Teacher Development

An international journal of teachers' professional development

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Becoming and re‐becoming a teacher in the

Arabian Peninsula: Amal’s story of hope

Kay Gallagher

To cite this article: Kay Gallagher (2011) Becoming and re‐becoming a teacher in the
Arabian Peninsula: Amal’s story of hope, Teacher Development, 15:2, 141-155, DOI:
10.1080/13664530.2011.571491

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Teacher Development
Vol. 15, No. 2, May 2011, 141–155

Becoming and re-becoming a teacher in the Arabian Peninsula:

Amal’s story of hope
Kay Gallagher*

Faculty of Education, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

(Received 11 June 2010; final version received 11 January 2011)
Taylor and Francis
RTDE_A_571491.sgm

Teacher
10.1080/13664530.2011.571491
1366-4530
Original
Taylor
202011
15
kayg@hku.hk
KayGallagher
00000May
&Development
Article
Francis
(print)/1747-5120
2011 (online)

This paper is an account of the early career narrative of a young Emirati teacher,
Amal, against the backdrop of the radical reformation of state schooling underway
in the United Arab Emirates. Amal’s decision to become a teacher was influenced
by negative school experiences in her own childhood, thus fuelling her desire to
‘have a hand in changing things’. Although one of the very first of her compatriots
to acquire an appropriate initial English language teaching qualification, within a
few years of starting to teach she finds her qualification obsolete. Amal’s story of
becoming and re-becoming a teacher offers unique insights into the shifting sands
of school reform and the challenges it poses to local teachers, and highlights the
need for capacity building for a sustainable, locally grounded, quality state school
system.
Keywords: United Arab Emirates; teacher education; school reform; teacher
narrative

1. Introduction
This paper is an interpretive biographical narrative of the first decade in the teach-
ing life of a young teacher in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Narratives do not
exist in a vacuum, but are shaped by the social and historical contexts in which they
are told (Bell 2002), and this story tells what it is like to become a teacher of
English in a place and time of unprecedented education reform, where until very
recently teaching had languished in a ‘pre-professional’ era, in Hargreaves’ (2000)
typology, but is now being reconceptualised within a radically revamped state
school system. It recounts what it is like to become and then re-become a teacher, in
order to keep abreast of this rapidly changing educational environment, and to strive
to teach in an elite international private school as a minority national citizen in a
country where expatriates outnumber citizens by five to one, and where half of the
resident children are educated in the non-state sector (Ministry of Information and
Culture 2010).
This narrative offers an insight from the Arabian Peninsula into the education of
teachers as ‘emerging out of and through experiences in social context: as learners in
classrooms and schools, as participants in professional teacher education programs,
and later as teachers in the settings where they work’ (Johnson 2006, 239). The story
has features in common with the story of other young Emirati teachers, as well as its

*Email: kayg@hku.hk

ISSN 1366-4530 print/ISSN 1747-5120 online

© 2011 Teacher Development
DOI: 10.1080/13664530.2011.571491
http://www.informaworld.com
142 K. Gallagher

own unique features, which combine to illuminate many of the issues and debates
within the often turbulent reforms of the education system in the UAE today. But it
has wider resonances too, relating as it does to the global discourse on issues of
teacher identity and teacher qualifications amidst the demands for standardisation and
performativity wrought by globalisation. In terms of teaching trajectories today, there
is no longer a predetermined career life script (Bathmaker and Harnett 2010), and the
young teacher portrayed here must carve out her own path through the shifting sands
of educational reform.

2. Background
The teacher is called Amal, not her real name, and not only to contribute to anonym-
ity, but also because amal means ‘hope’ in Arabic and to teach is to have hope (Bell
2002; Halpin 2003; Van Manen 1991). Or indeed, closely related to hope, to teach is
to have ‘soul’, as Amal herself puts it. Thinking about what it takes to be a teacher,
she says: ‘It’s the soul of the person that makes teaching alive, really. That’s what
you’re feeding to the students. All that liveliness you’re putting in, all that knowl-
edge. Making it meaningful.’ Amal’s story is told here as a series of metamorphoses
undergone through her experiences in her first decade of being and becoming a
teacher.
This paper draws its data specifically upon three lengthy in-depth interviews
over the course of the last 10 years, and also draws upon personal email communi-
cation. Because of Amal’s fluency in English, and the researcher’s lack of compe-
tence in Arabic, our communication has all been conducted in English.
As a teacher educator who has been involved professionally with some of the
first generation of Emirati teachers of English for primary schools, in a society
where parallel rather than intersecting lives are lived by the various social group-
ings, and where the indigenous people constitute less than 20% of the population
(albeit a powerful minority, at the top of the socioeconomic scale), I am privi-
leged to give voice to Amal’s story. It is acknowledged that in so doing, I am in
some senses taking over her voice; however this is mitigated by her involvement:
Amal reviewed the transcripts of all of our conversations, asking for the removal
of some aspects, and reviewed and suggested amendments to a draft of this
paper.

3. Educational reform
Johnson (2009) observes that because teachers’ narratives are constructed in
particular social and institutional settings, they are not neutral but are constitutive
of those settings. The bisection of Amal’s early career story with an intense period
of reformation of state schooling reveals insights from a young teacher’s perspec-
tive into some of the critical classroom and school issues in that reform. Like many
countries globally, as portrayed for instance by Earnest and Treagust (2006), the
UAE is engaged in wide-ranging educational reform; unlike most other countries,
however, this is simultaneously occurring within a societal context of exceptional
socioeconomic and cultural transformations; transformations so dramatic that they
have been described as ‘unprecedented in the history of civilization in terms of
scale or speed’ (Bashur 2010, 253), and occurring within a country which ‘does
not fit ordinary norms’ (Heard-Bey 2005, 358). The phenomenon of rapid trans-
 Teacher Development 143

formation in all spheres of public life that has been embraced by the UAE in the
past two decades has been well documented, in particular by Davidson (2005,
2008, 2009). In this regard, it is worth bearing in mind that many of Amal’s
generation are first-in-the-family college entrants whose grandparents are likely to
have been semiliterate, and whose mothers may not have completed secondary
school (Sharpes et al. 2005), and therefore the educational strides being made are
enormous.
As a progressive young country, currently oil rich but looking several decades
ahead to a post-fossil fuel era, the UAE aims to establish itself as a knowledge-
based economy (Ministry of Information and Culture 2005), and in so doing,
aspires to develop ‘a world class education system that supports all learners in
reaching their full potential to compete in the global market’ (Abu Dhabi Education
Council 2010). These aspirations notwithstanding, critical evaluation of the educa-
tion system has forced a belated focus on primary and secondary state school
education after years of benign neglect, and since 2005 the school system has been
undergoing a period of radical transformation, encompassing curricular, pedagogi-
cal, infrastructural, and administrative reforms (Macpherson, Kachelhoffer, and
ElNemr 2007).

4. Teacher narrative and teacher identity

People by nature lead storied lives and tell stories about those lives, and narrative
researchers tell those lived and told stories (Connelly and Clandinin 1990). Teacher
narrative, both told and researched, is representative of the recent reorientation of the
knowledge base of teacher education away from a view of teacher knowledge as
received and static, towards an emphasis on the value of reflective personal experi-
ence, a move in which ‘narrative has been placed centre stage in teacher education’
(Johnson and Golombek 2002, 4). Growing out of Connelly and Clandinin’s (1990)
seminal work, and refined and redefined since – see, for example, Clandinin and
Connelly (2000) – narrative offers a powerful methodological means of gaining
insight into the lived lives of teachers.
A second major focus within recent teacher education discourse and informing this
paper is teacher identity. Identity is a multifarious and elusive construct, but has been
simply defined as being ‘recognized as a certain “kind of person” in a given context’
(Gee 2000, 99). Amal was a student in a BEd programme specifically set up to address
some of the weaknesses in English language provision in schools, by producing qual-
ified Emirati primary school teachers, and whose emergent identity as a collective
group of student teachers has been portrayed by Clarke (2006, 2008). That pre-service
student teacher identity, however, awaited testing in the fire of full classroom teach-
ing; and because teacher knowledge and understanding grow through being fuelled by
the daily acts of teaching, through further academic study, through interaction with
colleagues and other stakeholders, and through continuing professional development,
so teacher identity is constantly evolving, forming and re-forming (Johnston, Pawan,
and Mahan-Taylor 2005).

5. Significance
Amal’s story of becoming and re-becoming a teacher is worth telling for many
reasons. First, in its portrayal of the teaching life of a young Gulf woman, it offers a
144 K. Gallagher

rare glimpse into some of the triumphs and tribulations in the career of an Emirati
teacher. Secondly, in touching places and people beyond the Gulf, Amal’s story
underscores how human self-understanding is increasingly lived in tension between
the local and the global, ‘between my understanding of myself as a person of this place
and my emerging yet profound awareness that this place participates in a reality
heavily influenced by, and implicated in, larger pictures’ (Smith 2003, 50, emphasis
in original). Her story augments the sparse accounts of the lived professional lives of
individual teachers of English from diverse contexts, thus expanding the knowledge
base of English language teaching ‘in its multiple professional realisations’ (Hayes
2010, 58).
Although some features of Amal’s story are unique to her, many of her experi-
ences are shared with other Emirati teachers of her generation who have also been
interviewed by the author; indeed the collective sense of a community as young
teachers-in-the-making is evident in Amal’s frequent use of the plural pronouns
‘we’ and ‘us’ to describe her experiences during her undergraduate studies. While
there are now many young Emirati women like her with an appropriate initial
teaching qualification, there are however few to have forged ahead and actively
sought out continuing academic and professional development to the extent that
Amal has done. It must also be acknowledged that there are some who will never
be allowed to pursue further studies abroad, or even work locally as teachers, due
to family disapproval for a professional life outside of the home; for, as Bristol-
Rhys (2008, 108) explains, there are many young female Emiratis who ‘have
watched their dreams of graduate studies evaporate before their eyes as fathers have
intervened’.

6. Metamorphosis 1: ‘Scarred by the schools’

Amal was born almost 30 years ago in the UAE where, as a toddler, her first language
was Arabic. As a young child, Amal’s family moved to live abroad for a time, where
she started school and began to learn and speak English, and as she says, ‘forgot all
the Arabic’. Her family returned to the UAE whereupon she attended a state school
where, like all state schools at that time, the medium of instruction was Arabic –
which she then had to re-learn. ‘It took me years,’ she says.
Looking back on that experience of starting school in the UAE after three
years of schooling abroad, Amal remembers finding it very hard to adjust: ‘It
was a culture shock to me,’ she says. ‘I was very scarred by the schools here, to
be honest.’ Indeed many years afterwards, while observing learning and teaching
in a school overseas during her postgraduate studies, Amal was to be reminded
of her own schooling, confessing that ‘I was a bit teary because I could see the
kind of things that our students are missing out, you could see it during things
like assemblies. Just in terms of how they enjoy their learning, because I didn’t
enjoy my learning.’ She wasn’t just sad for her own remembered schooling, but
also ‘for the children back home who didn’t have all of these things’. Indeed,
one of the many paradoxes about the UAE is that one of the wealthiest countries
in the world has had, until the recent reforms, an underdeveloped state school
system, not just in terms of curriculum or pedagogy, but also underdeveloped in
terms of educational resources, in contrast to the comforts of many Emirati
homes – and indeed in contrast to the relatively generous provision for the
tertiary sector.
 Teacher Development 145

Another frustration for her was the pedagogy employed by teachers in her school-
days, which was dominated by teacher-transmitted rote learning and memorisation,
and Amal vividly recalls feeling frustrated by this as a learner:

In geography this used to really bug me. We learnt the properties of thirty minerals, for
example, but we never actually saw them … not even pictures! Never! We used to
memorise the lesson, then we’d come to class and the teacher would ask us to repeat it
– and that was the lesson. Every lesson! And that’s not just one subject … it was every
subject. Really, here they treat the child as a passive learner. They need more critical
thinking.

Another remembered difficulty for Amal as a school child was the language
awareness of her English teachers: ‘They used to say really weird words, like
“gov-er-nee-ment” for government. I couldn’t understand them and they couldn’t
understand me … so I just talked like them!’ Untenured, and receiving little or no
professional development, her teachers – at that time mostly expatriates from the
wider region – may not have possessed the level of spoken proficiency in English
as an additional language that she herself had acquired.
Despite (or perhaps because of) these negative experiences as a school pupil, Amal
decided to train to become a teacher herself upon leaving school.

7. Metamorphosis 2: ‘Have a hand in changing things’

At just 17, Amal entered a new BEd programme in one of the country’s English-
medium state tertiary institutions, commencing her undergraduate studies directly as
one of very few school leavers with sufficient English skills to begin degree-level
studies, without the need of the majority for a pre-university bridging year (Fox 2008).
Explaining at that time why she had chosen to become a teacher, Amal said that she
‘wanted to have a hand in changing things, in doing things differently’. She thus
shared the same initial idealism as many of her peers, and indeed, the same idealism
shared by student teachers in other global contexts. Fullan (1993), for example,
reports that the most commonly cited reason for choosing teaching in Canada is the
desire to make a difference. Amal felt furthermore that she could provide young
Arabic-speaking learners with a good English language model, having acquired a
native speaker-like accent as a result of her background and her time in the English-
speaking world as a young child.
Amal appreciated the applied nature of the BEd programme which had a strong
focus on practice in school settings: ‘I really liked that we had a lot of practical
experience,’ she recalled. ‘We did around 150 days in schools over the four years –
‘cos I counted!’ This focus on pre-service classroom practice was innovative in the
region, for until its establishment there had been no teacher education programme
with a mandatory practicum component, and therefore no practical initial teacher
training had existed in the UAE previously (Al Banna 1997). The programme
sought to redress this issue, as well as to contribute to the development of the teach-
ing of English in schools. However, by 2005 almost half of the teachers in state
schools still held no teaching qualification (Ministry of Information and Culture
2010; World Bank 2008).
While she was positive about the effectiveness of her initial teacher education
overall, there were aspects that Amal felt were missing. One was the need for a course
in Arabic to prepare her better for written communication in modern standard Arabic
146 K. Gallagher

(fusa), due to the fact of Arabic diglossia where two varieties of the same language are
used (Ferguson 1959/2003). In his study of language in education in the UAE, Al
Sharhan (2007) portrays the challenges of acquiring literacy in Arabic due to the inter-
play between three varieties of Arabic that young Emirati learners must master: the
colloquial spoken Arabic of the Gulf, the modern standard Arabic that is the medium
of instruction in schools and the language of written media, and the classical Arabic
necessary for reading the Koran. As an undergraduate student teacher of English,
Amal explained why developing further competence in modern standard Arabic was
important not just for her, but for all future teachers in the state school system:

If we look at what teachers need for teaching here in the UAE, I think we would have to
have an Arabic course. It’s really important. All the meetings are in fusa. You don’t want
to sound like you’re talking slang in the local dialect. Like when visitors come (referring
to officials from the Ministry of Education), they all speak fusa. So it would sound bad
not to be able to speak properly or write a report in it.

The non-inclusion of an Arabic course in the programme belies some ambiva-

lence – if not antipathy – towards Arabic within the state tertiary system in the UAE.
This is reflective not merely of the programme’s origins in partnership with an inter-
national university, but also of the internal ‘divided epistemological paradigm’ (Find-
low 2006, 25) within higher education in the UAE whereby only one or two
institutions engage with Arabic to any meaningful extent (Findlow 2000, 2005,
2006). Moreover, developments in language-in-education practices in state schools
were soon to begin to challenge the previous dominance of Arabic at school level
also, as discussed later.

8. Metamorphosis 3: ‘No whole-school approach’

While still an undergraduate student, Amal was looking forward to graduating and
beginning teaching: ‘I’m optimistic about the future and positive about it,’ she said at
that time. By the time she graduated with a BEd in English language teaching, she had
already got married and given birth to her daughter. She immediately got a job teach-
ing English in a state school, and enjoyed her early teaching years: ‘I really liked that
actually,’ she says. ‘I like teaching. I like making the resources; every day you’re
doing something different.’ However, she says wryly that she was ‘misled into think-
ing it was a bit easier than it was’. Although as we saw earlier, she was appreciative
of the applied nature of her undergraduate studies, ‘when we came into doing the
teaching, there was a big gap between what we were taught and what we could actu-
ally see happening in the schools’. It seems that nothing can prepare the novice teacher
for the reality of the early years of teaching; not even the most applied teacher educa-
tion programmes seem to be able to achieve this.
While enjoying teaching in her own classroom, at the school level Amal found the
lack of shared understanding and shared whole-school approaches challenging:

All the teachers in that school came from different universities, and we had no shared
understanding of what a good school is or what a good school has. We didn’t have a
system in the school … there was no whole-school approach for anything. I remember
on some occasions when I went to the school principal and said we need a whole-school
approach for discipline, she was like, ‘Everybody does their own thing; everybody has
their strengths and their weaknesses and you work with that.’ And I was like, ‘Some
things don’t work unless you have a whole-school approach, like for discipline.’ And
 Teacher Development 147

there were some other things; like in planning. We could have done it better if we’d done
it consistently through the grades.

This resonates with research by Alwan (2007) showing that teachers in state
schools in the UAE are dissatisfied with their working conditions. Amal was to gain
necessary space in which to reflect on and understand these whole-school issues
through her next challenge: studying for a part-time Master’s degree in education
while still teaching full time and raising her young daughter.

9. Metamorphosis 4: ‘If I’m not learning anything new, I feel spiritually dead’
In reviewing the literature on the phases in the career trajectories of teachers, Day
observes that after the beginning teacher period, a sense of teaching mastery is likely
to have been established by most teachers, and this is a time when ‘many teachers are
likely to seek new challenges’ (1999, 62). In her second year of teaching, Amal
decided to begin studying for a part-time Master’s degree in education offered locally
by an overseas university. As she explained, ‘I enjoy learning. If I’m not learning
anything new I feel spiritually dead. That’s what keeps me alive as a person. I love
learning,’ she repeated. ‘I like to talk about learning, I like reflecting about learning.’
The two-and-a-half-year MEd programme was delivered in a blended learning format
whereby lecturers travelled to the UAE to teach intensive sessions, supplemented by
online resources and online interaction, and augmented by face-to-face support from
a team of locally based tutors. An instance of the benefits of the globalisation of higher
education for those on the ‘periphery’, and especially valuable for females in tradi-
tional societies for whom postgraduate study abroad is not always possible or permis-
sible for cultural reasons, the programme brought quality international postgraduate
education directly to Amal.
She was particularly enthusiastic about the MEd module in educational leadership,
as it helped her to make sense of what she perceived as the ‘chaos in all the schools’:

I found the leadership module the most interesting. That’s when I saw how things can be
done differently; how things can be planned through policies to prevent the chaos that
we had in our school. It’s the same chaos in all schools. It’s just a matter of training, basi-
cally, and having shared understanding between all the staff. And having a leadership
that will make sure that everybody is doing what they’re supposed to be doing.

10. Metamorphosis 5: ‘A difficult and long year but most worthwhile’

As she was working towards completion of her MEd, while continuing to teach English
in the same school, Amal became increasingly aware of the educational changes that
were underway around her. She was concerned to hear that her state school was due
to become one of the many new public–private partnership schools which are co-run
and co-staffed by educators from Anglophone countries, and a key component of the
school reform agenda. Amal had heard from colleagues in other such schools that it
was very difficult to work with ‘two different administrations’. They told her that it
was confusing because there were no clear guidelines or structures for the respective
remits of the extant teachers and the incoming overseas teachers at that time.
Furthermore, following shortly on this influx of overseas educators into the state
school system, there was a plan to hire hundreds of so-called ‘licensed teachers’ from
abroad. These non-Arabic-speaking specialist primary school teachers would not just
148 K. Gallagher

teach English as a subject, but would also teach mathematics and science through the
medium of English. This would be a radical change in the state school system wherein
English had been previously taught as a foreign language, but would now become a
medium of instruction rather than just a subject of instruction in state schools.
Unexpectedly, then, within a mere four years of qualifying with the country’s
first tailor-made BEd degree in teaching English, Amal found her innovative
specialist degree in effect obsolete, due to the planned switch to English as a medium
of instruction. She would need to become qualified to teach mathematics and science
also if she were to survive, it seemed, and so she began to feel uncertain about her
future as a primary school teacher of English. She was also feeling suspicious of
‘foreign supervisors who have just come into the country’, and wondered, like many
of the extant teachers who worked in the schools, if they were going to ‘impose their
culture’ on what had been until then an exclusively Arabic-speaking school
environment.
While pondering her future within this revamped school system, she heard about
a scholarship opportunity for Emiratis to study for a Post Graduate Certificate in
Education (PGCE) in primary school teaching abroad. On return to the UAE, success-
ful students would be given a teaching position in an elite, private school. She applied
for this scholarship, was accepted, and went off to study overseas.
Uprooted from her home, her family and her familiar culture, it was a very chal-
lenging year for Amal. ‘It has been a difficult and long year, but most worthwhile,’
she wrote in an e-mail towards the end of that academic year. ‘It’s a really good
programme, but I found it very stressful at times.’ Looking back later, she spoke about
how tough she had found the winter away from the UAE: ‘It was grey all the time; I
missed my daughter; I was finding the course hard; my teacher didn’t like me; it was
dark so early; I was on medication.’ In fact, she had made huge sacrifices in going
abroad to study: she had to leave her young daughter behind in the good care of her
by then ex-husband (who was supportive of her studies) when she discovered the cost
of childcare abroad, flying back and forth every few months to see her.
Although other young compatriot teachers were offered a place in the overseas
PGCE, in the end it was only Amal who took up the challenge. She believes that it isn’t
possible to have any significant numbers of female Emirati studying teacher education
abroad, not only due to cultural restrictions on females travelling unaccompanied by
a male relative, but also because she wonders whether ‘other [Emirati] students would
be able to fit in’. It is perhaps worth noting here that she reported no negative experi-
ences of being racialised while abroad, unlike the experiences of male students from
the Gulf as reported for instance by Rich and Troudi (2006).
Her year abroad was a major challenge for Amal, especially the cultural challenges
involved in teaching in schools during the lengthy mandatory practicum periods. ‘I’m
not familiar with the culture,’ she explained. ‘All the other student teachers had been
through the system themselves, and had been teaching assistants in schools.’ She
found it particularly challenging dealing with the pupils because ‘These students act
differently. They’re more opinionated. You have to treat them differently.’ Not only
that, but there were linguistic challenges too: she had to ‘learn colloquialisms to
understand the students in school. I couldn’t understand some of the things they were
saying,’ she said. And there were context-specific challenges to overcome, including
lack of prior knowledge about such topics as reading a train timetable, or indeed famil-
iarity with English literature, which, as Amal points out, is a ‘main part of the curric-
ulum and of social identity’.
 Teacher Development 149

The discourse on English language teaching in the Gulf is replete with disapproval
by observers for the predominance of rote learning and memorisation in classrooms
(for example, Loughrey et al. 1999; Saunders and Quirke 2002; Syed 2003). While
Amal was highly critical of the rote learning which she herself was subjected to at
school, as we saw earlier, she was equally bemused by what she saw as an over-
emphasis on imagination in the overseas curriculum. It is somewhat salutary to hear
the wry remarks she has made as an observer from the Arab world about the pedagogy
in the western classroom, and here she describes her reaction to an idea for developing
creativity presented at a workshop she attended:

There was a lot of creativity, but sometimes they relied too heavily upon the imagina-
tion. I was at a seminar, and it was the strangest lesson I ever heard about. They actually
did a whole week; they wanted to try it out, to see how they could link the curriculum to
doing fully imaginative work. So they got a cardboard egg … of course these are foun-
dation year students … and they looked at the eggs, and it was under a tree, in a nest,
and then they had a monster coming in and they photographed the monster and it was
supposed to be a real imaginary situation where they went out into the open yard – and
they based all their lessons on that. They said that they would do a lesson plan based
upon what the students said, and what they wanted to do, and how they were going to do
the writing, so I thought that that was a bit too over the top. So, there was too much
imagination; also some of it had a bit too much violence really. I don’t know, some of
the stories were a bit, had a bit too much violence.

11. Metamorphosis 6: ‘What do I have to do to be recognised as a teacher?’

After her study year abroad, Amal returned to the UAE and joined an elite private
school where she continued to work alongside experienced classroom teachers
towards fulfilling the competencies required for the PGCE. During her first term in the
school, she e-mailed this plaintive (and capitalised) rhetorical question: ‘OH DEAR,
WHAT DO I HAVE TO DO TO BE RECOGNISED AS A TEACHER?’ But Amal
already was a teacher; and a well-qualified one at that, with a BEd and an MEd and a
year’s PGCE study, and she had four full years of teaching experience, yet she was
apparently still struggling to be recognised as such. It transpired that one of the many
challenges she faced in moving into the elite, private school involved her use of
English, as she explained. ‘In the school where I’m working now, I don’t have the
right English. I keep being told … that I need to, you know, “Just change a few words
here and there”,’ she said.

I have to change my accent at school. And try and do standard English, ‘cos my English
is not standard enough. I’ve been told in a nice way, ‘Change that word and this word’,
because there’s a whole system in the school about which words we can use and which
we can’t use. They’re very specific. So I do switch [my accent] a little, I do.

It was not just a matter of a standard accent, however, for although she had
achieved a high score in the international IELTS1 exam and exceeded the require-
ments for postgraduate study internationally, Amal had struggled the previous year to
pass the compulsory online English literacy test of spelling, grammar, pronunciation
and reading comprehension; she sat it many times before being successful. Further-
more, she had had to learn all the terminology of mathematics and science, creating
vocabulary lists in a feat of memorisation for which her schooldays would, ironically,
have well prepared her.
150 K. Gallagher

As well as the linguistic challenges she faced, Amal was also feeling insecure due
to the expectations of parents in the private school:

[Overseas], I had parents coming in to work with me and they were really cool. Now that
I’m back in the UAE, I’m feeling all these other pressures that weren’t there. I was
accepted [there], but here I’m being questioned. It’s because of all the pressure of being
in a private school.

Despite these obstacles, and although she works much longer hours in the private
school than she did in the state school sector, she says that she enjoys the challenge.
She feels she has more energy and is more productive than before because of what she
finds to be a more professional working environment, and she says she is especially
happy with the whole-school approach to issues, the team work, and the level of
consultation in the school.

12. Discussion
12.1 Local capacity building
In his investigation into the teaching of English in primary schools in Asia, Nunan
(2003) concluded that the money spent by governments on hiring Anglophone teachers
from abroad would be better invested in the development of the proficiency and profes-
sionalism of local teachers. Indeed, the Arab knowledge renaissance called for in the
United Nations Arab human development report 2003: building a knowledge society
(2003) requires qualified teachers with contemporary teaching skills and knowledge,
and the up-skilling of unqualified and under-qualified extant teachers had represented
a crucial component in the plan for reformation of the school system. Recent develop-
ments, however, suggest that the staffing policy for state schools in the UAE has now
shifted towards the importation of new teachers from overseas. Although she is
concerned about the cultural mismatch of ‘foreign’ teachers coming into the state
school system, Amal is also concerned that the extant teachers from the region ‘don’t
see the gap’, as she puts it: ‘They have no experience of other teaching systems, so
they fail to see the problems.’ She herself, because of ‘doing all these shifts’, as she
describes the metamorphoses she has undergone, now understands the gaps ‘which is
the reason I went [abroad] in the first place, so those gaps are filling in’.
Having studied and experienced teaching and learning in the UAE as well as inter-
nationally, Amal has been unsettled from her prior understanding, and such unsettling
of beliefs is the nexus of teacher education. The challenges that Amal is facing in
‘doing all these shifts’ reifies a global paradigm shift in teacher education, a shift from
a traditional notion of teacher education as institution-bound reproduced learning, to
teacher education which is based on individualised learning in a context that is simul-
taneously localised and globalised (Cheng, Chow, and Mok 2004). The UAE state
school sector needs to seek out and invest in its ‘amals’, its young hopefuls, in order
to build a strong cadre of locally grounded and internationally exposed educators who
do ‘see the gap’, and who, like Amal, are reflective teachers who engage in lifelong
learning to maximise their potential (Zeichner and Liston 1996). They need to be
encouraged to take up in-country postgraduate study for capacity building through
linkages with international university partners; they must be enabled to undertake
English language immersion and school observation trips abroad; they should be
provided with compatriot mentors; and they need a viable career structure in order to
keep them within the education system.
 Teacher Development 151

12.2 The right English

In the international school, there are tensions for Amal between her perceived identity
– how she is seen by others, and her claimed identity – how she sees herself (Buzzelli
and Johnston 2002): ‘It is hard to be an English teacher when you’re not English,’
Amal wrote in her e-mail, referring to her efforts to fit into the private school. ‘I have
changed my accent a bit; I have changed many things.’ She negotiates multiple, some-
times conflicting, identities: linguistically, she is an Arabic speaker from the Middle
East who can also claim a partial identity as an English speaker. In terms of citizen-
ship, she is Emirati, but with roots in other countries. Professionally she is, by any
global standards, a very well-qualified teacher, while still continuing to undergo
further training. With an undergraduate and two postgraduate degrees in education,
she has enjoyed high status in the state educational community, yet she struggles for
certification and recognition in the private school. As a childhood bilingual, she is
proficient in Arabic and English, yet is told that she doesn’t speak ‘the right English’.
On the other hand, when she phones her former classmates from her undergraduate
days, now state school teachers themselves, and speaks to them in their common first
language of Arabic, they answer her in English.
Findlow suggests that linguistic dualism such as Amal’s – enabling two identities
and two cultures to be claimed at once – may be essential for a society undergoing a
process of ‘acute global-local transition’ (Findlow 2006, 22). Indeed, in the field of
English language teaching, there has been a vigorous debate on the merits of native/
non-native speaking teachers: see, for example, Braine (1999), Canagarajah (1999),
Holliday (2005), Luk and Lin (2007), Pavlendo (2003), for insights into this discus-
sion. Amal however presents a challenge to that sometimes dichotomised debate, and
reveals the concepts as anachronistic in the new context of global English.
Britzman (1991) frames the challenge of teacher development as identity transfor-
mation in which teachers have to suppress aspects of their identity that are counter to
the prevailing cultural model of a teacher. We see this in the quite startling way in
which Amal is asked to change her accent and vocabulary in the private school.
Although comprising just 20% of the population, Emiratis form the highest socioeco-
nomic group in the UAE, yet she finds herself struggling for recognition within the
private school, indicative of the complexity of social stratifications in the UAE.
Clearly, teacher education, as Bates (2007) observes, is political, and ‘the socialisation
of teachers into the work of schools inevitably involves some kind of relationship with
the distribution of symbolic and material power within and between societies’ (127).
Yet in the shifting social and cultural landscape of the UAE, although she is a cultural
insider as an Emirati citizen, when her expatriate colleagues in the international school
turn to her for advice on aspects of local culture and society, Amal finds herself at a
loss to explain things for them due to the rapid social changes that have occurred: ‘To
be honest, I don’t know what the social rules are any more,’ she says.

12.3 Two school cultures

Amal’s sense of agency saw her plan a way for herself out of a state school system
under stress, and into the better paying, better managed, and more prestigious elite
private sector, which nonetheless presents its own challenges for her. She displays
flexibility in her willingness to teach in a variety of settings, and such flexibility has
been connected to teachers’ professional growth (Fullan and Hargreaves 1992).
Despite her strong sense of agency, bolstered by her considerable symbolic capital,
152 K. Gallagher

including substantial linguistic and cultural capital (Bourdieu 1991), she struggles
against an assigned identity in the private school. She recounts wryly the manner in
which she is introduced to people there, after four years of hard-won experience as a
teacher in the state sector, followed by her year abroad: ‘This is Amal. She has no
experience.’
The cultures of the state and elite private schools in the UAE are divergent, as in
most countries. Perhaps from the private school’s perspective, they don’t quite know
where to ‘place’ her; perhaps they wonder if she has the background to teach multiple
subjects through the medium of English. Perhaps they too are concerned about paren-
tal expectations regarding the identity of a teacher in such a school, as Amal herself
suggests. Nevertheless, in employing her, the school sends a clear message that
teacher identities, just like student identities, are ‘fluid, hybrid, multiple and dynamic’
(Lin 2008, 215), a powerful message for all stakeholders in schools at a time of
profound change.

12.4 New challenges and old values

Beyond contemporary questions of capacity building, ownership of English, and
teacher identity, there are more old-fashioned conclusions to draw from Amal’s story.
The first of these, as we noted earlier, is hope: hope for a better, brighter teaching
future; and hope for a better, brighter learning experience for children in state schools
in the UAE. As well as hope, there are also the traditional virtues of patience and
perseverance; for, as Amal says, the key to becoming a teacher is to ‘just be patient.
That’s what I’ve learned – just be patient. Stick with it. Take on board feedback.
Listen. Listen to what they’re saying. Do what they want you to do. And you’ll be
fine.’ There is also the old-fashioned necessity of hard work: Amal is aware that she
has worked ‘really, really hard’ to achieve what she has achieved, particularly in
trying to meet international standards.

13. Conclusion
Amal’s story is an instance of the universal truth that ‘teachers are always in a state
of becoming’ (Saha and Dworkin 2009, 6, emphasis in original), or as Clandinin puts
it, ‘are always in the making’ (2010, 282), and most intensely so in a climate of educa-
tional reform, as this narrative has shown. If it is indeed the case, as Fullan (2001, 115)
believes, that ‘educational change depends on what teachers do and think’, then
sustainable and successful reform depends on understanding what teachers are doing
and thinking as they become and re-become teachers.
Amal’s crossing of multiple borders and her efforts to master multiple discourses
in her academic and professional development have been charted in this paper, and
Gee (1990/1996, 167) argues that people who are trying to master conflicting or
contesting discourses are the ‘ultimate sources of change’. So too does Allsup (2006,
9) frame teacher identity formation as a borderland discourse, ‘the place of becoming,
the space of ambiguity and reflection’; an intermediate space wherein new terrains are
tentatively mapped and re-mapped, and where new teacher identities begin to emerge.
Looking to the future, Amal sees the possibility of a new role for herself in the revised
state education system as a bridge between old and new territories and discourses,
between the old and the new way of doing schooling in the UAE: ‘I would like to
bridge the gap between two different teaching cultures,’ she declares.
 Teacher Development 153

Note
1. IELTS is the International English Language Test, a skills-based test of English proficiency
that includes a speaking test as well as tests of reading, writing and listening. Amal’s score
of Band 7.5 rates her between a ‘good’ and a ‘very good’ user on a scale that ranges from
1–9, and thus exceeds the requirements for postgraduate-level study through the medium
of English anywhere in the world.

Notes on contributor
Kay Gallagher teaches in the Faculty of Education at the University of Hong Kong. She has
been a leader in English language teaching and teacher education in the UAE for many years,
and prior to that was head teacher of an innovative multicultural school in Ireland. Her interests
centre on the learning and teaching of English in schools, on learning and teaching in language
teacher education, and on educational change.

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