaching, the teacher candidates disidentified with their role as students and learners (which is the case in Canada) and identified themselves as experts in their new roles in Uganda. Dislocation is evident in the ways in which power relations shifted among the teacher candidates, from their position in Canada to their position in Uganda. Teacher candidates resisted (and explicitly rejected) the authority of local Ugandan educators. Rather than viewing themselves as teacher candidates learning from their associate teachers as would be the case in the Canadian context, some took on making decisions and informing the host community on how things should happen in Uganda. Finally, displacement was evident in how some teacher candidates, rather than embrace the international experience as an opportunity for developing as a teacher, sought refuge and security in their privileged positions. Poverty, lack of school resources, and linguistic differences were interpreted as lower competence, experience, and knowledge as they assumed authority based on their Western education and their confidence that they knew how to be a teacher.
This presentation will discuss how and why these teacher candidates ‘doubled down’ and resisted the possibilities of deep learning that can come from tensions and uncomfortable situations. The fault lies not in the teacher candidates themselves, but in how they were prepared and how we managed the tensions in Uganda. The presentation will be an opportunity to discuss how these tensions could have been better navigated to enhance deep learning.

Author

• Ruth Kane, University of Ottawa