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Globalizing Teacher Labor for the Knowledge Economy: the Case of New York City’S Caribbean Teachers

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Globalizing Teacher Labor for the Knowledge Economy: the Case of New York City’S Caribbean Teachers GLOBALIZING TEACHER LABOR FOR THE KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY: THE CASE OF NEW YORK CITY’S CARIBBEAN TEACHERS BY MARGARET M. FITZPATRICK DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Educational Policy Studies in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2014 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Pradeep A. Dhillon, Chair Associate Professor Teresa Barnes Professor Cameron T. McCarthy Professor Leon Dash Abstract This is an interpretive and ethnographic exploration of actual neoliberalism as lived by a group of immigrant international knowledge workers and their children, specifically participants in a 2001 New York City public schools recruitment of teachers from Anglophone Caribbean nations. Their testimonies shed light on at least three aspects of the human costs and benefits of globalizing teacher labor for the knowledge economy: the nexus between workers’ rights, citizenship rights, and human rights—and the importance of the nation in advancing these rights; the value of their insider/outsider perspectives on American public education; and the gendered construction of their transnational, transgenerational class projects. I argue that international teacher recruitment, and in particular the U.S. public school recruitment of highly trained teachers from “developing” countries, has become an illusory panacea for alleged teacher shortages, a short-term strategy for staffing classrooms instead of a longer-term and much more difficult and costly set of strategies for really prioritizing education as a necessary core value of a just and sustainable knowledge economy. Focusing on the case of New York City’s Caribbean teachers and privileging their testimony about their responses to such recruitment elucidates many of the personal contours of this emerging strategy of the neoliberalized global governance of teacher labor. This project contributes new knowledge by attending to this understudied population of teachers, revealing the extraordinary flexibility demanded of their globalized labor, citizenship, and humanity; important insights into how American public education could be improved; and key gendered aspects of their experiences. Their lived experiences show ways in which their access to certain workers’ rights precipitated their access to citizenship rights which then precipitated their access to their full complement of human rights. This enriches the discussion on immigration rights, strengthening as it does the understanding of the relationships ii and interdependencies between these different kinds of rights. Their insider/outsider perspectives on the New York City public schools where they taught deserve special consideration, and can help to clarify what actions must be taken to improve these and other American public schools. Finally, their testimonies also reveal some established constructions of Caribbean gendered identities, in particular the matrifocality of these immigrant families, an organizing principal they have maintained across time and borders. This study is based on intensive interviews with 10 of New York City’s public school teachers recruited from Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Guyana, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines in 2001; and five of their adult children. My ethnographic research protocol was modeled on the Leon Dash method of immersion interviewing, especially in two ways: First, I patterned some of the basic introductory interview questions on similar questions developed by Dash over many years, and followed his precepts of tape recording then transcribing the interviews. Second, I spent considerable time socializing informally with as many of the participants as possible, in their homes and churches, at their parties, on subways and beaches, and at festivals and parades, in Brooklyn, New York, and in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and Tobago. I interviewed these participants from March, 2013 through August, 2013, in Brooklyn, New York and in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. I hoped to learn what motivated these teachers to make this move, how they and their families were coping with some of the special challenges of it, why they in particular may have been chosen over other similarly qualified applicants, and how their particular experiences speak to the wider experiences of flexible knowledge workers operating in a globalized arena. This intensive interviewing method proved particularly effective in generating this new ethnographic knowledge of an as yet understudied group of international and American public school teachers. iii This is for my children, Isabelle and Arthur; and for all the children of wandering mothers iv Acknowledgements Thank you first to Frédéric Beaugeard, my husband, who always believes in me, and who listens to me a lot. So many people helped me, I cannot list them all here, but I am so grateful. Here are a few. Thank you to my many amazing professors, especially my dissertation committee, for inspiring me and for guiding me with your own fine research and teaching. Thank you to my advisor, Pradeep Dhillon, for the opportunities she gave me to see myself as a scholar, and for her devotion to Immanuel Kant and her comcomittant appreciation for the infinite worth of every immortal soul. Thank you to my committee member Cameron McCarthy for his practical guidance on interpretive methodology, and for modeling multitasking in scholarship. Thank you to my committee member Teresa Barnes for her inspirational work on African women's labor history, and for constantly challenging me to think harder. Thank you to my committee member Leon Dash, for teaching me his immersion interviewing method, and for inspiring me with his work on the American underclass. Thank you also to Leon Dash for allocating thousands of dollars of his own research budget from the Center for Advanced Study so that I could pay for my research trips to New York City, and for part of my trip to Trinidad and Tobago. Thank you to the Gender and Women's Studies Program for granting me the Due and Ferber International Dissertation Research Award for 2013-2014, which helped me to visit Trinidad and Tobago and meet with recruited teachers there. Thank you to the late Marianne Ferber, who co-funded this award and who passed away shortly after I received it; and thanks also to Jean Due, the other co- funder of this award. Thank you to the College of Liberal Arts, especially Timothy Wedig, for giving me the opportunity to teach Global Studies for the last 2 years of my doctoral studies. Thank you to all the professors I worked with and studied with in the College of Education, v including Cris Mayo, and the professors named above and below, for giving me the opportunity to teach Global Studies in Education, and also to perform various administrative duties during my first 3 years of doctoral work. Thank you to Fazal Rizvi for recruiting me into the Global Studies in Education program, and for introducing me to the globalization of educational policy. Thank you to Michael Peters for the seminar on Michel Foucault, and for showing me what a scholar does. Thank you to Bob Stake, Nicholas Burbules, Jennifer Greene and Gilberto Rosas for teaching great classes. Thank you to Gale Summerfield for teaching me how to gender my analysis of anything, and why I should always do that. Thanks to Karen Flynn for recommending key Caribbean theorists. Thank you to Nicole Lamers for showing me some of the career possibilities of a PhD in Global Studies in Education. Thanks to Noah Sobe and Shabnam Koirala-Azad for their advice during my New Scholars Dissertation workshop at the Comparative and International Education Society’s 2013 annual conference in New Orleans. Thank you to Rhoda Rae Gutierrez, for inspiring me with her excellent master’s thesis on Filipino teachers in America. Thank you to Alyssa Hadley Dunn, for sharing with me her research on international teachers, and for calling my attention to The Black Institute. Thank you to Bertha Lewis, president and founder of The Black Institute, for encouraging me and introducing me to Caribbean teachers and their adult children affiliated with the Association of International Educators and The International Youth Association. Thank you to the Nesbitt Family for welcoming me into their Brooklyn home; and thank you to Antoinette Nesbitt and her many friends—especially Queens Jenny, Evette “June” Wright-Thomas, Orrin, Carol, Sandra and Hamline, and Tarkis and Ming Lee—for showing me around Trinidad and Tobago. Thank you to Auntie Claire for the cow’s heel soup. Thank you to Rosaline O'Neal, president of the African American Caribbean Education Association, for several introductions. Thank you to vi Eartha Hackett, for inspiring me with her own dissertation work, and for introducing me to several participants. Thank you to Mildred Lowe, Nellie Miller, Dorritt Crawford, Anton Nesbitt, Anthea Nesbitt, Alden Sandra Bethel, Kimlyn Prescod, Wray MacBurnie, Bertram Lewis, Monifa Crawford, Nesbitt, Mikel Crichlow, Sonya Williams and so many other Caribbean teachers and other Caribbean immigrants who discussed this project with me. Thank you to the Crawford Family, for making me feel at home in their home in Brooklyn; and thank you to Pastor Farell Jones, for praying over my migraine headache. Thank you to all my friends for all the kind encouragement and good companionship. Thanks especially to Sujung Kim and Dinah Armstead, my dissertation writing support friends and New Orleans C.I.E.S. conference co-conspirators. Thank you to Wendi Shen, my Friday dissertation writing companion, and thanks to her mother for the dumplings. Thanks to Peter Kleinhans, my supportive old friend. Thanks to my old Urbana High School teacher friends, Mark Freedman and Phyllis Gingold. Thanks to my wonderful mother-in-law, Odile Leturdu. Thanks to my brothers, Tom Fitzpatrick and Joe Fitzpatrick, for always welcoming us home to the South Side of Chicago. Thanks to my old friend Gabriella Walker, for role modeling how to sit down in front of a computer for more or less one whole year and write a dissertation.
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