The historiography of educational change in the context of globalized social conditions is characterized by an attention to processes of internationalization and transnationalization (Zymek 2021). Three perspectives on schooling dominate. First, the goals and mechanisms of an international-educational-governance and global-education-industry led by supranational organizations (OECD, UNESCO i.e.) are observed (Tooley 2005). Secondly, the interest is directed at the cross-border profiles and offers of different types of schools (State Schools abroad, IB schools i.e.) in view of national social and educational conditions and regulations (Zymek 2006). Third, with regard to the selection and use of schools, their students and their parents, most of whom are described as highly socially mobile, come into the focus of research (Breidenstein et al. 2018). 

Against this background, in the case of the controversial Muslim-inspired educational network of the so-called Gülen movement (Agai 2011), several hundred private secular school foundations have been established worldwide since the 1980s, irritating common perspectives. Even if the assessment that the movement of Turkish origin is an upwardly mobile "global player" (Adick 2012) of private educational organizations dominates early on, it is not possible to speak of a common educational agenda underlying the globally distributed schools. Their connection can rather be described as mediated by the individual pedagogical orientations of the locally based founders (Geier & Frank 2021). At the same time, these are embedded in the context of the socio-religious narratives central to the network (e.g., the "educationally successful Muslim"). Moreover, the institutions are not generally competitively aligned to so-called high-ranking schools (for schools in Tanzania, see Dohrn 2018). In the case of Germany, for example, schools tend to be attended by a clientele of children with so-called migration-background who are affected by educational disadvantage (Autorengruppe Bildungsberichterstattung 2020). In view of public accusations of promoting ethnic segregation, the founders hope that their institutions will gain a reputation as inconspicuous "German school[s]" (Geier, Frank & Schmidt 2020). 

In the proposed contribution, another perspective on the transnational history of schools, which has received little attention so far, will be unfolded. While in research on International Schooling the teaching staff – despite sometimes precarious working conditions (Bunnell & Poole 2021) – is relegated to the background of interest, research in the context of the movement shows clearly its importance for the bond of the transnational network. This includes, in addition to a know-how that experienced actors circulate through their willingness to migrate, especially a narrative to be approved for in the individual biographies. The socio-religious movement is constituted in the form of shared "translocal ethics" (Dohrn 2014) only through the social and territorial mobility and flexibility of its pedagogically oriented actors. Being able to show a transnational biography is part of the normality expectations of the field, especially towards longstanding and leading actors in schools. With regard to the promotion-oriented processes of internationalization, it is not so much the clientele of the schools as their personnel who turn out to be "global nomads" (Maclachlan 2007). 

In this perspective, the presentation outlines contours of research on the transnationalization of schools by teachers. Taking the Gülen movement as an example, the paper first describes contrasting historical contexts within which different forms of school founding occur as a result of social and political upheavals – Turkey and Central Asia after the end of the USSR, African countries in focus of Turkish foreign policy after 2000, Germany as a result of guest-worker-migration. Second, based on own interviews with school founders and teachers in Germany and international research, the question of how a network of globally distributed schools emerges and is maintained at the level of professional biographies will be explored. 

This paper draws on the results and experiences of many years of research on the activities of the Gülen Movement in Germany within the framework of a qualitative-empirical project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). These are contextualized and extended by results of international political science and religious studies research on the emergence, establishment and transformation of the Gülen movement's educational activities (Yavuz & Balcı 2018). In the empirical main part of the presentation, excerpts from interviews with school founders and teachers of a school in Germany will be reconstructed. For this purpose, the role of transnational biographies of teachers for the constitution of transnational school designs is brought to the fore for the first time. Methodologically, the lecture mainly uses narrative-structural (Rosenthal 1995) and discourse-analytical (Keller 2011) approaches.

Using the case of school foundations of the Gülen Movement, this paper aims to discuss a little-noticed history of the transnationalization of schools. Established perspectives in the context of the internationalization and transnationalization of schools will be irritated and attention and paths for research will be contoured that include the significance of teachers' school biographies in the discussions on educational change in the context of globalized social conditions.

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