The Imagination of Mobility: Windows into Australian Teacher Education as a Site of Transnational Lifeworld Negotiations

Current development in global migration flows reveals a rapid increase in student mobility through international education. However, the study of teacher education-migration nexus is relatively unknown in migration and education research. This paper aims to address such a lacuna. Taken from a larger longitudinal study, this paper offers a hermeneutic phenomenological examination of four international pre-service teachers undertaking Masters in Teaching in one large Australian university. They arrive on student visas with the intention to be qualified to teach, and gain permanent resident status, upon graduation in Australia. Such motivation is an important dimension of transnationalism situated within their social imagination of the West. Drawing on Appadurai's (1996) work on imagination, I identify two broad currents that shape their imaginations to migrate to Australia through teacher education studies, namely: Fitting-In that explores the forms, contents and workings of cultural constructions of power that are being played out in the teaching practicum sites; and Looking-Out that explores their continuous struggle to maintain balance between space and relationships which was not experienced back in their home country. These two currents provide nuanced engagements to understanding pre-service teacher-mobility, as a subset of student-migrants, in adopting the identity of a transnational profile. Such currents of imagination are central to understanding how Teacher Education can influence the intercultural adaptations of student-migrants to institutional practices in university and schools, and the ways in which Teacher Education has the potential to shape the capacities and productions of transnational subjects who embody specific forms of fitting-in and looking-out.