The number of schools delivering a curriculum in English outside an English-speaking nation is growing both in scale and importance, reaching 12,000 by 2021. Such schools are traditionally staffed by expatriate teachers and mainly from Britain and North America. In recent years, a newer arena of commercially driven "non-traditional"…

Although the impact of the global COVID-19 pandemic in terms of school closure and the sudden shift to online learning has started to be explored, little has so far been written about the impact on teachers. This paper addresses this gap by drawing on the first author's autoethnographic experiences of working in the growing body of…

Traditionally serving expatriate elites, international schools now increasingly cater to local middle-class families in developing countries. With the industry's explosive growth, attention turns to the role of expatriate teachers in preserving the institutional legitimacy of non-traditional international schools. However, expatriate teachers'…

The purpose of this qualitative, hermeneutical phenomenological study was to understand teacher relationships in non-traditional international schools. The setting included 12 Chinese internationalized schools, institutions serving local rather than expatriate students, offering a fusion of local and international curricula, and employing local…

International branch campuses (IBCs) are commonly used by nations and universities to achieve internationalization. Although existing research has examined students' attitudes and behaviors toward IBCs, few studies have investigated these issues in an intra-country context. Hong Kong institutions' IBCs in the Greater Bay Area of Mainland China are…

This article investigates how the International Baccalaureate's 'global dream' for education interacts with the national priorities of governments. In mainland China, a thriving international school market has been met with tightened government control. We draw on the analytical lens of 'cosmopolitan nationalism' to demonstrate how a cosmopolitan…

The paper explores the perceptions of host national teachers in China's international school sector, focusing on their views of expatriate teachers. It addresses two main research questions: how do host national teachers perceive the professional status and ability of foreign teachers working in internationalised schools, and what do these…

Xi Wu examines how national and transnational forces and discursive logic mediate international secondary school students' educational routes and life trajectories. Drawing upon an ethnographic research program involving Chinese students in a Canadian international secondary school, Wu employs Ong's notion of transnational cultural logics to…

The purpose of this capstone was to investigate how the experiences and attitudes of educators at international schools and how they impact their perceptions of inclusive education. In this mixed methods study, 52 elementary teachers at an international school in China were surveyed on their demographics, attitudes, and experiences with inclusion…

Recent policy changes to the regulation of international schooling for Chinese nationals in China have seen restrictions on curriculum, admissions and ownership. While there is evidence of the impact of these changes at the institutional level, it is not clear how recent regulation has impacted the actors at the phenomenological level. In order to…

This study examines the second language academic discourse socialization of two Chinese students who attended British Columbia (Canada) offshore schools in China. After an overview of offshore school structures in China, this article describes the perspectives and experiences of recent offshore school graduates interviewed at a Canadian…

Qualities of effective teachers matter because teachers are the number one school-related factor that impacts on student achievement. Although researchers in the United States have studied frameworks for evaluating teacher effectiveness, these frameworks are not focused on teachers working in international schools. Thus, they may not reflect the…

International organizations operating in China face difficult cultural, political, and regulatory issues that challenge their ability to operate successfully in the region. However, leaders who employ effective emotional labor strategies have been found to be more effective at building confident, optimistic, and resilient teams equipped to…

Secondary schools in the US and internationally have dramatically expanded students' access to the internet in the classroom. Students at many schools now have continuous access to the internet via a school-provided or self-owned device. The ubiquity of student access to the internet represents a large investment of time and money by schools, and…

Through a narrative study of three second-career teachers who started their professional lives as English-as-a-second-language (ESL) teachers and then became Chinese-as-a-second-language (CSL) teachers, we examine how the participants constructed their professional identities across their trans-professional experiences. In this study, we define…