James Budrow

Background

About James Budrow

As much as I came to enjoy the classroom as an English language teacher in South Korea, China and Canada, my PhD journey took me into teacher education. Being an instructor in the College of Education at the University of Saskatchewan and the International Education cohort of Western University’s Bachelor of Education program (in-house and online) has impacted me significantly. The work has obliged me to broaden my own practice with internationally oriented pedagogy and to find ways to teach others how to do so – a task I have found challenging. What is involved, for example, in critically evaluating one’s own privilege and positionality in the world as an international educator? How does one develop the capacity to openly engage and learn from differently located others? And, how does one address such concerns with teacher candidates whose intentions and motivations are as diverse as their academic, cultural, socio-economic and professional backgrounds? Suffice to say, I have had to manage new (to me) and fairly complex contexts, lessons and situations while advising students through both the academic expectations of their studies and the practical demands of their burgeoning teaching practice. I am a teacher first and I enjoy learning and helping others learn about the times, spaces, places and people around us. But I sense a shift in myself. I see my life’s work as not solely teaching per say but understanding the human condition in the most profound ways (e.g, how/why people do what they do, and in what ways do they – people and their actions – affect one another). Fortunately, much of the material covered in my classes relate to my research and so afforded me many opportunities to both reflect on my work and address issues hindering my progress. Speaking specifically to my research, my work examines the internationalization of teacher education. I seek to better understand the kind of ‘cosmopolitan’ teacher, teaching and teacher education that current conditions demand – conditions largely defined by global interconnectivity, heightened mobilities and super-diversity. Teachers are increasingly immersed in these conditions and teacher education must respond by preparing teachers for both the diversity they will encounter in their ‘local’ education jurisdictions as well as for teaching ‘beyond their local’ where they must learn to navigate the intercultural and/or transnational conditions of unfamiliar locales and school communities.