International TESOL Teachers in a Multi-Englishes Community

Phan Le Ha is Senior Professor in the Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah Institute of Education, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Brunei Darussalam, and in the Department of Educational Foundations, College of Education, University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA. She is the author of books including Transnational Education Crossing ‘Asia’ and 'the West': Adjusted Desire, Transformative Mediocrity, and Neo-colonial Disguise (2017, Routledge).Osman Z Barnawi is Associate Professor at Royal Commission Colleges and Institutes (Education Sector), Yanbu, Saudi Arabia. He is the author of books including TESOL and the Cult of Speed in the Age of Neoliberal Mobility (Routledge, 2020).

All of us – nomads, immigrants, refugees, teachers, students, company executives, academics and farmers – are in flow, in motion and on the move, argues International TESOL Teachers in A Multi-Englishes Community. This is true even if physically we stay put. Methodologically innovative, scholarly grounded, and intellectually dareful, this book tells the story of this mobility, its challenges as well as its possibilities, especially how it looks like when it meets such a nice field as TESOL. It dares to ask, what does it mean to live in a time and a place that are neither neutral nor without history? At some point, especially for TESOL teachers and learners, we would not know if the stories told in the book belong to the authors or to the reader. This is the poetic of this book, you can’t put it down until the end. It is highly recommended, namely for those who are interested in that space of métissage between TESOL, mobility, historicity and negotiability.

• AcknowledgementsPreface: Putting Curiosities in Action: An Uneasy Journey of Exploration1: International TESOL Teachers: What’s Missing on the Ground?2: International Teachers of English in the ‘New’ Middle East: Saudi Arabia in Focus3: Engaging (with) Flavors of TESOL: Mobility, Space, Place, Neoliberalism, Multilingualism and Emotion Labor4: Unpacking Mobility Drive: Geographical, Personal, Financial, Professional and More5: Unpacking Often-Hidden Layers of Factors behind International Mobilities6: English, ELT and Perceptions of Peers and Students7: On-the-Ground Realities: From Training, Experience and Perception to Actual Classrooms8: Every Teacher is Different, Every Classroom has its Own Dynamic9: Sulaiman Jenkins: Examining the (Im)mobility of African American Muslim TESOL Teachers in Saudi Arabia10: Unpacking Hardly-Ever-Revealed Emotions, Pains and Complexities11: Abdullah Alshakhi and Phan Le Ha: A Much-Needed Conversation with Native-English-Speaking Caucasian Teachers: Emotion Labor and Affect in Transnational Encounters12: International TESOL Teachers Working in the Saudi ‘Trust House’: (Re)Conceptualization of Key ConstructsRyuko Kubota: AfterwordReferencesIndex