Global and Local Citizens and the Creation of a Teaching Community at CSU

Abstract

I still vividly recall the first words spoken by the then director of the ELC in 2004 to the foreign teachers at a welcome dinner after we had arrived at CSU on complimentary air tickets: “Welcome to China, you have come to reform English language teaching.” Few of us had lived in China or could speak Mandarin Chinese fluently at the time, let alone had any knowledge of Cantonese or any other local dialects; it was simply the case that our education and cultural backgrounds gave us the expertise to come as reformers to CSU. As further investigated in this chapter, these internationalizing desires and emphasis on foreign teachers as reformers would come to have complex effects on the teaching identities, classroom practices, and community-building of CSU teachers. In keeping with the goal of this book, which is to move away from entrenched dichotomies and modes of analysis, this first data chapter further introduces the CSU context through an analysis of local and foreign relationships both inside and outside the classroom. Specifically, this chapter examines the tensions inherent in the national and local English-teaching policies summarized in Chap. 1, and the simultaneous local and global influences and orientations of CSU teachers, students, and administrators.