E-raamat: Winning the Australian Awards Scholarship for a Master's Degree in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) as a Form of Entanglement, Agency, Investment, Identity, and Capital

In this retrospective story, I narrate my experience gaining a scholarship to pursue a Master's degree overseas, especially in Australia, under the Australian Development Scholarship (ADS), now the Australian Awards Scholarship (AAS). While there are many existing stories about winning overseas scholarships, both academic and recipe-based, my story here is different. I will not only situate my successful story of winning an overseas scholarship as an academic matter per se, but also as a personal, spiritual, and relational journey. It is more complex and situated in the life history. Aiming to address this complexity, following Pennycook (2022), I will use the idea of entanglement, the interconnectedness of my success story of getting a scholarship abroad within its network, such as the personal, spiritual, relational, and, of course, academic. Concurrently, I will discuss my success in relation to the different concepts of agency: psychological, sociocultural, and cultural (Bandura, 2018; Markus, 2026; Wertsch et al., 1993), Investment and Identity (Norton, 2013), and capital (Bourdieu, 1986). Following a post-structural principle, I will let my story flow from the beginning to the end, and then link my success story to the theory of entanglement, agency, investment, and capital. This e-book is special because it provides examples of how to answer critical questions on the Australia Award application form and interview questions. It is a must-read for those wanting to win overseas scholarships, especially for the Australia Awards Scholarship in TESOL