Transnational Students and Mobility by Hannah Soong

Author:Hannah Soong [Soong, Hannah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367869748
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2019-12-12T00:00:00+00:00

Teaching Studies of Society and Environment (SOSE)

Although SOSE is not a language subject, for both local and international pre-service teachers, especially Chong, it presents a struggle. This is because SOSE requires access to the dominant schooling culture which is embedded in a language-rich environment.

It is evident from his story that the nature of this subject highlighted his inadequacies to teach in Australian schools. The teaching of SOSE made Chong feel like a ‘cart without two wheels’ (06/05/2010). One of the missing wheels is observed to be the lack of time. In fact, amongst the student-migrants in this study, Chong was the only one who was teaching more classes and hours than what was stipulated in the basic requirements for all pre-service teachers to undergo their teaching practicum. The subjects that Chong was tasked to teach included one class Year 10 Chinese History and Year 9 SOSE on First Generation of Immigration and Year 10 International Studies focusing on non-government organisations.

The other missing wheel is perceived lack of support. Chong’s inner struggle to make sense of, and thrive in, environments in which different social norms and identity/role attribution prevailed. As an international pre-service teacher, with little or no experience teaching in Australia, trying to understand the type of content knowledge that was needed to teach students contributed to Chong’s teaching shock. For instance:

I remembered in the International Studies we did not get any resources. I have to come up with ideas and resources ourselves that we think are going to be useful for teaching in practicum.

(27/09/2010)

Additionally, each of the SOSE topics demanded a lot from him to plan three distinctly different lessons, assessments and resources. Before he could begin to plan, he had to first understand what he was tasked to do. A general subject like SOSE has a huge scope of topics which encompass a range of issues that integrates different disciplines – such as geography, history, sociology, and cultural studies – within the Australian context.

Chong perceived that the university has provided him with a lot of knowledge on the ‘how’ aspect of teaching a specific topic at the expense of the ‘what’ aspect. He further explained: ‘… too much focus on methodology … strategy … pedagogy … of certain stuff … to manage students’ behaviour inside the classroom and how to deliver knowledge but that’s not what I need now’ (06/05/2010).

To a certain degree, Chong’s struggle implied that, from his perspective, the university did not adequately cover areas that were crucial in the preparation of international pre-service teachers like him. The cause of Chong’s struggle partly reflected his lack of confidence to teach SOSE because he was not familiar with Australian curriculum and education structure. What he feared most was not the process of teaching the subject, but the lack of content knowledge of the subject. Unfortunately, this was not the focus of the Master’s programme. What Chong represented is the level of expectation that some international pre-service teachers might be looking for in a teaching course. In which

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