TEFL tourism: the tourist who teaches

ABSTRACT

There is evident lineage between the concepts of teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL) and tourism, represented through evocative marketing material, the commoditisation of the TEFL product, teacher motivations and experiences. Yet, to date there has been little attention paid to this relationship. The amalgamation of the two concepts brings rise to the introduction of the niche form of tourism ‘TEFL tourism’, where the tourist travels outside of their usual environment to teach English as a foreign language and whose role shifts between tourist, educator and educatee at various points in their trip. The TEFL tourism phenomenon is explored through the use of a two-phase research approach employing the qualitative examination of blogs written by TEFL teachers and quantitative surveys. Drawing parallels with associated tourism forms including volunteer, education and philanthropic, it is concluded that TEFL tourism is an entity in its own right, with unique characteristics and motivations presented by TEFL tourists. The use of logistic regression facilitated the analysis of TEFL teacher types, presenting a typology classifying tourists as leisure-minded, philanthropy-minded, career-minded and expatriate-minded. This case-study examination facilitates initial comprehension of the TEFL tourism industry, providing basis for subsequent research to be undertaken to enable enhanced sustainable management of the TEFL industry worldwide.     

Politics and Eschatology: Reassessing the Appeal of the “Jewish Indian” Theory in England and New England in the 1650s

This article examines the “Jewish Indian” theory — which claimed that American Indians were the ten lost tribes of Israel — in 1650s England and New England. The theory found support in England while failing in New England. This difference in reception can be explained by considering its ecclesiological, political, and eschatological implications. Biblical commentators in both England and New England held to a form of “Judeo‐Centric” eschatology, which looked for a sudden, miraculous conversion of the Jews and their eventual superiority to Gentile believers. Such beliefs undermined crucial elements of New England ecclesiology when applied to Native Americans. Conversely, the New England Company used the theory in its publications as a fund‐raising tool in England. These publications impacted upon debates on Jewish readmission to England in the mid‐1650s, with New England missionary models suggested as a way of evangelising Jews. This article therefore argues for the importance of understanding eschatological beliefs in local contexts, while demonstrating the way in which such beliefs can be maintained and reoriented in the face of apparent disconfirmation.     

Emigrated neuroscientists from Berlin to North America

ABSTRACT

The highest number of German scholars and physicians, forced by the National Socialist regime to emigrate for “race” or political reasons, were from Berlin. Language and medical exams were requested differently in their new host country—the United States—leading to a concentration of immigrants in the New York and Boston areas. Very early Emergency Committees in Aid of German Scholars and Physicians were established. Undergraduate students (like F. A. Freyhan, H. Lehmann, and H.-L. Teuber) from Berlin seemed to integrate easily, in contrast to colleagues of more advanced age. Some of the former chiefs and senior assistants of Berlin’s neurological departments could achieve a successful resettlement (C. E. Benda, E. Haase, C. F. List, and F. Quadfasel) and some a minor degree of success (F. H. Lewy and K. Goldstein). A group of neuropsychiatrists from Bonhoeffer’s staff at the Berlin Charité Hospital could rely on the forceful intercession of their former chief. The impact of the émigré colleagues on North American neuroscience is traced in some cases. Apart from the influential field of psychoanalysis, a more diffuse infiltration of German and European neuropsychiatry may be assumed. The contribution to the postwar blossoming of neuropsychology by the émigré neuroscientists K. Goldstein, F. Quadfasel, and H.-L. Teuber is demonstrated in this article.     

Diaspora and nostalgia: travelling Jewish tales in the Mediterranean

The article addresses narratives that tell of a member of the 10 Lost Tribes of Israel who comes to the rescue of a Jewish community. The tales were documented at the Israel Folktale Archives, in the second half of the twentieth century, and were told by informants from Morocco and Greece. While it is probably impossible to trace the exact routes of these “cultural possessions”, around and across the Mediterranean, the texts nevertheless provide a glimpse into the ways in which a network of Jewish communities shared a meta-narrative while adapting it to their own regional contexts. Although these tales are quintessentially diasporic, they also provided a platform for negotiating post-exilic identities in the new Israeli national context.     

Bringing Organizations Back In: Multilevel Feedback Effects on Individual Civic Inclusion

Policy feedback scholarship has focused on how laws and their implementation affect either organizations (e.g., their resources, priorities, political opportunities, or incentive structures) or individuals (e.g., their civic skills and resources or their psychological orientations toward the state). However, in practice the distinction between organizations and individuals is not clear‐cut: Organizations interpret policy for individuals, and individuals experience policy through organizations. Thus, scholars have argued for a multi‐level model of feedback effects illuminating how policies operating at the organizational level reverberate at the individual level. In this theory‐building article, we push this insight by examining how public policy influences nonprofit organizations’ role in the civic life of beneficiaries. We identify five roles that nonprofit organizations play. For each role, we draw on existing research to identify policy mechanisms that either enlarge or diminish nonprofits’ capacity to facilitate individual incorporation and engagement. From these examples, we derive cross‐cutting hypotheses concerning how different categories of citizens may need policy to operate differently to enhance their civic influence; whether policy that is “delivered” through nonprofits may dampen citizens’ relationship with the state; and how the civic boost provided by policy may be influenced by the degree of latitude conferred on recipient organizations.     

TO CATCH THE ECHO: RETHINKING ACTS OF WITNESSING TO THE SHOAH

In light of recent revelations about global ignorance and disbelief regarding the Holocaust, first‐hand testimonies acquire fresh significance. Two disparate books frame this discussion of how writings by survivors serve to deepen our understanding of the Shoah. Otto Dov Kulka's memoir, Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death, is a carefully crafted account by a professional historian who survived as a child in Auschwitz. Thomas Trezise's work, Witnessing Witnessing, is an analytical inquiry into the literary and epistemic issues that frame different genres of testimony ranging from video to poetry. Kulka's slender account is situated in the context of other works by survivors, including Saul Friedländer's When Memory Comes, Charlotte Delbo's Auschwitz and After, and a more recent work by Joseph Polak, After the Holocaust the Bells Still Ring. The emphasis in this discussion is upon the challenges that survivors face in articulating horror, especially to readers in the twenty‐first century. Trezise's more voluminous work is based upon the literary and philosophical theories of Adorno, Levinas, and Freud, among others. The question raised in this essay focuses upon which of these narrative strategies might work better to convey the complex meanings of the Shoah after the generation of survivors has departed from the historical scene. In the end, the halting words of those who went through the death camps is all we have to counter the ignorance and disbelief spreading around the world. Kulka's book, combining memories, dreams, and art works, fosters an imaginative encounter with inconceivable historical realities. Trezise's theoretical engagement with indexicality and with the phatic function of language helps us to understand the impact of testimonies within the scholarly literature. It does not, however, point a clear path toward conveying the importance of the Holocaust to the public at large. For this purpose, we need books such as Kulka's that enable the generation after the Holocaust to listen to silences embedded in survivor narratives. These silences must be carried forward in time, along with the ethical mandate not to forget the atrocities of the Shoah. If we can embrace this mission, we may be able to diminish the reign of hate running amuck today.     

Becoming Cleopatra: the forgotten Zionism of Raphael Lemkin

The biography of Raphael Lemkin has emerged of late as a highly contested lieu de memoire in charged political debates in Europe, the United States and the Middle East about the meaning, past and present, of the Holocaust and genocide. At the same time, scholars have attempted to demythologize Lemkin by reinscribing his life into its pre-World War II Polish context. Yet thus far no one has identified the precise political activities and affiliations that shaped Lemkin’s concept of genocide. In this article, I show that Lemkin, far from being a Jewish Bundist, a Polish nationalist or an apolitical cosmopolitan, was an active member of the interwar Polish Zionist movement, from which he drew the ideas that inspired his idea of the crime of genocide. In the first part of this article, I use his published writings from the 1920s and 1930s in Hebrew, Yiddish and Polish to recover a rich Jewish political framework in which his concepts of barbarism and genocide first began to emerge. In the second section, I ask how this crucial dimension of Lemkin’s life and thought vanished from the historical record, and why it has yet to be recovered in spite of the boom in biographical scholarship. Finally, I suggest how the recovery of Lemkin’s Zionism helps to reframe the current political impasse in the historiography of Holocaust and genocide studies.     

Troubled Traditions: Female Adaptive Education in British Colonial Africa

This article examines African female education reform between the wars as a conjuncture of transnational philanthropic initiatives and state and missionary objectives on the ground. Through a comparative treatment of four schools in West, East and South-Central Africa, it shows that the search to recover and re-create the authentic African subject was a gendered process that aimed to critique one brand of colonialism (settler and industrial capitalism) by bolstering another (indirect rule). The schools at Achimota (Gold Coast), Kabete (Kenya), Hope Fountain (Southern Rhodesia) and Mbereshi (Northern Rhodesia) all idealised women’s traditional education as the key to offsetting the dangers of modernisation and preserving the integrity of the social body, and ‘adapted’ their curricula accordingly to their perception of women’s normative economic and social roles. However, the internal contradictions of this project stymied any possibility of implementing it in a cohesive way, and even its advocates and architects were often forced to admit the limits of tradition as a coherent logic or redemptive force. The gendered contours of adaptation, therefore, showed the potential of education to destabilise as much as to reinforce the shifting paradigms of the colonial project.     

Knowledge nodes and international networks of connection: representations of private philanthropy by elite higher education institutions

This paper investigates the social and cultural geographies of large-scale individual giving in supporting the work of ‘elite’ international universities. With public funding of higher education in general decline, universities in countries of the global North are increasingly seeking funding from alternative sources, including private philanthropy. Although scholarly work has examined corporate and foundational giving to Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), there has been little enquiry into how donations from wealthy individuals are represented by universities in their official literature. Publications such as annual reports, giving reports and campaign reports are used strategically by HEIs to project a global image. We examine the official literature of 50 elite HEIs located across the globe, uncovering new discourses into the cross-cultural reach of universities. We draw attention to complex social and cultural relations between HEIs and philanthropists, describing their encounters with reference to debates on personal mobilities, world-making and global and social inequalities. We conclude by highlighting the implications for theoretical work on ‘strategic philanthropy’ and on the transformative nature of HEIs as global centres of knowledge.     

Voices of Jewish Converts to Christianity in late Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England

This paper seeks to highlight the content and context of the conversion narratives written by Jews converting to Christianity in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. It will be demonstrated that a non-Pauline pattern of conversion writing emerges. The content of these conversion treatises will be contextualized by looking at a whole range of English treatises concerning Jewish conversion, in particular those containing voices of “hermeneutical” Jewish converts. It will be argued that the period under scrutiny evinced a waning of the barriers surrounding Jewish conversion.