Mobility, place and affect in transnational teacher education graduates' accounts of their first year teaching

- Beginning teaching involves both mobility and immobility for bonded teachers.
- Overseas-educated teachers in Malaysia faced high expectations when they returned.
- The teachers described grappling with contrasting understandings of best practice.
- The teachers also described 'shifting' personally and professionally.
- Bonded pre-service teachers should be encouraged to anticipate 'return' challenges.

In this article, we consider how mobility, immobility, embodiment and affect appeared in research with 13 beginning teachers who were 'bonded' graduates of a twinned (Malaysia-New Zealand) teacher education programme. We discuss the teachers' accounts of moving place, and being placed in new schools; 'moving selves', or experiencing a changed sense of self as new teachers; 'moving students', or seeing shifts in students' educational outcomes; and being moved by (responding affectively to) student learning and behaviour. Our study highlights the need in internationalised teacher (and higher) education to pre-empt challenges inherent in moving 'home' or to new places to work.