Abstract
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) recently initiated multiple, one-year, school immersion programs to help 25,000 KSA teachers better support KSA students and the KSA education system after spending time abroad in teacher education programs throughout the United States (US). This study explored the effects of one such program, aimed at helping KSA teachers become agents of change. The authors examined how the 46 KSA teachers involved in this program changed. Survey-research and English language tests were used to show that the immersion program yielded its desired effects: the program increased teachers’ sense of efficacy; improved teachers’ pedagogical, content, technical, and English language skills; and enhanced teachers’ understandings of education across nations and cultures, with emphasis on the transfer of features of the US educational system back to the KSA (although teachers were uncertain about the extent to which the transference desired might actually occur). Via supplemental interviews, the authors also identified self-reported influential sources of change. The article examines how these sources of change impacted KSA teachers’ mindsets regarding their teaching. The study confirms that the program influenced participants through their school immersion experiences, given that the program offered KSA teachers chances to learn more about student-centered learning approaches and more customized and individualized care for students.
Highlights
As globalization in educational reform advances, it has become common practice for more government officials and educational practitioners to seek, in order to transfer, educational reform ideas from foreign nations
While the findings and outcomes cannot be generalized to all Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) educators who participated in immersion programs at various United States (US) and Canadian universities, it seems logical based on our findings to assume that English proficiency would have a significant impact on program outcomes for all KSA participants, regardless of the location of their study-abroad experience
While language matters in terms of the realization of the goals and objectives of any such program, perhaps the larger, societal, cross-national and -cultural understandings derived via such experiences might matter more. It appears that participating in this immersion program increased KSA teacher participants’ (1) teacher efficacy, (2) program-specific outcomes, and (3) cross-national understandings of education, as well as the mobilization of knowledge and transferability of skills learned for KSA teacher participants
Summary
As globalization in educational reform advances, it has become common practice for more government officials and educational practitioners to seek, in order to transfer, educational reform ideas from foreign nations While such international collaborations are not new to education, including teacher education (Freeman, 1993, 2009), more recent, dramatic reconfigurations and social transitions have provided greater impetus for varying emerging economies to reform educational systems by learning about and transferring foreign educational practices, policies, and procedures to home contexts (Darling-Hammond & Lieberman, 2012; Kabilan, 2013; Kitchen et al, 2019; Lunenberg et al, 2017; Song et al, 2019). One key reform involved the KSA Ministry of Education (MoE)’s decision to fund and provide intensive, one-year study-abroad professional development programs for its teachers, whereby the MoE set out to send at least 25,000 selected KSA teachers abroad until the year 2030 (Estimo, 2015)
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