Tertium Comparationis: Issue 1/2024, 30. Volume Denied recognition of teachers’ mobility experiences – case studies of teachers returning to Germany from schools abroad

In Germany, the mobility of teachers is almost exclusively discussed in the discourse of educational migration research with regard to newly arrived teachers and teachers who belong to an ethnic minority. In contrast, we focus on teachers who emigrate from Germany to work at a German school abroad for a maximum of seven years and then return. We present two case studies of teachers who returned to Germany in 2016, hence in the period after the “short summer of welcome culture” (Behrensen & Westphal, 2019, p. 3), one from Turkey and the other from the USA. Different types of empirical data are being analysed, following Grounded Theory Methodology as outlined by Kathy Charmaz (2014): In one case, we draw on a biographical narrative interview and focus on the returnee’s self-interpretation. In the other case we use ethnographic data to open up praxeological perspectives on the teaching practice of a returned teacher. By taking these different perspectives on returnees from German schools abroad, we contrast the potential of teacher mobility, especially with regard to multilingual education (García, 2009; García & Li Wei, 2014), with the risk of denied recognition due to the monolingual habitus (Gogolin, 2008) of the German school system.

Keywords
teacher mobility, schools abroad, multilingual professionalisation/education, translanguaging, biographical research, ethnography