Implemented English curricula in transnational education: Neocolonialism and pedagogical orientations in a Canadian offshore program in China

Transnational education has been widely offered through partnerships between minority world English-speaking countries such as the USA, UK, Australia, and Canada and majority world countries such as China, with a host of claimed benefits including opportunities to learn multiple languages. Despite its apparent opportunities, transnational education has also been identified as having the potential to forward neocolonialism and reproduce Western-centric linguistic and cultural hegemony through its imposition of English and English-related curricula onto majority world contexts. Contemporaneously, teachers, through their participation in implementing curriculum, have been documented as playing a crucial role in challenging neocolonial practices in transnational literacy education. To better understand and illustrate the role of teachers in transnational education implementation, this exploratory case study investigated three English teachers’ implementation of English curricula in a Canadian transnational education program located in China. Qualitative data sources included classroom observations and teacher interviews. The study was informed by the nested pedagogical orientations of literacy education (i.e., transmission, social constructivist, and transformative pedagogical orientations). Findings suggest that the teachers operated through transmission and social constructivist orientations and the various factors that mediated the implemented curricula: the programmatic curricular expectations, the local and global standardized tests, and students’ varied English proficiency levels. These factors concerted to enact literacy curricula that reinforced neocolonial power relations that privileged English academic literacy and Western-centric knowledges and ways of teaching. The article provides recommendations to resist neocolonial values and practices in literacy curriculum in globalized schooling contexts.