Teaching Internationally: Stories from 15 Years of Teaching Art Around the World (Ep. 482)

Welcome to Art Ed Radio, the podcast for art teachers. This show is produced by The Art of Education, and I’m your host, Tim Bogatz.

I’m excited for today’s conversation because we’re going to be talking with someone who has one of the coolest teaching journeys I’ve heard in a long time, someone who has spent her career teaching art all around the world. So, I’ll be joined today by Lindsey Bailey, who has been an art teacher internationally for close to 15 years. Now, you may recognize her from her presentations at the last two Art Ed NOW conferences. She just wrapped up her teaching contract in Beijing. And she is teaching this year in Ethiopia. Now, she’s going to be joining me today from Portugal. Like I said, she’s all over the place. But her teaching career has spanned so many countries and so many cultures, and she has some incredible stories to share about, what it’s like to live and teach internationally.

And so, as we talk today, I want to ask Lindsey about how she first got into teaching art, what inspired her to go abroad to teach, and maybe see what kind of lesson she’s learned along the way. And I think she has such a great perspective on what it means to be adaptable and creative and open to new experiences. And I think there’s some great lessons in there for all of us. So, let me bring her on now.

Okay, Lindsey Bailey is joining me now. Lindsey, how are you?

I’m good, thank you.

Good, good. Glad to hear it. Super excited that you’re joining me here. And I guess, just to start with, I would love to have you just give us a quick introduction. Can you tell us about who you are, what and where you teach? Anything else that you want to share with us?

Let’s see. I have been teaching overseas for just under 15 years now. I just finished up a two-year contract at a school in Beijing, China, and I’m in process of moving in to Ethiopia, and currently talking to you from Portugal. I’m certified to teach K-12, but I have been sort of living in the first grade through sixth grade space for the past probably 10 years.

Okay. Okay. Very cool. No, and I guess I’m just kind of fascinated by all the different places you have taught, all the different things you’ve done. And I guess I would love for you to just tell us a little bit about your journey. What led you to become an art teacher, first of all? And then, secondly, what inspired you to move around the world? What inspired you to teach internationally?

I’ll break up this answer because I think it’s really important to see where that all started to grow in me back in the day. So, I went to undergrad for my BFA at the University of Texas at Austin. We had sort of a visual arts track that you could go on in a… There was a teaching track, but they were very separate. And I remember thinking, while I was in school, that it was so strange to me that they were so drastically separated because we all end up doing the same thing at some time or another. So, that always sort of hit me the wrong way. And my mother was a teacher for a very long time. And I always had sort of gotten excited about using community in my artwork. And I think just working with people on a regular basis, that teaching component naturally fed itself into that kind of arena.

And I think I took some time off while I was in undergrad. So I ended up stopping kind of in the middle of my junior year of college and then took about 10 years off. And during that 10 years, I was working all over the place. I was teaching art camps at various museums in Nashville, Tennessee, and I was being a visiting artist at local elementary schools, and I was working at the Fine Arts Museum there, and I was working at an organic grocery store. It just kind of was all over the place. And the more I started doing that, the more I thought, “Well, I should start maybe teaching classes that I truly believe in sort of out of my home.” So I started a home studio. It was called Blue Raku Studios, and I taught clay and painting and all different kinds of things to homeschoolers and people after-school programs and all sorts of things. And I just started thinking to myself, “If I’m teaching and enjoying it this much, I should probably go back and finish my undergraduate degree, and really push myself to really do this.”

After that, I came back to Nashville, kind of picked up where I had left off with all the various jobs around town. And I just thought to myself, “Well, I just did all this really wonderful community work where I was teaching and working with students and young people and having just an amazing time, and it really transformed my life.” And I just thought, “There might be something more than just working seven days a week and doing all the things around town that I was doing.” I mean, it was a very fun life doing all that stuff. I was doing these pop-up workshops at Vanderbilt and I was doing all these other things. And it was really, really fun, but that can really take a toll to work seven days a week, all day long.

And so, I contacted the career center at the University of Texas and also the career center at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and I just said, “Just finished this master’s program. It was an amazing time.” And we just kind of worked together, all three of us, down in Texas, also in Baltimore, and just kind of figured out what my likes and dislikes were and where we thought I would fit in. And they kind of had me start applying to private schools in the United States. And I ended up applying for this job that at the time wasn’t listed as being overseas, but I applied for it, and I ended up getting an interview, and I was like, “Oh, it’s a Singapore.” It was just like, “Surprise.” So, I was like, “Well, this could be kind of interesting.” And I applied for the job, I got an interview, got a second interview, got a third interview, and got the offer.

Took the offer to my dad’s house, and we read over it, and he was like, “This is incredible. You should totally do this.” So, I was like, “Right.” And it was hilarious. They were taking me to the airport after all the moving stuff and getting my visa and all this stuff and everything that I needed to go to Singapore. And my dad was like, “Do you know where Singapore is?” And I was like, “No. I’ll figure it out when I get there.” And so, it just kind of started this kind of jump into curiosity. I had no idea necessarily what I was doing. It was kind of a surprise. I had been overseas a couple of times on vacations, but it was very sort of sporadic and with my parents.

And so, I just jumped with both feet and ended up absolutely just loving it. And so, Singapore was my first position. I was there for three years. And that’s when I started doing sort of the bulk of my IB training, so for International Baccalaureate and PYP. It’s inquiry-based teaching. I really love it. I think art really lends itself to that kind of teaching. And so, it’s always kind of been part of who I am.

And then, from there, I just kind of blossomed. I got excited and started thinking, “Well, if I can teach in Singapore, couldn’t I teach also in Europe? And couldn’t I also teach in the Middle East? And couldn’t I also…” And I just started thinking, “This would be an amazing way to see the world. I’m getting paid, but I’m also able to travel.” So, it just really lined up with feeding my curiosity, playing with that idea of how do you build community in a new place, and going back to my first master’s of “What is community arts? And how do you build community when you’re just thrown into a new area that’s maybe not your own?” That just has blossomed into this amazing experience that I’ve had now for close to 15 years.

Yeah. That’s very cool. So, as you were talking, I got kind of curious. Can you tell me a little bit about what it was like when you first touched down in Singapore, when you first started that first international job? What were the feelings, the emotions? And then was there culture shock? What was it like sort of fitting in or assimilating there and just trying to live that life as an international teacher for the first time?

Well, it’s funny because now I know this, but at the time, I didn’t know this. But Singapore is quite easy to move into. And it’s probably been the easiest place that I’ve now lived. And it was my first one. So, you’re swept into a whole different world. I was coming from truly living day to day to try and figure out how I was going to make money that day and what other school could I reach out to that I could do a visiting artist-ship with, or how many hours was I going to get at the organic grocery store, or how was I going to… It’s just very tricky.

And when I got off the plane in Singapore and they pick you up in a car and they take you to this fancy hotel, and you live there for 10 days while they show you around at all these apartments, and everything’s covered, and I just started thinking, “This is a way different life.” It just was really kind of exciting and you just felt like you were sort of elevated in the way that you were treated. And you get a living allowance that you can live off of until your first paycheck comes, and they kind of show you around the town, and they give you tours of places. And then, once you pick an apartment, all you have to do is sign a paper. The school does all the deposits and they do all the renting and all of the stuff. Everything is taken care of. So it’s just kind of such a massive different world than what I was coming from.

And it has been, with a few hits and misses, but it’s been very similar in every place that I’ve taught. And every time it happens, I’m always like, “This is really kind of incredible [inaudible 00:12:34] happening.” I remember one time I was in Dubai and I got picked up at the airport in a Cadillac Escalade and I felt like I was, I don’t know, a music star, pop star or something. It was really wild. Anyway.

So, the things that I always think about when I’m moving to a new place is, “Who do I possibly know there? And who has possibly lived there? And what can they tell me about the things that you need to know just for everyday life? Is it easy to get to a grocery store?” I have a dog and a cat. “Is it easy to find pet food and walk the dog?” Because walking the dog has to happen twice a day, right? So, “I’ve got to be able to walk the dog easily, and how’s that going to happen? What is it like to set up a bank account?” Setting up a bank account in the Middle East is quite different than setting up a bank account in China, which is totally different than setting up a bank account in the United States.

So, everybody has their own systems and their own ways that they go about things. And there might be some political things that come into play as far as how safe they feel doing this, that, and the other. So you always have to have your passport with you to make sure that everything’s by the book. And then there’s the whole setting up the phone and setting up your internet at your house. And that can get tricky because a lot of the places that I’ve lived, English was not the first language. Singapore, it happened to be the first language. That’s why I say it was kind of easy to just live there. But every other place, it has not necessarily been the first language. And that can get tricky when you’re trying to do all of the minutiae of life.

Yeah. Yeah. No, no. Okay. So, I guess, just moving beyond the idea of moving and the personal life, I’d love to know what it’s like inside of school as well, too. I mean, I’m sure it’s the same in every country, but I would love to know what it is that’s similar and different. How do you adapt your teaching style when it comes to fitting into that culture, adapting to the culture, the expectations that are in those schools, in those different countries? What has been your experience?

I mean, this can be thought of as good or bad, or maybe it’s indifferent, but kids are kids, and that’s one of the greatest things about moving all over the world, is that kids are kids. And if you are down with the kid culture, then you’re going to be okay with hanging out with kids anywhere you go. In Singapore, my classes were 24 kids or students per class. And I taught eight classes a day that were between 30 and 40 minutes apiece.

And it was super, super international. There might be 6 or 7 languages, maybe even 10 languages spoken in each class. And so, really, what that taught me is that everything truly needed to be visual in the art class. So, I needed to use a lot of hand gestures. I needed to use a lot of pictures that I was showing and making sure that the students understand process. Sometimes it was through video. Sometimes it was through me physically doing a demonstration. I always find that the demonstration works way better than the video. I know that everybody’s doing videos now, but I still feel like that kind of hands-on and students physically watching you do something is the strongest teaching tool there is.

And that has kind of been similar throughout. When I was in Doha, Arabic, Spanish, and English were spoken in my classroom. Most of the teaching was done in English throughout the school. It was a Spanish international school that I was teaching at. When I was in Cambodia, it was a Canadian school and English was spoken throughout. China, a lot of the time, it is both Chinese and English. And a lot of the times, the students are still navigating English language learning. And so, a lot of that came with translation and a lot of it came with… I mean, it just depends on what school. Some of them actually had a translator in the classroom.

Some of them, I had a teacher assistant that would help translate when necessary. Because a lot of it, you don’t want to necessarily feed the Chinese to the students because then they’re not learning English. But at the same time, they need to know what’s happening and I need to know that they understand what’s happening, right? So, there’s a lot of that that happens. And a lot of times, in schools that I was able to do this, I would label everything with both languages, Chinese and English. And so, students knew where things were, and they could better understand, and it would kind of jog their memory when they were forgetting things or whatever. And that’s kind of been how it is all over. I’ve been in China the most, so a lot of my references might come from China. But yeah.

Okay. Very cool. And I guess, taking that a step further, I would love to know just your perspective on international schools versus the United States. I would love your take on just what, I guess, some things you think the United States does well when it comes to education and some things that you think other countries do really well as well.

I think about this a lot, actually, because there are striking differences, but there can sometimes be similarities. And I think what happens mainly in the US, as far as when I’ve taught there, there’s not as much… It really depends on where you are in the US, let’s be fair about that, because there’s different schools all over the country, and they are all sort of different, and their demographics are different, and their class makeups are different. So it’s different. But the schools that I was at, I found that the students were really excited to jump in, and that fear of failure was not there, which I think is really exciting.

But I also think, on the other side of that, sometimes the students were sort of… I don’t know how to say this exactly, and forgive me if I’m coming off a bit flaky, but there is a underlying respect for education in Asia. And there is never going to be a time when you find a student disrespecting the teacher at any level. They may get in fights with each other or the students, because all kids are like that, but they’re never… And the parents are always going to be on your side. There’s very, very little times that the parents are not like, “Oh, yeah, whatever you… We follow the teacher.” They always are, “We follow the teacher.”

And I remember a guy in Singapore, it was a taxi driver, and he was like, “Oh, you’re a teacher. That’s the highest profession.” Just a lot of respect. And I would say that it’s not that you don’t see it in the US. You just don’t see it maybe as much, and maybe it’s not as openly displayed. And I think sometimes the kids in the US come off as very comfortable with their teachers, maybe so much so that there’s a lot of joking. You just would never see that in China or somewhere like… if that makes sense. I don’t know if that makes sense.

No, that makes a lot of sense. I understand that.

And I think, depending on who you are as a… I like to laugh and I’m a humorous person to be around and I kind of make jokes all the time while I’m teaching. So, for me, that was okay until it was time to work in the US, and then it was like, “Okay, now we got to get to work, and enough is…” But in China, all you have to do is… They show up ready to do whatever you tell them. There’s no questions. They show up ready to go. And it’s really interesting to kind of see that up close and personal. It’s just very interesting.

What’s also interesting, as I think about this, the closer I get to moving to Ethiopia, because I have three more weeks until I move to Africa, the kids are going to be totally different there. I just think it’s going to be kind of a different sort of school and there’s no uniforms, which I haven’t been in a non-uniform school in a long time. So, I just think it’s going to be very interesting.

Yeah. No, that will be. And I don’t know, I’m sure it’s like that every time you move to a new school and just trying to figure out the lay of the land and what’s going to happen. But you’ve done it enough that I’m sure you’re up for it.

And then, the other thing I wanted to ask you about is just sort of your own experiences and what you’ve gotten from teaching internationally throughout all the different sites you’ve done. What have been some of the biggest benefits for you? I know you’ve talked about being able to travel the world and see the world while teaching. But I’d love to know what the benefits are from teaching internationally. And maybe what some of the other challenges have been, some other things that you’ve run into that have been difficult throughout your moves or throughout your teaching career.

I think, for the most part, it’s been incredibly positive and such an amazing experience. I don’t think if you had asked me when I was 22, if I would’ve even known Vietnam or China or if I had been to any… I wouldn’t… And now I’ve been to most of Asia except for four countries. So, it’s just, the traveling is really incredible, and that is such an experience that I just can’t tell you how much it’s changed me as a person. Most of the time, I travel alone. It’s not very often that I travel with people. And what that has done for me, traveling alone, is sort of get me out of my comfort zone. It’s made me have to figure out… I got to figure out how to get from point A to point B by myself when I don’t know the language, and I might have to just figure things out or get Google Maps out or get an actual map out. It just really heightens your awareness of your surroundings and really makes you hyperfocused on things.

And I think it’s made me a better artist, being able to travel all over the world and see so many different things and be influenced by all the colors and the smells and the senses and everything that I’ve experienced everywhere. And I think anytime I go somewhere, Portugal included, I always bring that back to the classroom. And I think that is the absolute most important thing about the traveling that has really stuck with me. My friend and I just took a tile painting class the other day and we both talked about how we could totally bring this into the classroom and talk to them about Portuguese tile making and the history of it and why it was important to the culture and all that stuff. And there’s never been a place that I’ve been that I haven’t been like, “Oh, my God, there’s 10 lessons here. Just me sitting here at dinner, there’s 10 lessons that I can come up with.” So, I think it’s been very inspirational in that manner.

It’s helped with a lot of financial things. I was able to pay for both of my graduate degrees, being overseas. And I didn’t have to have a car, but my apartment was paid for. My flights back and forth are always paid for. Some schools give you travel allowance, some schools give you housekeeping help. It’s just incredible the amount of physical benefits that you get with your teaching contracts.

The people that I’ve met. I mean, there’s probably not a country that I don’t know somebody in at this point. It’s amazing to me. The world has just shrunken, just gotten so much smaller, the more I’m out here, because then I’m like, “Oh, my gosh, well, I know that person, and that person taught that person, and then that person was the admin for that person.” We all know everybody. That’s really incredible. And then you have connections for when you want to change jobs or you want to go to another country. Or if you want to go somewhere and visit, you’ve got a place to stay. It’s really incredible.

The challenges are the challenges that you would find anywhere. China’s an amazing place to live. Education is the number one in China. It is the most important thing to that culture. And you work for that. Your job is… You have a lot of expectations on you. Every morning, I would leave for school at 6:10 and get there by seven o’clock, and sometimes I didn’t leave until six o’clock at night. They want the education, and they want you really focused on the students. And I think it’s great. So, the busier I am, the better it is.

So, for me, it’s great, because I really loved working with my students in China because, like I said before, they want to do it. They want to do anything that you throw at them because they’re really excited to learn something new. Occasionally, there was a fear of failure in some of the students, but that really didn’t happen that often. Because once somebody else is doing something… It’s just like anywhere else. Once somebody else is doing something and they see that person’s having so much fun doing that thing, then they jump right in and it becomes a non-issue. And the younger the students are, the easier that is to sort of manipulate. So it’s great.

But it’s just like what I said before, some of the other challenges, like it was harder to open a bank account in the Middle East than it was in Singapore. In Singapore, they had listed my name as Bailey Lindsey because on my passport, it’s Bailey Lindsey Denise. And so, every time I had to do something, I had to sign it Bailey Lind, and I was like, “Well, that’s not my name,” and they were like, “Well, this is how your passport.” So, it’s just those little things that you kind of have to get used to. It’s just like, “Okay.”

But the challenges are never more than what the amazing parts of teaching overseas are. There’s never a question about budgets. Budgets are always quite high for the arts department. There’s usually always a kiln. If you need something, you just ask, because there’s never going to be an international school that doesn’t want whatever the other international schools have. So you can always use that as leverage. “Well, they have a visiting artist. Why don’t we have?” That’s always been kind of the way that it has been, and it’s really allowed me to stretch myself as a teacher, whether I’m teaching with the sewing machines or teaching some really ornate clay project. It’s allowed me to really push myself with what I can offer the students and what we can do in the classroom.

Yeah. That’s really cool. I love hearing that and just love getting your perspective on them. And then I guess just one last question before I let you go. I always like to end the podcast with some advice for listeners. And I guess I would love to know your advice for anybody who is considering teaching internationally. What would you tell somebody who’s thinking about teaching internationally?

There’s lots and lots of things to consider. I do some advising about this on the side. So people can email me with any questions they might have. I don’t know if you’re going to offer people an email, but you’re welcome to.

Yeah, we can do that.

But there’s lots of things to consider. I think it all comes down to who you are as a person. I was ready for a shakeup in my life when international teaching kind of presented itself to me. And I was open for that opportunity when it did present itself to me. It’s like I said earlier on, I didn’t know that that school was going to be in Singapore when I applied for the position. So, when it was, I was like, “All right, that sounds great.” So, I think you have to be in a place where you’re ready to make those shifts in your life, and you have to be really open-minded about it, and you have to be really curious about what’s out there.

Having said that, I think it’s really good to understand if you’re adaptable, easily adaptable or not, if you like tight control or less. Because you can find jobs with all of these. I mean, it’s certainly a lot looser in, I don’t know, some of the Southeast Asian cultures than maybe in China, or China or Korea. You just have to know what your personality type is. And I think you want to know what your social expectations are.

I’m at a place now where I like to come home after school and read or watch something on Netflix. That’s kind of all I do. And I hang out with my dog and my cat, and that’s all I do. So, if somebody put me in a village somewhere that didn’t have a high social life, that’s okay with me because I don’t really do that anyway. But there’s some people that might want to be in downtown Beijing and going out every single night or doing whatever. And you just kind of have to know where you want to be because there are really big cities that have international schools and there are really small cities that have international schools.

And you kind of have to be really considerate when it comes to sort of the culture of the country and the politics and all of that. Because as much as you might believe in one thing or the other, you kind of have to put that to the side when you’re teaching in a new country because it’s not your place. You are a guest in that country and it’s not your place to kind of be, I don’t know, adverse to whatever’s happening. And so, you just have to… I mean, obviously, you’re going to have conversations with colleagues and things like that, but you just have to really be considerate of that you are a guest in that country, and that is the first and foremost of international teaching.

And you also kind of have to know how you relate to community building. Maybe you’re interested in learning about different cultures and really putting yourself out there and doing all different kinds of things and traveling a lot. Or you might just want to go somewhere for three years, save a lot of money, and then leave. So, you kind of have to know what you want to do. I’ve known people that have only been overseas for three to five years, and I’ve known people that have been doing it for 25-30 years. So, you just kind of have to know what you’re really interested in.

And all the schools are so drastically different and they offer so many different kinds of educational models that you really just have to sift through and see what you’re interested in. There are at least 10 search engines that are specifically for international teaching. So you upload your profile, your CV and all that stuff, and then you can just start sifting through jobs based on what you’re interested in. Europe has a whole thing, and you got to be really financially set before you go to Europe because the pay is not 100% great there. Asia pays really high, but then there’s some other things that you might not be comfortable with. So, you just kind of have to pick and choose based on your personality as a human.

No, very cool. It’s good to know those things. So, thank you. And, Lindsey, thank you for sharing your experience, your insights. Just everything that you had to say today, I think, was really worthwhile and, hopefully, interesting for people. But we really appreciate you joining us. So thank you.

Yeah, no worries. Thank you for having me.

That’s going to wrap up my conversation with Lindsey. And honestly, I loved every minute of it. Just hearing about her journey from Singapore to China to Ethiopia and so many points in between, that is just a great reminder that being an art teacher can open doors that you never even imagined. And as Lindsey mentioned, if teaching art internationally is something that may be of interest to you, she would love to talk to you about it. So, we’ll link to her website, cakecrush.com. And you can follow her on Instagram @cakecrushonthetown. And feel free to reach out.

I also decided to find some cool articles in the archives of the Art of Ed website, because about 10 years ago, Amanda and I collaborated on a series called Teaching Art Around the World. There are six articles, maybe, on where we talk to teachers from all different countries, India, Germany, Thailand, South Korea, Norway, I think. But they’re all about what it was like living and teaching internationally. Great perspectives from those teachers, some great photos they shared with us, and just a really interesting slice of life that I think all of them are worth checking out. And you can find those in the show notes as well.

But to wrap it up today, I hope you found Lindsey’s stories as inspiring as I did, whether it’s her advice about moving abroad or approach to connecting with new communities, or just the way she keeps her focus on helping kids grow through art. There’s so much we can take away from what she shared today. I hope you enjoyed the show.

Art Ed Radio is produced by The Art of Education, with audio engineering from Michael Crocker. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts. The mailbag is coming up next week. Please leave us a voicemail at 515-209-2595 or send an email to timothybogatz@theartofeducation.edu and ask what is ever on your mind, whether that’s beginning-of-the-year questions, successes you have, struggles that you’re already dealing with, or anything else you want to talk about. Feel free to send us those questions. Amanda and I would love to hear from you.