Drawing on more than 20 years of experience in international education, Bobbie Bumgarner’s doctoral research investigates the possibility of the Third Culture Educator (TCE) as a way of understanding the experiences of internationally mobile teachers. Inspired by research on Third Culture Kids (TCKs), her work shifts the lens to educators whose movement across cultures and communities may reshape how they understand themselves, where they belong and who they become through these transitions.

Through this emerging research, Bobbie explores whether the TCE may offer a useful conceptual lens for understanding how international educators make meaning of lives and careers shaped by mobility. At the heart of her work is an interest in how the self evolves across cultural transitions and how international educators continually reinterpret and reimagine who they are as they learn to teach between worlds.