What it is to be resilient: An interpretative phenomenological analysis of expatriate EAP (English for Academic Purposes) instructors’ resilience in Qatar

Abstract

‘Resilience’ refers to positive adaptation in the face of various challenging circumstances. ‘Teacher resilience’ is the quality that allows teachers to maintain their commitment to teaching despite facing struggles and stressors. This thesis seeks to illustrate the experiences of expatriate EAP instructors working in Qatar with a view to promote a better understanding of the concept of ‘teacher resilience’. The existing research on teacher resilience has focused almost exclusively on specific national contexts at a time where the teachers often share the same cultural and linguistic backgrounds as their students, colleagues and administrators. Teaching abroad, on the other hand, is a very different case, and given the increase in the number of teachers who move overseas to teach EAP, and given the unique challenges they face, this group of teachers present an important niche case for exploring the personalised and contextualised nature of teacher resilience.

The overarching goals of the present thesis were threefold. First, it aimed to characterise teacher resilience in the context of expatriate EAP instructors in Qatar. Second, it aimed to identify the protective factors and strategies that emerged from and within the socio-ecologies that expatriate EAP instructors are situated in. Third, it aimed to uncover the perceptions of the expatriate EAP instructors with regard to the role the university plays in supporting their capacity to be resilient.

Given the fluid and context-specific nature of resilience, this research adopted an interpretivist paradigmatic position. In order to gather data that bring individual subjectivities to the surface, a qualitative approach was taken, with the IPA (Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis) laying the methodological framework for data collection and analysis. IPA focuses on the commonality of a lived experience by describing meanings that several individuals make from experiencing a single phenomenon, in this case, resilience. Data were collected from 6 expatriate EAP instructors working at a particular university in Qatar using two semi-structured interviews and a graphic tool.

The first research question about the characteristics of teacher resilience in the context of expatriate EAP instruction resulted in three findings. Accordingly, teacher resilience in this context is characterised by a small expectation gap, institutional loyalty and fluctuations. The second research question about the process of resilience building in this context resulted in 8 personal factors, 9 contextual factors, and 5 strategies. The third research question about the role of the university showed that participants had divergent opinions regarding whether their employer bears any responsibility, some arguing that resilience-building is an individual matter, others perceiving it as a collaborative endeavour.

The findings of the present study show support for the previous research that underscored the dynamic and multidimensional nature of teacher resilience. The scholarship on teacher resilience emphasises that the resilience-building resources that are available and their significance are population-specific and context-dependent. The findings of this thesis, however, imply that it is not only the type and relative importance of resources that change depending on the circumstances, but also the very characteristics of the concept of teacher resilience itself. This is because in this research the resilience of expatriate EAP instructors was characterised by certain unique qualities that are not reported in other studies (e.g. characterised by a small expectation gap and interwoven with institutional loyalty). Furthermore, it was shown that teachers in this environment had a tendency to resort to proximal contextual factors for sporadic challenges and to distal contextual factors for more persistent and regular challenges. In other words, it is, inter alia, the extent and nature of the challenge that largely determined which layer of the context had the greatest influence on a teacher’s resilience. The theoretical implication here is that researchers should not only focus on identifying the various different factors shaping teacher resilience in different environments, as has been the case largely in the scholarship thus far, but also its salient characteristics in general and peculiarities in the different layers of context in particular.