Teacher educators in university English as foreign language (EFL) classrooms often emphasise verbal communication alongside teacher-student relationships, students’ emotions, and the classroom climate. These factors all contribute to either encourage or discourage students’ willingness to communicate verbally (Butler, 2011). Yet, an area with limited research is understanding the teachers' perspectives of students' silence during online learning throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Utilising Redmond et al.’s (2018) conceptual model of cognitive, behavioural, and emotional engagement in online learning, we examine how three undergraduate EFL teacher educators in Vietnam interpret students’ silence while teaching EFL through online Zoom classes. Drawing on three in-depth semi-structured interviews (n=3 hours), findings indicated that silence was experienced by the teacher educators in different ways; as a thinking/learning opportunity, an indication of teachers' uncertainty, and as conscious disengagement.

This paper explores internationally mobile global middle class families (GMCF) in terms of how they rationalise moving away from their home country, select schools and reimagine their young children’s futures in an international setting. Building on Appadurai’s notion of ‘the future as a cultural fact’ and Anagnost’s concept of ‘life-making in neoliberal times’ we analyse how the search for escaping the past is dialectically related to seeking better futures. For GMCFs, the search for better futures within current neoliberal times leads to them discursively constructing spatial–temporal movements across international boundaries. The term ‘futurescaping’ is introduced and used to understand the act of imagining futures that are shaped by a person’s past and present experience. We argue that futurescaping is more than simply transnational mobility, but is a multidimensional act, which is dynamic, culturally value-ladened, historically embedded, futuristic and provides a unique view into the everyday lives of internationally mobile GMCF.

This article focuses on practice architectures of international schools that create affective atmosphere for the professional learning and becoming of international-hire and local-hire teachers. We use the concept of precarious labour to explore relational tensions and their effects on the professional learning of teachers and school leaders. Empirical data are drawn from two case study schools located in two major countries that offer international education. The data sets include interviews with school leaders and international and ‘local’ teachers. The analysis focuses on relational tensions experienced by teachers in these schools. The article argues that the affective atmosphere of teacher workplaces produces a force – a sense of precariousness – that envelopes teachers and oppresses them. At the same time, it also provides the very conditions for their professional learning in international workplaces. From this practice-ontological perspective, therefore, it is important to recognise the primacy of affect in the professional learning of teachers.

This study explored Master of Teaching pre-service teachers’ (PSTs’) feelings of comfort and more broadly, their emotional experience as they prepare to work in classrooms with LGBTIQ students. Within the context of a broader mixed methods research project, PSTs were surveyed, and data were combined with a focus group (total participants n = 42). This paper reports on the qualitative data collected. Theoretically, Vygotsky’s cultural-historical approach was used to elicit information about the PSTs’ emotional experience (perezhivanie). Important findings indicate that PSTs’ past experiences influence their understanding of LGBTIQ content and their willingness to transform their developing pedagogy. Systemic tensions around language and context contributed to challenging emotional experiences when PSTs were unable to mitigate the issues. It is argued that comfort is an initial starting point, but perezhivanie provides a lens to examine and support a broader understanding of the institutional structures which constrain PSTs when working with LGBTIQ students.