“People with Pants”: Self-Perceptions of WorldTeach Volunteers in the Marshall Islands
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This paper explores the experiences and self-perceived roles of WorldTeach volunteers in the Marshall Islands. Examining WorldTeach volunteers through the lenses of modernization theory and anti-colonialism theory suggests that they adopt opposing roles in the Marshall Islands. On one hand, they wish to improve the education and institutions of the Marshall Islands. On the other hand, they do not want to impose their personal values and beliefs onto their Marshallese communities. I interviewed returned WorldTeach volunteers and found that they do experience a tension with respect to the roles that they assume. For instance, they wish to teach English but lack experience, improve teaching practices without elevating their own opinions, promote cross-cultural exchange without depreciating Marshallese culture, and be role models without elevating the status of people from the United States. I argue that these conflicts develop because how volunteers view their roles changes; initially, volunteers’ self-perceptions can be best understood from a modernist perspective, but then increasingly from a more anti-colonial perspective as they stay in the Marshall Islands.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | August 2011 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Li, Ruochen Richard |
|---|
Subjects
| Subject | WorldTeach |
|---|---|
| Subject | Marshall Islands |
| Subject | Teaching |
| Subject | Stanford Graduate School of Education International Educational Administration and Policy Analysis |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
| Related item | |
|---|---|
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/kr813qs4832 |
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- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Collection
Graduate School of Education International Comparative Education Master's Monographs
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- dickli@gmail.com
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