Revisiting Ms Banerjee and Mr Chips

Abstract

A number of important themes have emerged from this book on global teachers in Australia. The first relates to the global mobility of teachers and the international migration literature. We can predict that more and more teachers will be on the move globally in coming decades, becoming part of what immigration scholars refer to as the process of circular migration. The second theme is that global teachers must reconvert their human capital and their cultural capital to the new currency denomination of their host country. Capital reconversion is not only a bureaucratic process but also a set of social relations and power structures which global teachers must negotiate. Global teachers have agency in this process of capital reconversion. Racialization influences the capital reconversion process and shapes considerably the experiences of global teachers in the schools and communities of host countries. New comparative research on global teachers in a number of countries, including non-Western countries is needed. Southern theory and Cosmopolitan Social theory provide important insights and conceptual frameworks that can inform this new research agenda in a way that challenges established Western social and educational theory by putting the West at the periphery rather than at the centre of this research.