This thesis presents an interpretative study of an Australian offshore education program in educational leadership conducted at Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province in China from 2002 to 2003. It is a study of the influence of international education on the conceptions of the participants in a particular context, where Chinese culture and Western cultures came into contact. The study is significant because it investigated a relatively new aspect of international education, offshore education, this time from the perspective of the participants. It explored the conceptions of learning and leadership brought by a group of Chinese educational leaders to the course and investigated the perceived influence of the course upon their conceptions and self-reported leadership practice. It employed a culturally sensitive approach which recognizes that a complex interaction between Chinese and Western cultures is occurring in the participants of this study. This interpretative study was inspired by the phenomenographic approach. Phenomenography is an approach to research that has been used to help understand the key aspects of the variations in the experiences of groups of people (Marton & Booth, 1997). The study examined the experiences and understandings about learning and leadership of Chinese leaders in an offshore program, a Master of Educational Leadership. The program was delivered in a flexible mode in three intensive teaching brackets of six subjects. The study employed a semi-structured and in-depth interview technique. Twenty participants were interviewed twice over a 12-month period. The study sought a better understanding of their conceptions by making a comparison between their perceptions prior to and after undertaking the course. Participants were from schools, universities and educational departments. Potential differences across the three sectors were also considered in the analysis. The findings showed that most participants developed more complex understandings of learning and leadership throughout the course. Comparison of conceptions prior to and after the course indicated an expanded range of conceptions. There was reportedly a movement towards more complex and diversified perspectives. Prior to the course, participants reported comparatively traditional conceptions of learning and leadership in quite a limited range. Learning experience and exposure to Western educational ideas and practices seems to have led participants to reflect on their inherited assumptions and to expand their conceptions. They generally increased their awareness of key aspects of variations in learning and leadership. This study identified a general shift from content/utilitarian-oriented learning conceptions to meaning/developmental-oriented conceptions after undertaking the course. There was also a shift from task/directiveorientated conceptions about leadership to motivation/collaborative-oriented leadership conceptions. Many participants reported that they expanded their leadership practice after the course. The findings also revealed some differences regarding conceptual and practice changes across the three sectors. The study contributes to understanding of learning and leadership in an international education context. The learning and leadership conceptions and self-reported practices are context and culture dependent. The study illustrates the tensions between different cultural forces in the process of teaching and learning. The methodology which explores the subjective understandings of participants renders more complex understandings of intercultural processes than cross-cultural comparisons which have been predominant in the educational leadership field in the past. The results highlight the need for appreciation of local contexts in designing international programs. The discussion questions the universal applicability and transferability of Western ideas, and also highlights the importance of critical reflection and adaptation on the part of educational practitioners from non-Western cultures. It highlights the potential for growth of change in both providers and recipients of international education as a result of very different cultures and traditions coming into contact. Intercultural dialogue and integration of educational ideas and practices are likely to come about when East meets West in an open and reflective dialogue.

This research thesis set out to better understand the professional knowledge bases of Western teachers working in offshore education in Indonesia. This research explored what two groups of Western teachers said about the students they taught, their own role, professional and social identity, the knowledge transmitted, and their pedagogical strategies whilst teaching offshore. Such an investigation is significant on a number of levels. Firstly, these teachers were working within a period of rapid economic, political, cultural and educational change described as 'New Times' (Hall, 1996a). Secondly, the experiences of teachers working in offshore education have rarely been reported in the literature (see Johnston, 1999). A review of the literature on teachers' professional knowledge bases (Shulman, 1986a, 1986b, 1987; Turner-Bisset, 1997, 1999) concluded that, in general terms, teachers draw on three main interrelated and changing knowledge bases: knowledge of content, knowledge of teaching processes and knowledge of their students. This review also explored the notion that teachers had an additional knowledge base that was in a continual state of negotiation and closely related to the aforementioned knowledge bases: teachers' knowledge of their own and students' pedagogic identities (Bernstein, 2000). A theoretical framework appropriate to exploring the overarching research problem was developed. This framework drew on models of teachers' knowledge bases (Elbaz, 1983; Shulman, 1986a, 1986b, 1987; Nias, 1989; Turner-Bisset, 1997, 1999), the sociology of knowledge (Bernstein, 1975, 1990, 1996, 1999, 2000), and notions of pedagogic identity (Bernstein, 2000). This framework theorised the types of knowledges taught, categories of teaching process knowledge, and the range of pedagogic identities made available to teachers and students in new times. More specifically, this research examined two case studies (see Stake, 1988, 2000; Yin, 1994) of Western teachers employed by Australian educational institutions who worked in Central Java, Indonesia, in the mid-to-late 1990s. The teacher participants from both case studies taught a range of subjects and used English as the medium of instruction. Data for both case studies were generated via semistructured interviews (see Kvale, 1996; Silverman, 1985, 1997). The interviews focused on the teachers' descriptions of the learner characteristics of Indonesian students, their professional roles whilst teaching offshore, and curriculum and pedagogic design. The analyses produced four major findings. The first major finding of the analyses confirmed that the teacher participants in this study drew on all proposed professional knowledge bases and that these knowledge bases were interrelated. This suggests that teachers must have all knowledge bases present for them to do their work successfully. The second major finding was that teachers' professional knowledge bases were constantly being negotiated in response to their beliefs about their work and the past, present and future demands of the local context. For example, the content and teaching processes of English lessons may have varied as their own and their students' pedagogic identities were re-negotiated in different contexts of teaching and learning. Another major finding was that it was only when the teachers entered into dialogue with the Indonesian students and community members and/or reflective dialogue amongst themselves, that they started to question the stereotypical views of Indonesian learners as passive, shy and quiet. The final major finding was that the teachers were positioned in multiple ways by contradictory and conflicting discourses. The analyses suggested that teachers' pedagogic identities were a site of struggle between dominant market orientations and the criteria that the teachers thought should determine who was a legitimate teacher of offshore Indonesian students. The accounts from one of the case studies suggested that dominant market orientations centred on experience and qualifications in unison with prescribed and proscribed cultural, gender and age relations. Competent teachers who were perceived to be white, Western, male and senior in terms of age relations seemed to be the most easily accepted as offshore teachers of foundation programs for Indonesian students. The analyses suggested that the teachers thought that their legitimacy to be an offshore teacher of Indonesian students should be based on their teaching expertise alone. However, managers of Australian offshore educational institutions conceded that it was very difficult to bring about change in terms of teacher legitimisation. These findings have three implications for the work of offshore teachers and program administrators. Firstly, offshore programs that favour the pre-packaging of curricula content with little emphasis on the professional development and support needs of teachers do not foster work conditions which encourage teachers to re-design or modify curricula in response to the specific needs of learners. Secondly, pre-packaged programs do not support teachers to enter into negotiations concerning students' or their own pedagogic identities or the past, present and future demands of local contexts. These are important implications because they affect the way that teachers work, and hence how responsive teachers can be to learners' needs and how active they can be in the negotiation process as it relates to pedagogic identities. Finally, the findings point to the importance of establishing a learning community or learning network to assist Western teachers engaged in offshore educational work in Asian countries such as Indonesia. Such a community or network would enable teachers to engage and modify the complexity of knowledge bases required for effective localised offshore teaching. Given the burgeoning increase in the availability and use of electronic technology in new times, such as internet, emails and web cameras, these learning networks could be set up to have maximum benefit with minimal on-going costs.