Asian international teacher education (AITE) students in Australia : unfolding the different perceptions of their challenges, and disentangling their sources of struggle

Abstract

In the last decade, a corpus of research has explored the challenges that international students from non-English speaking backgrounds are confronted with in their teacher education courses. This thesis focuses on Asian international teacher education (AITE) students in Australia, who face extra challenges on top of the stress and anxiety that most novice teachers would experience during their teacher education course, and particularly in their practicum. While cultural difference and English language proficiency are two of the most frequently mentioned causes of these challenges in the research, opinions about the key challenges for these students are still much divided. In addition, there is a paucity of knowledge about AITE students' own perceptions of their experiences. These issues are related to the problem of teacher shortages in Australia, and form the basis of this research project. This thesis studies the perceptions of ten AITE students in regard to their struggles to construct their identity as a teacher in the Australian context. Two main research questions guided the exploration of the research problem: Firstly, what are the key challenges that AITE students themselves perceive as confronting them in their course, and particularly in the practicum, and secondly, are these perceptions echoed by other key players, such as their university lecturers or supervising teachers in schools? What are their perceptions about the students' struggles, and do these perceptions match? The focus of this research project is on postgraduate secondary teacher education students whose first degree was completed in a non-Anglophone culture and who were doing an end-on course in pre-service teacher education. Ten students were recruited from an Australian university that attracts high numbers of AITE students in a Master of Teaching (MTeach) degree. Semi-structured, individual interviews, as well as group interviews and documentary analyses were used to collect the primary data. With a view to conceptualising the issue of teacher identity as membership of a community, which was identified by this research as a key challenge that AITE students face, a theoretical framework was established, based on relevant concepts from the following scholars: Miller (2003) on teacher identity; Kachru (1985) and Pennycook (2010) on English and language; Wenger (1998) on communities of practice, and Pavlenko and Norton (2007) on imagination and imagined communities. I argue that the biggest challenge that the researched AITE students faced is neither simply a language issue nor one of 'cultural difference', but involves the larger complexity of seeking to belong to the community of 'Australian schoolteachers'""a complexity that is composed of various barriers. Overcoming this complexity depends largely on the ways in which AITE students perceive themselves and how they are perceived as teachers. Thinking about new ways of perceiving the students and their challenges, and cultivating 'safe spaces', various imagined communities of practice to which they feel they can belong, becomes critical. This research project informs higher education policy-makers in governments and universities in Australia about the particular needs of such students. It provides an empirically grounded, theoretically informed investigation of the needs of AITE students and of the demands of their courses. It provides a basis for improving understandings of the process of orientation into Australian schooling cultures for AITE students or equivalent. Finally, this research suggests that teacher education courses should be reconceptualised for AITE students by addressing issues of equity (here positioned as a separate consideration from equality), and giving adequate attention to their special needs and differences.

Date of Award	2013
Original language	English