In their own words: Government sponsored Turkish EFL teachers. Are we really investing, or wasting

To boost the social and economic outlook of the country, Turkey has recently initiated educational reform at all levels and especially higher education, including organizational restructuring and expansion for increased accessibility. The swift increase in the number and size of universities has resulted in a challenge to find trained faculty. One important program to meet this challenge has been the government's sponsorship of students for graduate study abroad in exchange for future service in higher education institutions. Due to non-return rates, critics have questioned the program's success, and consequently, the actual and potential contributions of returning scholars have often been overlooked.This study explored, through narrative inquiry, the personal and professional experiences of two English language teachers who received doctoral degrees in U.S. institutions as government-sponsored scholars and returned to Turkey to serve as teacher educators. The researcher combined an advocacy/participatory approach as a worldview to elicit the participants' stories in conversational interviews, and critical theory as a lens to identify essential meanings embedded in their stories as well as to examine and interrogate oppressive power relationships in the sociopolitical context of their academic institutions and in the overall Turkish higher education system.The stories revealed that as much as the two U.S.-educated scholars contributed to the improvement of higher education in Turkey, their capabilities and chances of greater involvement and influence were minimized by the systemic and institutional barriers they encountered. Due to a lack of material resources, moral support, consistent standards, and on the whole, a culture of fair-play and justice, the higher education system did not appear to be able to fully benefit from the efforts of these individuals to diffuse new knowledge and ideas, thereby compromising the value of the investment of sending them abroad. It was concluded that the elimination of obstacles inherent in the existing structures and practices of Turkish higher education was necessary to realize the fundamental goals of Turkey's sponsorship program for scholars abroad in a way that would yield worthwhile returns for funding that could otherwise be used effectively in other initiatives in this global era of economic crises.