ESL AND CONTENT AREA TUTORS IN THE ONLINE, FOR-PROFIT SHADOW EDUCATION SETTING: UNMASKING THE TRANSIENT EDUCATOR

Abstract

Supplementary for-profit tutoring, also known as shadow education, has grown significantly worldwide and has become a multi-billion-dollar industry (Fortune Business Insights, 2021) over the past few decades, in both the number of organizations offering tutoring and the number of participating students (Aurini & Davies, 2004; Bray, 2010/2012; Zhang & Bray, 2017; Bray, 2021, 2022). Shadow education includes the distinct characteristics of privateness, supplementation, and academic subjects. Individuals pay for tutoring outside of school hours that supplements principal academic subjects in mainstream schooling. It does not include unpaid tutoring or extra lessons, nor “domains that are learned mainly for leisure and/or personal development such as music, art, and sports” (Yung & Bray, 2017, p. 96). Due to the dearth of research about the tutors working in this industry, this qualitative study voices the lived experiences of tutors working for a company offering tutoring services for Chinese international undergraduate students studying abroad in English-speaking countries. Based in sociocultural theory, it uses the theoretical frameworks of Gee’s (1989, 2002) and Fairclough’s (2003) concepts of identity and discourse as a foundation for critical discourse analysis (CDA). The study reveals how the for-profit setting influences tutors’ classroom practices and their professional identities as educators and creates identity conflict for them as they and their work do not match the traditional concept of who a teacher is and what a teacher does. This is identified as the t/Teacher dichotomy, which questions who a “real” teacher is, and also highlights the instability that educators working as independent contractors or who are in contingent, part-time positions face, and how this teaching context affects their livelihood.