The Making of an International Educator: Transnationalism and Nonnativeness in English Teaching and Learning

In the last decade, international teacher recruitment has accounted for an unprecedented number of nonnative-English-speaking teachers (NNESTs) from around the world hired to work in public schools in urban areas in the United States. However, the worldwide trend of international teacher recruitment, and its implications for issues of language, power, and identity involving NNESTs in the United States, continue to be an underrepresented area of study. In this article, the author looks at her own journey as a Costa Rican English teaching professional recruited to work as a teacher of English for speakers of other languages (ESOL) in the United States. Using critical applied linguistics, she framed this study within the theories of linguistic imperialism and World Englishes. Through autoethnography, and more specifically narrative inquiry, she illuminates the local processes of socialization and globalization that contributed to her participation in the phenomena of international teacher recruitment, and reflects on her contestation and appropriation of the various linguistic and racial positionings that she experienced as a NNEST from Latin America in the United States and back in her country of origin. This article portrays the process of boundary-crossing and identity expansion of one NNEST going back and forth between countries in the expanding and inner circles of World Englishes.