Shadow ESL Education from North American Tutors’ Perspective

For-profit, private tutoring services, often referred to as shadow education, are tutoring students for pay and are made use of as a concurrent supplement to their standard academic courses or programs. These tutoring sessions are often online and given by tutors who work for companies that are for-profit businesses in the education services industry. Tutors are often subject matter “experts” working as independent contractors, many of whom have little or no formal training as teachers. This is a qualitative case pilot study consisting of semistructured interviews with two such tutors working at a company that offers online tutoring in content areas and ESL to Chinese international undergraduate students studying abroad in Canada, the US, Australia, and the UK. Data reveal that these tutors have concerns with their sense of professional identity as teachers. These results elicit questions of who has the privilege of being called a “teacher” and the status of online for-profit tutors as compared to classroom teachers. Findings also include that tutors’ perceptions of working for a for-profit shadow education company impacts their teaching practices.