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research-article2017
JRI0010.1177/1475240917722277Journal of Research in International EducationFanning and Burns

Article JRIE
Journal of Research in
International Education
How an Antipodean Perspective 2017, Vol. 16(2) 147­–163
© The Author(s) 2017
of International Schooling Reprints and permissions:
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Challenges Third Culture Kid DOI: 10.1177/1475240917722277
https://doi.org/10.1177/1475240917722277
journals.sagepub.com/home/jri
(TCK) Conceptualisation

Sean Fanning
La Trobe University, Australia

Edgar Burns
La Trobe University, Australia

Abstract
This article recounts the story of Jack’s primary and secondary schooling career across several countries
and eventual relocation and tertiary education in Victoria, Australia. His narrative is described here as
an antipodean educational trajectory. What is meant by antipodean education is contrasted to the long
established concept of the third culture kid (TCK). There are overlaps in these concepts. The argument
is made, however, that Jack’s travelling and multiple education cultural mix gives him a different sense of
himself that is not fully accounted for in the TCK literature. Global movement of people for employment and
other reasons such as politics, governmental or service professions, continues today, Taking children with
working and mobile parents has long been characterised as creating third culture kids who do not belong
to either originating or hosting societies. Today, however, it is less the case that this can be adequately
described as travel ‘out from’ and ‘back to’ the geo-political centres. This changing socio-cultural reality
means re-examining what kinds of educational opportunities and experiences children are exposed to and
the effects of these on young people.

Keywords
Antipodean migration, intercultural schooling, international schooling, third culture kid (TCK)

Introduction
This is a story about Jack (a pseudonym) and international education. Children and young people
who moved around the world in consequence of their parents’ employment and work opportunities
have in common being disembedded from their home cultures through participating in schooling,

Corresponding author:
Edgar Burns, Department of Social Inquiry, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, La Trobe University, Bendigo,
Victoria 3550, Melbourne, Australia.
Email: e.burns@latrobe.edu.au
148 Journal of Research in International Education 16(2)

peer friendships, often language, and different cultural milieus. The effect on these young people’s
schooling is markedly different from experiences of education for those staying within the country
of their birth. For those educated cross-nationally it is not simply a matter of being torn between
two cultures, two identities, or the compare-and-contrast of home-and-away, though these things
may be present (for example, Russell, 2011; Morales, 2015; Wu, Ganza and Guzman, 2015).
In pushing analysis beyond conventional verities, the discussion in this article follows three
main sections. In the first the concept of third culture kid (TCK), often used to describe experi-
ences such as those above, is reprised. Limitations of the TCK concept are discussed in relation
to what is called an antipodean perspective which frames links and contrasts between cultures in
less binary terms than TCK ideas. Section two briefly outlines the methodology of this case study
on intercultural education to illuminate the argument made about contrasting interpretations by
TCK and antipodean perspectives. The third section examines, in the case of Jack, how such vari-
ations in interpreting his educational journey and resultant sense of self have both overlaps and
differences.

TCK theory and an antipodean perspective

A long-running formulation of the disembedding effects of children accompanying parents’
employment in different cultures than their home country centring on insights about these experi-
ences of children and young people has been summarised in the concept of third culture kids or
similar (Fail, Thompson and Walker, 2004; Limberg and Lambie, 2011). Indeed, intentional cross-
cultural and cross-lingual experience and education as an adult contrasts with any conceptualisa-
tion of cross-cultural schooling. Desired/intentional travel to another country, as young adults or in
mid-career, stands in contrast to the dependency of simply being with parents where they are:
“Generally, this is not a life choice, but rather an imposed situation” (Straffon, 2003: 489).
TCK over more than half a century has become a common acronym to describe the phenomenon
of children educated through international schools while parents work overseas from their home
country (Greenholtz and Kim, 2009: 320). Other terms such as global nomads and transculturals
also attempt to capture the special experience of these young people. From the beginning TCK was
presented as something “interstitial”; a “third culture”. The term TCK (Straffon, 2003: 489):

“was coined by John and Ruth Hill Useem in the 1950s while they were in India studying Americans who
were stationed there as foreign service workers, missionaries, technical aid workers, businessmen, and
teachers.”

The concept has served a significant role in articulating the unsettling and disorienting experiences
of growing up and schooling outside one’s home culture, but not being fully part of the culture of
one’s schooling and upbringing. Attempts have been made to widen the concept by, for instance,
Limberg and Lambie’s (2011: 46) application to immigrants, but then almost immediately acknowl-
edging distinctions in the latter continuing to reside in the new environment. From active use in the
1970s and 1980s (see Fail et al., 2004: 320), writing including that of Pollock and van Reken
(1999) and Russell (2011) extended its deployment to this century.
Importantly and usefully, TCK continues to touch the intangible qualities of disrupted educa-
tion, adjustment and cultural displacement, seeing both advantages and disadvantages. It is,
however, framed in the vernacular of mid-twentieth century binaries of West vs rest. Somehow
the ‘real’ culture remained in the binary from the home country relative to some other place—
third world or developing world, however termed. Globalisation today is much more multi-
centric and multi-located. Beneficial hybrid cultural elements are mostly later additions to TCK
conceptualisation.
Fanning and Burns 149

TCK hybridity has been viewed contradictorily: as a ‘third’ culture, but also as merely ‘intersti-
tial’. This qualifier term itself signalled an imperial gaze, or at least geo-political self-centredness
around western identity. Thus on one hand the concept does not really propose a hybrid culture
since identity created is simply interstitial between ‘home’ and ‘other’ culture. On the other hand,
there is, ironically, an implied truth in how the in-between experience references the ‘non-ness’ of
anything other than a satisfactory return to home/western. To observe this, however, presupposes a
present-day perspective, not the primary assumptions of the TCK concept.
The three problematic elements—overly binarised cultural understanding, interstitial concep-
tion of personal culture, unacknowledged geo-political centrism—create a permanently fraught
quality in using the concept of TCK, despite the importance of what it addresses. For the present
authors, a fourth demerit is the term ‘kids’ with its mid-twentieth century American overtones. For
us it adds to the three previous issues an unnecessary condescending element of proprietorial inter-
est, the paternalism of which suggests the relative unimportance of the subject, even though recent
scholarship using the term clearly sees growing importance. Although we do not have a full solu-
tion for re-framing this concept, the concept of antipodean theory makes a start by suggesting
limits to TCK generalisability.
Working from these propositions, adding value here to contemporary theorising of international
schooling comes by problematising the implicit focus on geo-political global centres. Such cen-
trism makes several assumptions not borne out in more objective framing. Antipodean theorising
by Beilharz (1997, 2009) and Beilharz and Hogan (2012) recognises that Australia and New
Zealand are on the global margins. Their antipodean perspective argues that going out from or
coming back to Australia is quite different from returning to the United Kingdom, European or
United States geo-political centres. Even though Australia and New Zealand constitute a privileged
margin, their peripheral status nevertheless makes a difference that challenges TCK experiences.
Beilharz (2009: 228) uses popular literature to “demonstrate[e] the reciprocal movement of
culture from centre to periphery and back”. This ‘calls out’ the theoretical privileging of global
centre scholars’ talk about schooling experience, their presuming to know when, in fact, they can
only know the reality for peripheral societies, even privileged ones, from their own specific, not
universal, viewpoint. Increasing global movement of people makes this a correspondingly more
significant mismatch today. Willis, Enloe and Minoura (1994: 29) observe that:

“The dispersion of highly-qualified people to many lands because of their employment in multinational
enterprises or diplomatic agencies is a new kind of diaspora. Are their children, the students we serve,
something new, forerunners of the kind of transcultural /transnational ‘identity’ needed if the world is to
survive the twin scourges of ultranationalism and ethnocentrism?”

On the empirical evidence this is not just a bilateral ‘going out’ and returning ‘home’ from global
centres to assorted developing countries. Willis et al’s point is interpreted here to mean that global
movements have to be understood as much more than that: from any country to any country.
Certainly there are economic realities that set up major cultural traffic of elites and experts from
wealthier countries. But that is steadily changing. The dichotomy between first and developing
worlds continues to shift. There are substantial overlaps in income and education between many
countries today. A much more ambiguous rich-poor divide prevails (Rosling 2010).
The antipodean perspective argues that going out from or coming back to Australia is quite dif-
ferent from return to the global centres, even recognising western cultural and educational tradi-
tions common across these countries. As Beilharz and Hogan (2012: xxix) explain:

“The use of the word ‘antipodean’ is an indicator of our post-colonial, post-nationalist argument for
reconceptualising Australia and New Zealand across time, place and division.”
150 Journal of Research in International Education 16(2)

This innovative antipodean sociology can be seen in Burns’ (2011: 252ff) re-framing social theory
from supposed production in the global centres for consumption by the global margins: “it is pos-
sible to give rein to one’s antipodean sense that it does not fit what one is trying to understand and
express”. An antipodean viewpoint is distant but relational; involves cultural traffic—schooling an
obvious example; “looks sideways”, learning from other parts of the periphery not just the centres;
sees cultural change in civilisational time-frames, and has its “own head and heart space”, rejecting
deficit theory.
An antipodean view resists, and hence has reason to investigate alternative narratives to, stand-
ard TCK accounts. The over-simple framing of TCK conceptualising only imperfectly fits the
experiences of Jack and others like him. First, this is not a simple binary of national/cross-cultur-
alism but a multiple-step voyage. Second, this supposed TCK goes and returns from the antipodes,
not the global powers. Third, it is not a ‘going out’ and returning from/to a geo-political power.
Only once (United Kingdom) does Jack pass through the centres. Fourth, in antipodean theory this
interleaved ambiguity is the benchmark: not complete alterity, nor merely derivative of the global
centres, but interactive between centres and peripheries. Fifth, this is not a simplistic migratory or
cultural dialectic, but interaction that is substantive on its own terms; not merely interstitial to the
larger powers.

Methodology
Now in his mid-twenties, Jack is a child of a white Zimbabwean mother and a white Australian-
born father. In this study we use Jack’s educational experience to elucidate Beilharz’s antipodean
idea relative to conventional TCK perspectives. Chang, Ngunjiri and Hernandez (2013: 13) refer
to “collaborative autoethnography”, which they define as a method of “writing about individual
experiences of life within the context of family, work, schooling, and society, and…doing so with
others”. This methodological approach is used to elicit and analyse Jack’s international educational
upbringing. The collaborative approach further develops Chang’s (2008) Autoethnography as
Method, in which two or more collaborators ‘see’ and ‘read’ what one party experiences, in a kind
of emic-etic, co-operative insider-outsider process. For Jack and his co-author this narrative
emerged from an undergraduate Reading Subject that described distinctive features of Jack’s cross-
cultural education.
In one sense this is Jack’s story, but it is also a narrative affected by close and distant family
members and people in countries he resided in for various lengths of time during his schooling. As
a youngster moved from one country at school-starting age, Jack could not readily reconstruct
dates, time, places. Looking back now, the valence of those events can, however, be seen as forma-
tive. Before undertaking this project this array of facts, circumstances and relationships was for
him relatively undifferentiated personal history. Gathering information meant talking to family and
friends, getting into contact with people who had relevant knowledge. It took time on social media,
telephone, and video-link to collect this data, and cross-check it; such social media are being
increasingly recognised as a reliable way to research a subject involving biographical stories
(Bryman, 2015: 558). An ethic of care has been necessary in describing events in Jack’s schooling
to avoid involving or ‘bringing discomfort’ to other family members in the narrative (Habibis,
2013: 76). Using the pseudonym ‘Jack’ in this account is part of being careful in this respect.
This process helped Jack reconstruct his schooling across several countries, adjusting it with
new information and responding to collaborator questions. It was partly created in written form,
sometimes combining written and spoken forms. Later, oral reflection recombined with previous
writing helped re-understand elements of his story. Unless otherwise indicated, quotations in the
following sections are Jack’s words from his initial document and subsequent expansion
Fanning and Burns 151

or clarifications. These citations and commentary are inevitably only parts of the emotional and
intercultural richness of his larger personal account and sense of identity today. An autoethno-
graphic account such as this is specific, not an empirical generalisation about a cohort. Its contribu-
tion in this article is to illuminate how socio-political patterns of career, education and international
people-flows play out. It may also demonstrate that accepted concepts have limited applicability.
Continuing conversations about the meaning of this data between us as colleagues have come
to see common conceptualisations of TCK not entirely fitting this evidence. Here one co-author,
Jack, recounts his educational history to another co-author. We discuss, analyse and reflect on what
Jack’s experiences mean or do not mean, and how they might be interpreted. The educational
autoethnographic narrative is constructed and reconstructed (Ricoeur, 1991) by question-and-
response over considerable periods of interrupted conversation. These were not formal interviews,
but included self-writing by each collaborator and efforts to conceptualise events and meanings, as
well as asking numerous ‘For example …?’ kinds of questions. This avoids privileging experience
as simple truth, instead trying to problematise its meaning relative to existing concepts.

Findings: Jack’s Intercultural Schooling Career

Data from Jack’s extended story is used to explore points of similarity and difference from conven-
tional TCK writing, thereby opening possibilities of alternative framing such as antipodean theo-
rising opening up. First, the extent of Jack’s antipodean trajectory is sketched. Second, examples
from the first stages of Jack’s educational journey are presented. Third, material from his later
sequences of educational-cultural transitions is considered. Implications of the limited generalisa-
bility of TCK theory that emerge are returned to in the conclusion. At this distance of time, several
years after his schooling, Jack’s multi-country education gives him a different perspective on living
in Australia than young people who have mostly experienced Anglo-Australian culture. This is part
of the antipodean nature of his schooling. That is, he is not journeying and returning to the United
States, the United Kingdom, or West Europe, the geo-political and economic centres globally.

Reaching across the antipodean trajectory

Jack’s schooling has given him a sense of education’s existential importance in his life, more than
simply formal learning. The arcs on the map (Figure 1) of his cross-cultural schooling reach out of
Africa from Harare in Zimbabwe to schooling in Birmingham, England, to Galle in Sri Lanka, the
New Zealand city of Auckland, and finally to Echuca on the northern state border of Victoria,
Australia. This was a series of diverse, first-hand experiences in each of the educational institutions
attended, providing the basis for reflection of differences and similarities in time spent in classes
and other school activities, play and leisure, and talking with many other children from different
education systems and different lived neighbourhoods. In outlining these experiences, Jack’s story
can be seen to contain different elements from the home-and-away characteristics of geo-political
powers to elsewhere, and back.
Jack came from a rural setting just outside Harare, Zimbabwe. He had a Zimbabwean mother
and an Australian father, a family consisting of both parents and siblings. His parents saw problem-
atic political changes taking place within Zimbabwe. They decided to move, travelling in early
1990 to Birmingham, England for work opportunities. This was later followed by another employ-
ment move to Galle in southern Sri Lanka at the start of 1993, where they stayed until the end of
1994. Switching primary schooling systems, and switching countries—including changing from
British to South Asian cultures—was a repeated induction to new cultural practices and experi-
ences. Jack left Zimbabwe speaking English and Shona, as was normal in that rural setting. English
152 Journal of Research in International Education 16(2)

Figure 1.  Jack’s antipodean intercultural schooling trajectory.

was spoken within the immediate family; Shona — a Bantu language spoken by the majority of
Zimbabweans, and also used in adjacent countries — was spoken as the first language of their farm
workers and their families.
Jack recognises important aspects of himself in the following kinds of discussions. Lijadi and
van Schalkwyk (2014) confirm that intercultural schooling numbers (using the term TCKs) con-
tinue to rise. On the one hand, Jack describes himself as like these young people in being able to
fit into many cultures easily, yet these authors describe how such young people also struggle in
maintaining intimate relationships. Such multi-culturally educated young people themselves say
they enjoy the lifestyle, quite often stating they prefer a nomadic lifestyle. Russell (2011) suggests
transitioning into a new culture is easier for a TCK, because they do it so often. Such youngsters
are seen as people who have learnt the skills that are what make international engagement work—
they know how to transition between cultures easily, and generally have good language skills.
Selmer and Lam (2004) see TCKs as the next wave for international businesses, providing
‘already-on’ skills other workers struggle to learn. Jack does not see himself as nomadic or of high
mobility. Rather, he has established himself in one Australian state in tertiary education and now
in working life.
In many ways anthropologist Turner’s (1967) term ‘liminal’ is preferable to the original intersti-
tial TCK concept that implied that third space was less real by being somehow abstracted from
geo-political centres that were home. As a space within which people are in the process of chang-
ing, a liminal space is the in-between stage, moving from pre-liminal to liminal (that is, in-between)
to post-liminal. This more accurately describes Jack’s state of becoming, as he moved into and
adapted to new cultures and school groups. Like other children in similar situations, Jack spent a
great amount of time adapting to the other cultures he had moved to. Helmick (2014) counters that
though not everyone copes well in liminal space/time, children nevertheless have special capaci-
ties. Amigo’s (2014) view contrasts with this yet again, seeing liminal space as allowing children
to learn, and that having a worldwide canvas is one of the best things for children. Those described
as TCKs have some of the best opportunities to learn by living in multiple places and cultures. In
Fanning and Burns 153

Jack’s reflections now, it is an ongoing sense of liminality that he talks about, rather than each
transition while at these different schools. The recurrent experiences of entering “a new world”
each time are the benchmark against which he assesses contemporary events and relationships. He
is not primarily referencing an original “home” environment.
Cross–culturally educated children like Jack are known to have many skills that one-culture
children have not developed. Panina and Kroumova (2015) contend that TCKs have the ability to
change, and develop language skills at a much higher rate than do children of a single culture.
These skills develop at such a rate due to the lived necessity of acquiring them. The learning curve
of attending multiple international schools, as Jack expresses it laconically, “is fairly significant”.
This understatement appears to arise from Jack expressing caution when mixing with mostly
Australian-only young people. Jack’s feelings build on his sense of provisionality in repeatedly
adapting to new schooling and lived situations. For Kenny (2014), TCKs’ learning curve in a new
environment is much better. Most TCKs know they have this ability, yet they are unsure how to
quantify it, or explain how they are able to do it. Again, Jack shows a mixture of both diffidence
yet clarity at the same time in his own sense of fairness and appropriate treatment of “different”
others.
Describing Jack’s schooling trajectory (Figure 1) has drawn on literature that uses the concept
of TCK to talk about the experience of international schooling. This literature is applied to widely
diverse intercultural situations. An antipodean perspective, however, suggests this is at once too
general and too specific to satisfactorily encompass the complex contemporary phenomenon of
internationally schooled youngsters in a globalising workforce. First, Jack’s experience between
countries is better expressed as distinct but relational. It is not interstitial between a main culture
and some ‘other’ culture. It is serial, cumulative and multiple. That does not yet make Jack’s expe-
rience antipodean, but his example undermines the universality of the TCK concept: that is, it is too
general.
Second, however, TCK conceptualisation is also too specific: in Jack’s case it is not interstitial
in an all-encompassing sense, but is better understood as having liminal attributes of passage
between stages, education systems and cultures. Antipodean theorising avoids the totalising effects
of binary concepts. A soon as a space or place is created, two things start to occur: re-assembling
the relationships into larger units and also reducing them into smaller educational parts, stages and
intersections. Jack’s experience has not left him discombobulated as the TCK literature conveys.
Nor has it “enabled” him in some faintly post-modern way to be successful in later life. It has given
him a sharper insight into the truncating ethnocentrism implicit if not taught and broadly allowed
in parts of his period in regional Australian schooling, and now experienced in everyday Australian
society around him.

Contrasts in first stages of education trajectory

From Zimbabwe, Jack’s starting school in England was a “massive cultural shock” which he
describes as extending “from the weather, to the constant usage of the English language, to the food
that was served at lunch”. A change of country for young children ensures there will be some cul-
ture-shock trying to deal with a new place (Kroger, 2014). Jack’s experiences of this are gathered
under four headings: language adaptations, physical activity, artistic expression, and schooling and
social hierarchy. The later suggestion is that these can pass as TCK experiences but are more accu-
rately portrayed as an antipodean schooling trajectory.

Language—personal and school culture.  Perhaps oddly, because of the colonial links between Zim-
babwe and the United Kingdom, the biggest culture-shock Jack found in the education system on
154 Journal of Research in International Education 16(2)

this first move to England was in the “unremitting use”, from his point of view, of the English
language. Jack had Shona-speaking friends in the United Kingdom school, yet was not allowed to
use Shona while attending school, even in recess or lunch breaks, on the instructions of the teach-
ers. Sneddon (2008) comments that bilingual skills have been encouraged in England for a long
time, as long as they are European or Asian languages. With Shona having a relatively small
speaker base it was not deemed desirable by teachers in Birmingham as a language for creating
bilingual skills. The social-personal needs of these children were ignored. Jack found discouraging
language skills like this “confrontational as a kid, and stupid as an adult” in later post-schooling
situations.
In contrast to the Birmingham school, Jack experienced the school in Galle, Sri Lanka as more
adaptable in how it responded to newcomers. For him it was “more comfortable” as a new learning
environment to which he had to adapt. There was still major culture-shock for him living in Sri
Lanka, but his perception was that the locals “were a lot nicer” to Jack and his family. The way the
locals included the family was the biggest “shock”, but a nice one for the family; everyone was so
welcoming. Jack noted that while the teachers taught his classes in English, if the students needed
it there was someone to translate into Sinhalese. Brock-Utne (2011) says that if a student learns at
school in their first language, they have greater ability to absorb the subject matter, and also to do
well within the school’s curriculum. Hayes (2010) comments that having opportunities to access
language skills from native speakers improves capacity to speak a language. Jack described the
private school he attended in Galle as offering opportunity and encouragement to learn Sinhalese,
and helped him improve his language skills.

Physical activity.  In the private primary school Jack attended in Birmingham, physical education
played a massive part in the school’s everyday life. Each child was “vigorously encouraged to join
at least one sporting team” at the school. Vertinsky (2010) confirms that private schools have a
history of encouraging active pursuits in physical education. Jack participated actively in football
(soccer), cricket and swimming, one of few students who knew how to swim before starting school.
This is something that came easily to Jack as he found the sports skills he learned in Africa were
developed at a higher level than for other students. Standage et al. (2005) describe how British
systems of education like to use physical education as a way to develop self-determination within
young people. Jack readily responded to this urging to participate in at least one sport. Quite often
Jack participated in swimming all year round while at school in Birmingham, playing cricket in the
warmer months or football in the cool months.
When he moved to Sri Lanka, Jack found the students he studied with in Galle were “cricket
mad”. They would play cricket in their breaks from classes, as soon as they could get onto the
school grounds, as well as before and after school, and in school teams. Bunde-Birouste (2006)
states that Sri Lankans are very good at using sport as a way to help rebuild after civil war or natu-
ral disaster. Cricket is usually at the forefront of this, and Jack recalls that “even with minimal
equipment they do it rather well”. After one particularly violent storm doing major damage, most
local children in his neighbourhood could not wait to get out and play cricket, using whatever they
could find to take part. In Sri Lanka using cricket to promote a healthier lifestyle that includes
exercise has been a well-used strategy by people active in health promotion (Mukhopadhyay,
2007). Thus in both British and Sri Lankan international schooling contexts Jack actively partici-
pated and enjoyed physical activities.

Artistic expression.  The arts taught in the Birmingham private school that Jack attended were taught
in a way he describes as follows “if you know how the greats have produced their art, then you
should be capable of producing great art yourself”. Clark and Button (2011) report that this has
Fanning and Burns 155

been the primary way of teaching artistic subjects in the British schooling system for generations
of students. In painting terms, Jack found he was supposed to try and paint like Da Vinci, Van Gogh
or Picasso. Musically, Jack and his classmates were taught to try and play music produced by
Bach, Mozart or Beethoven. He found this form of teaching the creative arts “quite stifling to a
young person’s natural artistic nature”. In learning art like this, he says, students all complained
about the lack of personal creativity, and about not learning to express themselves artistically in
ways they enjoyed. Jack proposes that “this form of education may bring some success, but it also
turns students off from doing anything else artistically”.
Jack found art education in Sri Lanka very different. He noticed that while being taught art in
class had some similarities with his Birmingham school, there was a lot of room for personal
expression within the art he had to produce for class, and this was also actively encouraged in other
students’ work. Unterhalter (2007) sees expression of self as a major part of art education in Sri
Lanka, that has been since the 1960s, as well as being a platform to promote gender equality. The
art classes Jack took in Galle were quiet, in contrast to the classroom environment in Birmingham.
School teachers in Galle encouraged students to learn about art from different cultures, and styles,
instead of using what Jack had come to understand as the European masters. This more relaxed
approach, and teacher encouragement “to explore personal themes in art was enjoyable” for Jack.
Again, here were two quite contrasting teaching milieus, one emphasising authoritative forms of
art and art production, the echo of geo-political centrism, the other more plural in developing stu-
dents’ interests and capabilities.

Schooling and social hierarchy.  Something Jack noticed with his school in Birmingham was the class
divide between his schoolmates based on where they lived. Only people who could afford to, or
were on a scholarship, were able to attend this private school. Zhang et al. (2011) observes there
has generally between a significant difference between private and public schools, and that due to
their financial ‘pull’, private schools are able to entice the best teachers to their ranks, so that the
quality of education that private school children receive is generally higher than public schools.
Jack was well aware of this—he had noticed he was well ahead of his neighbourhood friends who
were attending public schools, and also that expectations were higher in the level of work that the
teachers set for classes. As well as this, there was a noticeable difference in the British class system
between public and private schools. Being of Zimbabwean and Australian descent, it was seen that
the family were one of the most interesting mixes in the school, yet this also confounded the class
system with which the British families were familiar.
The “higher-end private school” Jack attended for two years in Galle was a school that did not
charge the parents of students a fee for attending what he described as reputedly “one of the better
schools in the city”. Up until 2000, schooling in Sri Lanka was free, schooling having been free for
children in Sri Lanka since 1943, unless attending a top-of-the-range private school which may
have charged students to attend (Gamlath, 2013). Private schools give an advantage to students in
Sri Lanka anxious to get the high marks necessary to gain entrance at universities that are free for
undergraduates (Hettige, 2000). Although Jack’s time there was not part of the Sri Lankan social
hierarchy, he remembers a lot of his friends wanted to get into university, “using education to land
a better job”. Parents wanted their children to go to a better school, and the children “worked hard
at their studies”. Jack found this similar to his own family’s encouraging of study towards univer-
sity as the best positioning for the workforce.
Some of these children fit the conventional idea of TCK, but many like Jack do not. Some are
ambitious within their own culture; some are between one non-western country and another. Others
like Jack moved through a series of international schooling stages and experiences of western cul-
ture but not returning to family locality or to a geo-political centre. Dislocation, transition and
156 Journal of Research in International Education 16(2)

related ideas are very important indeed, but overstretching one concept is not academically ade-
quate in a field where world global movements are increasing faster than ever and reflecting more
diverse patterns.

Later stages of schooling trajectory

As he got older, in the later stages of his intercultural schooling trajectory, Jack began to be aware
of features of his schooling experience that were distinctive, in contrast to the experience of others.
These are briefly documented here in terms of Jack’s maturing identity, recognition of schools’
different cultural understanding, how schools embraced international cultures, and how local art
was a ‘site’ of comparison between different schools.

Maturing identity that sees differently.  Jack’s experiences of the education systems in both New Zea-
land and Australia were broadly similar, yet even in these closely related former Anglo-settler colo-
nies he found significant differences. These were seen through the lens of a Zimbabwean-now-teenager
having experienced two previous educational systems and the markedly different social and local
milieus surrounding them. Jack describes these as particularly felt in then-current discourses of
race and culture in these educational contexts (first decade of this century). He experienced his
schools in both metropolitan Auckland and regional northern Victoria as doing things well in gen-
eral educational terms. He found, however, that the latter had issues in relation to acting positively
to newcomers and immigrants within their communities at this time. Regarding this lack of cultural
openness, Jack comments that “The fit in metropolitan Auckland was a lot easier than in northern
Victoria”.

A different metropolitan-rural comparison. The African diaspora is something significant for the

world community. Because of difficult conditions across many countries of the African continent,
many inhabitants from all ethnicities move for better life chances for themselves and their families.
People want the best opportunities, and will move to make better lives (Santana, 2014). Jack found
in Auckland during the 1990s that there were quite a few African families living and working
within the city. Their children all went to local schools. Pond (2014) states that when both black
and white African people come to an place such as Auckland, they all had to learn local ways, and
work out what was acceptable in their new community. From his own previous experiences Jack
could see it was like this for migrant children as well: though used to a certain educational back-
ground, they had to change to fit into the new educational system.
Jack explains that the African diaspora did not come to northern Victoria in Australia until the
last years of the twentieth century. In the 1990-2000s he found there were not many African immi-
grants living in or around Echuca. It was a culture shock both to African immigrants and to locals
when they interacted with each other. Leary (2014) notes that many African immigrants had issues
in new western communities because the community and the immigrant did not understand each
other and this caused issues for newcomers perceived as ‘different’. Such dynamics affected chil-
dren in school—the lack of understanding of Africanness led to many issues within the educational
system, which were not understood by most people (Garland, 2013). Jack could see this had con-
sequences for classmates when their school teachers and friends did not understand their culture
and experience of crossing cultures.

Contrasting local schools’ cultural understanding.  From his time in 1990s Auckland, Jack described
his school as “rather adept at understanding how these children were, and catered for their needs”.
Morales (2015) proposes that students of schools that have successful transition programs have
Fanning and Burns 157

greater success in their academic lives. The international children in the Auckland school were
given considerable assistance by the faculty of the school. Jack saw that the families of these
children, himself included, were also given greater support by the school. For Granich (2013)
such cultural competency has become a major education theme in the modern world through
globalisation of work and lifestyles: education systems and teachers need training in cultural
competency. This Auckland school had understood this in the 1990s and begun programs to help
its students. It had bridging programs designed to include students from other cultures, helping
them flourish in the school’s system of education and its local community. Tracing the causes of
this is beyond the present discussion, but the discomfort of several decades of racial adjustment
to the Mäori renaissance is one obvious element in opening intercultural communication (Bell,
2004; Täitaiako, 2011).
In contrast to the Auckland experience, Jack found that rural northern Victoria in the late 1990s
unreflectively dealt with young people like himself, with no adjustments made for very different
life experiences—a rigidly uniform sameness with every other child. With few such children in this
schooling system at the time, it failed to engage him or black African students except within a
“pretty unyielding rural-regional Australian culture”. Jack and others had to conform to the local
‘culture’. Such failure to engage intercultural children properly within an education system can be
argued as being especially dangerous for children, and almost certainly means children will fall
behind (Morales, 2015). Jack found the pressure to make children conform to this restrictive local
culture was everywhere, and overwhelming—from what to eat, to how to act in social situations. In
contrast Madden and Joshi (2013) say that engaging a child’s culture by teachers is not only good
for the child but also for the whole class, because all children get to see a different perspective.
Other locations in these two western post-settler countries would undoubtedly reveal wide varia-
tions in school responses to the push towards greater multiculturalism happening in this period.
Policy changes to being more uniformly inclusive can thus be seen as contrasting to variations
between different geographic localities.

Schools embracing international cultures.  Embracing culture, and different cultures, is challenging
for any education system, yet the Auckland school excelled in this work. Jack found it was able to
embrace the Anglo-New Zealand (Pakeha) and Mäori cultures, as well as marrying the other cul-
tures found in each classroom. He describes it as follows: “The school was able to make students
feel comfortable for who they were, which would have been a hard thing to do”. For Eldin (2015),
teaching culture, and blending different cultures in a classroom, are ‘hot issues’ which schools have
to deal with in the modern world, most not having had success. The ones who are successful lead
with understanding, and are always adjusting what they do. Kukreja and Bhagat (2015) say that
continually reviewing, and implementing changes about, cultural understanding is where the best
institutions are leading others. Such academic institutions maintain currency with research in
developing ways to enhance cultural diversity.
Jack found that acknowledgment of cultural diversity in northern Victoria in the late 1990s was
largely absent. Recognition of cultural differences was

“not treated as a significant thing in the local high school. There were Pacific Islander students, a number
of Koori students, and some African students, yet almost no cultural classes that were not western,
European or White-Australian based. Almost everything was based around white culture within Australia.”

Wu et al. (2015) observe that teaching about different cultures broadens students’ horizons, and
makes them more effective adults. High schools have a responsibility to teach students how to be
well-rounded people who can at least understand cultural issues, which was not happening in
158 Journal of Research in International Education 16(2)

Jack’s northern rural Victorian high school in the late 1990s. Wu et al. suggest that with greater
understanding of culture, students from different cultures will do better academically and socially,
and classmates are likely to develop interests in other cultures. Jack asserts that in his recent profes-
sional employment in Australian metropolitan centres he sees greater awareness of this kind but,
applying his intercultural schooling experiences, he comments that he is constantly surprised at
instances of professional staff demonstrating little or no cultural breadth.

Another chapter in art and Indigenous culture.  An earlier section described Jack’s contrasting experi-
ences between his United Kingdom school and his school in Sri Lanka. After further experiences
Jack could see that one area his school in Auckland was lacking in how it dealt with culture was
how art was taught, despite other positive intercultural learning opportunities:

“A common thing in schooling seems to be teaching art that assumes western/ European techniques and
ideas. This was seen as at leading edge—the measure of art in the world. This view did not take into
account art forms from Asia or Pacific Islands for instance, which should have been seen in the same way,
and the quality recognised as just as good.”

In this respect, Jack found the school’s practice had not progressed in parallel with other elements
of greater cultural openness and seemed to more reflect the Birmingham situation mentioned ear-
lier. Letts (2015) states teaching art covers all forms and cultures, and it also broadens the views of
students. Art can play a major role in bringing people together, and if done well helps with bridging
different cultures. Jack’s contention fits this notion that art has the ability to strengthen ties, giving
people with different views on politics and economics a place they can enjoy together.
Jack’s adult sense of the obviousness of acknowledging cultures as significant today sees
Australia, his father’s homeland, with an outsider’s eye as he mixes with a new generation of sec-
ondary and tertiary students:

“Something becoming more apparent within Australian schools is how they teach about cultures. For
Aboriginal Australians, when I said ‘there is a lot of culture not being taught in rural northern Victoria’ in
the late 1990s, I meant in that period, at that school, there were only ever a few classes a year on Aboriginal
culture, which was rather poor.”

Again Jack’s characteristic understatement is present in this critique. This is not a TCK who
‘perches’ on the edge of a larger culture. This is someone with a developed ground-level sense of
cultural desirability and fairness. Rauland and Adams (2015) affirm that engagement in Aboriginal
culture is important, and doing so can provide a bridge between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal
Australians. For Jack, today, the effects of this “continually lost opportunity” in schooling at that
time in the 1990s, to learn about Aboriginal culture and ways, should have been “something that
can push for greater justice for Aboriginal Australians”. Though he acknowledges major shifts
have been occurring in Australian education, in his adult life he remarks he has to continue to deal
with the insularity and white-centrism of other adults, still relatively young, who are the products
of that period of education.
Gunn (2014) connects the TCK concept and first-people skills and experiences: teaching
Aboriginal culture through traditional stories and storytelling is more important than traditional
western teaching techniques to achieve this. Furthermore, learning about Aboriginal culture and
lives enhances the wider Australian culture, bringing people together from different cultures. For
Jack this unasked-for sensitivity (Straffon, 2003) from his own prolonged intercultural educa-
tion—even in the final Australian stage of his educational journey—makes him permanently and
acutely aware of inclusion/exclusion and belonging in any interaction.
Fanning and Burns 159

Yet once again the TCK concept is pressed into use far from its main provenance, to describe
immigrants and first people in settler-post-colonial white societies. The divided self from inhabit-
ing different worlds has quite different referents at two levels. First, these groups are not provision-
ally from one place and are not problematising return, even though it is true that in-between,
liminal, sensibility is defining. Second, however, the needs driving immigration or the ‘sorry his-
tory’ of first-people’s displacement in their own land are obscured by TCK, and of course are far
bigger culturally and politically than the term “kids” can encompass.

Conclusion: Thinking About Jack’s Educational Pathway

Now as an adult at the other end of this schooling trajectory Jack makes a two-fold observation of
present day Australianness and attitudes that become apparent to him as he moves around society.
First, he says, being “within close family and friends is one thing”. However, people outside the
family have issues with his family being both white and African. The cultural categorisation being
used in these encounters Jack has is based on a perception that if he comes from Africa, his skin
colour cannot be white. This perceptual lens operates in spite of the fact that Australian statistics
record almost fifty percent of African continent immigrants are white English-speakers from South
Africa arriving in the skilled migration scheme (Hugo, 2009). But the term ‘African Australians’ is
usually taken to mean migrants who have come to Australia on humanitarian visas and have black
skin colour (Phillips, 2011).
Second, the other issue that people outside the family have in talking with Jack is the fact that
he and his family members and friends who have experienced a similar schooling and international
upbringing do not sound foreign. This lack of their own ability to achieve immediate identification
of Jack’s different origins is somehow a problem. People like Jack adapted their accent and lan-
guage as they travelled, and Jack modified his speaking manner in the countries to which he moved.
But others find it hard to believe the members of this family are “anything but locals to the country
they are presently living in”. This is hardly Jack’s ‘fault’, but to these white Australians it seems
somehow illegitimate, a “bit sneaky”, and incomprehensible.
This discrepancy is experienced by Jack as his local Australian companions’ cultural mispercep-
tion. The lived reality is that Jack’s family left Africa before any of the children in their family—
Jack and his siblings—had started school. The schooling system in Zimbabwe was based on the
model from England, with high school students studying both O and A levels, and quite a few
travelling for university studies in South Africa or England. The schooling system within Zimbabwe
is compatible with most Western European and southern African and Australasian systems. It
allows students to enter and graduate in university systems in multiple countries.
Byttner (2012: 1) shows the permanent interactive effects for people who have gone through
multi-cultural schooling in dealing with daily constraining or narrow cultural assumptions:

“Where are you from? The seemingly innocuous question usually elicits a feeling of dread, a groan, or a
knowing smirk from every third culture kid (TCK) who has ever been asked the question. The answers are
varied and often depend on any number of conditions: the person’s mood, the length of time allowed for a
response, the perceived interest of the individual asking the question. Yet, no matter how simple the
response may seem, you can be sure there is a story to be told behind it.”

Jack, too, stops and starts in telling stories like this one, often proceeding in a round-about manner,
feeling his way for how to say the subtle and almost incommunicable sameness yet difference that
is his identity. Despite the problematics of the TCK terminology from an antipodean perspective,
such exploration and articulation of intercultural schooling still provide tools for expression.
160 Journal of Research in International Education 16(2)

Greenholtz and Kim (2009: 391) summarise: “[T]he central paradox of global nomadism [is]
that cultural hybrids seem at home in any cultural context, but feel at home only among others with
a similar cultural history”. An example closer to an antipodean focus than the TCK concept is
Cockburn’s (2002) description of dislocated identity from the point of a Singaporean girl growing
up in Japan and speaking Japanese more fluently than Chinese but not knowing the mores of
Japanese culture. This has many of the themes any TCK study reveals. It is notable, however, in
not being a cultural interchange between a geo-political western power and a developing country.
The linkages are different, hence closer to an antipodean experience. In that instance the exchange
is between one non-western country and another, neither developing world countries. To TCK
theorising this looks like just another example of the phenomenon. The argument being made here
is that further distinctions can usefully be made.
TCK conceptions are deficit theorising in the implicit referencing of hegemonic culture—
viewed either for individuals or educational institutions such as schools. Obviously enough, any
culture-culture transition creates sensibilities of belonging/not-belonging. But antipodean perspec-
tives have no need for a discourse of retreat ‘back’ to normality, or a non-space in between. Instead,
questions of centre and periphery are surfaced and addressed in ways that challenge conventional
views of dominant societies. This intercultural world is a new kind of human experience. Yet again,
Limberg and Lambie (2011: 47) observe:

“TCKs appear to feel at home in most cultures, but a true sense of belonging, comfort, and reassurance
occurs when they are with people who have had similar experiences (Greenholtz and Kim, 2009; Pollock
and van Reken, 1999).”

In Limberg and Lambie’s case they are seeking to relate the relevance of counselling to the mental
wellbeing needs of students still at school. In Jack’s case, he has been successful in tertiary educa-
tion, completing three degrees. The way he expresses it, he derived an intercultural sensibility
through his schooling such that now he finds he can talk easily to just about anyone on campus or
off, in social settings and in his professional work. He has enjoyed how this habitus is helpful
interacting with younger students. But the more he has moved around in Australia in paid work, as
a student, and in socialising through sports clubs and more generally, the more “I get tired of ongo-
ing narrow-minded views, the casual sexism and racism that is ingrained in so many Australians’
conversations. It gets blurted out without any thought of how ignorant or offensive it actually is”.
Jack affirms his educational journey in the description above as “a rather unique one”, that is
“definitely not the norm in everyday education”. It is a distinct trajectory primarily from the antipo-
des, intersecting the global centres, yet returning to the south. This creates a singular sense of self
trying to reflect upon and articulate the experience. It invokes significant socio-cultural concepts such
as self, identity, hybridity, intercultural and transition. These concepts not only apply, however, to his
own identity, but also create in him views about education and where education can be improved
for further generations of students. From the pivotal role that good and negative educational experi-
ences have played in his life, these formative experiences lead him to strong views on how education
plays a significant place in everyone’s lives and the need to develop a better version.
In Jack’s view, education needs to evolve by actively looking at different ways of doing things,
drawing from educational systems in different countries to make a blend of what is the best.
Reconfiguring education, in this view, is what helps communities become better versions of them-
selves. Thus each stage of his educational journey had significance for Jack, now looking back.
Each place gave a perspective on life, and the way people intermingled, leading to greater under-
standing of learning, culture, and the world. What was learnt in one place may have been inapt or
only partly apt for the next, so the ability to learn what was needed in a new place, and how to fit
Fanning and Burns 161

into different cultures when needed, was fundamental and remains a core element of identity and
personal competence today.
It is not the multiple steps of Jack’s education that make it antipodean. These steps, however,
gave repeated opportunities to test the non-TCK pattern he inhabited. Neither is Jack’s experience
the same as that of other edge/peripheral societies even though it shares with them being outside
the TCK binary of geo-political centre travelling to an ‘other’ country. Antipodean theory acknowl-
edges the globally peripheral but privileged position Australia and New Zealand occupy. Jack’s
experience overlaps with TCK notions, but is distinct in not making the assumptions of the TCK
conceptualisation. It is one of potentially several alternative ways of experiencing the intercultural
pull of growing up and being formed between cultures.
As a single instance Jack’s international educational journey does not – cannot in fact – confirm
the contours of an antipodean perspective, but as a significantly antipodean narrative it offers nega-
tion of several previous assumptions about the generalisability of TCK ideas. Central to Beilharz
and Hogan’s (2012) analysis, described above, is that an antipodean point of view is not the oppo-
site of global theories that start from the political centres of the United States or Europe; models
since Australia and New Zealand are deeply implicated in that modern, global, world. An antipo-
dean perspective avoids excessive focus on the person, but considers also how the experience of
intercultural schooling enables observation and interpretation of the surrounding society. Further,
it offers research that attempts to give the TCK genre greater freedom to analyse intercultural edu-
cation in new and more productive ways.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit
sectors.

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Author biographies
Sean Fanning is a postgraduate Planning Program student at La Trobe University’s Bendigo campus. He is
active in an NGO supporting community development and outstanding young leaders.
Edgar Burns lectures in the Sociology Program at La Trobe University. His teaching includes social theory,
21st century communities and research methods. He researches professions and organisations, and is cur-
rently involved in a quantitative research project on settler society occupations and a contemporary project
on Australian teachers being bullied.