Teacher resilience and triple crises: Confucius Institute teachers’ lived experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

This article aims to investigate Confucius Institute teachers’ lived intercultural experiences during the triple crises, i.e., the pandemic, hostility towards Confucius Institutes (CIs) and rampant racism. Through the analytical lens of teacher resilience, the article looks beyond what has gone wrong and foregrounds resourcefulness, strength, and agency of CI teachers. It draws the data from interviews with nine CI teachers based in US, Europe and Australia where CI closure has been reported, over a period of three months in 2020 and 2021. In addition to technological and pedagogical challenges and well-being issues, CI teachers found themselves in the vulnerable position of ‘being caught in the middle’ exacerbated by the changing political dynamics, rising anti-Chinese racism, cross-cultural differences in health behaviours and broken partnership with the host universities. Our analysis shows that despite these challenges, CI teachers built resilience and remain committed to their professional values. They adopted a pragmatic approach to depoliticise language teaching through ‘safe’ cultural activities and engaged in perspective-taking and reflexivity. The findings further demonstrate the importance of mutual support and co-learning for developing resilience, thus offering new insights on factors contributing to teacher resilience. Our research raises questions about the CI operational/partnership model and urges policy makers and senior management teams to put teachers and students’ needs first in their decisions.