Early childhood teacher cultural Otherness and belonging

Abstract

Early childhood education settings are arguably places of community, togetherness and belonging. But what if they are not? What if individuals’ senses of identity, place or reality clash, do not fit or, worse, repel or offend? This article picks up on the largely under-researched area of teachers’ belonging and sense of cultural identity in early childhood settings. It argues for the critical importance of elevating and paying attention to teachers’ subject formation and identity. Drawing on some of the concerns and common conceptions of cultural Otherness in early childhood education, the article uses Kristeva’s foreigner lens and her theory on the subject in process to argue that teachers’ sense of belonging, of their own cultural identity and place, in their teaching team and in their early childhood setting is critical for an overall sense of openness and belonging throughout the setting. Teachers are commonly called on to nurture children’s and their families’ cultural identities. The sense of belonging intended through such practices depends on teacher attitudes and orientations to cultural Otherness that go beyond the surface – that allow for the difficult, complicated, unpredictable processes of becoming part of a centre community. This article offers a challenge to rethink teacher Otherness, for the (re-)elevation of their own sense of belonging in early childhood settings and teaching teams.

Introduction

Early childhood teachers’ identity and feeling of belonging is fundamental to the overall well-being and sense of belonging of children in early childhood settings. Yet, it is also largely neglected in research studies on cultural belonging, diversity, multiculturalism or cross-cultural practices in early childhood education. This article elevates attention to teachers’ sense of belonging and to their cultural Otherness in early childhood settings. It addresses the gap in the research by offering possibilities for rethinking the idea of teachers’ difference within their early childhood settings. Early childhood teachers’ significant influence on children, their families and, ultimately, society is affected by the current lack of attention paid to their cultural identity and belonging. In this article, I argue that further critical reconceptualizations and research are necessary and urgent. The aim of this article is to offer a theoretical foregrounding for rethinking and researching early childhood teachers’ cultural Otherness and belonging in their teaching teams.

While this article is largely contextualized in the Aotearoa/New Zealand early childhood milieu, the conceptual ideas are intended to relate to early childhood teachers and their colleagues in other localities. I first of all highlight some concerns with teacher attitudes that arose in a study of prior research related to difference and diversity within the early childhood context (Arndt, 2017), and then I use philosophy as a method to elevate the complexities of teacher belonging (Arndt, 2017; Koro-Ljungberg et al., 2015). In particular, I examine belonging for teachers from diverse cultural backgrounds using a post-structural approach – that is, I attempt to trouble and resist the idea that there can be one objective truth, to offer ways of thinking that acknowledge identity as always contingent, relative and questionable. From this perspective, cultural identity is seen as arising within power relations and forces that emerge within them (Foucault, 1980).

The key philosophical influence on this examination is Julia Kristeva’s post-structural feminist work, from which I draw particularly on her idea that we are always ‘subjects in process’ and her notion of the foreigner (Kristeva, 1991). I consider early childhood teachers as subjects which are always in process of becoming, and I use this Kristevan lens to suggest diverse ways of conceptualizing teacher identity and belonging. Adopting this Kristevan lens helps to develop an argument for rearticulating teachers’ subjectivities and feelings of belonging in their early childhood settings by calling on an openness to uncertainty, rather than expecting to perpetuate particular truths, answers or ways of being. The next section gives some background to the problem by highlighting some of the contextual influences. This contextual background both shapes and is shaped by teacher attitudes and orientations in relation to the cultural diversity present in their early childhood settings. The analysis and suggested rethinking of teachers’ belonging follows in the second half of the article.

Contextual influences

Aotearoa/New Zealand has experienced an increasingly diverse migrant population since 2001 (Ministry of Social Development, 2016). This has impacted on early childhood settings in a number of ways, including increasing attendance by children from ethnic and linguistic minorities (Loveridge et al., 2012). In highlighting the extensive research that this situation has led to in support of children and their families, Cherrington and Shuker (2012) call attention to the lack of engagement with teachers’ cultural Otherness. Their call affirms this situation as exacerbating a gap in understanding teachers’ belonging, and elevates the importance of teachers’ attitudes and orientations towards not only children’s, but also their own and their colleagues’ cultural Otherness. Existing research – for example, that describes teachers’ approaches to diversity in their settings as grounded in an approach to fairness that promotes treating all Others the same (Rivalland and Nuttal, 2010) – perpetuates cultural normalizations and exacerbates already normalizing interpretations of policy or curriculum (Arndt et al., 2015; Cederman, 2008). This article provokes thinking about teacher diversity and belonging in ways that counter universalizing approaches to Otherness within early childhood settings.

In order to further contextualize early childhood education in Aotearoa/New Zealand, it is important to recognize the sector within its cultural and bicultural context. Situated at the intersection of a relationally oriented, holistic curriculum framework, Te Whāriki (Ministry of Education, 1996, 2017), the early childhood sector is equally affected and driven in many ways by a neo-liberal, market-oriented political and educational landscape (Kelsey, 2015; Mitchell, 2013). This creates a paradoxical positioning, which places teachers from minority cultures in what could be seen as a crisis of belonging, and makes opening up to their Otherness and cultural identities crucial and urgent. Guo (2015) echoes Cherrington and Shuker’s (2012) argument that research on teachers’ own cultural identity formation is necessary and urgent. Importantly, she cites the difficulty that teachers experience in engaging critically with children’s cultural Otherness, claiming that their treatments of children’s Otherness are largely developed from their own experiences, rather than drawing on a critical understanding of the diverse ways in which culture can play out. Developing articulations of these complexities and the interplay of theory and their own lived experiences involves teachers confronting their own Otherness and cultural professional identity from political, curricular and social-relational perspectives (Duhn, 2010; Moss, 2006, 2010; Urban, 2014). Cherrington and Shuker (2012: 85) further suggest that shifts in perceptions and orientations that occur when marginalizations within the teaching team are revealed highlight ‘a different set of issues’ – that is, promoting diverse ways of thinking differently about difference is necessary for teachers to confront their attitudes and orientations in ways that they had not previously considered. Opening up to various ways of conceptualizing cultural Otherness therefore creates an atmosphere that is conducive to challenging accepted wisdoms within teaching teams, and to opening up to each other’s diversity in previously unexpected ways.

Seminal international research further supports an openness to teachers’ intercultural ways of being through ongoing attention to social justice and equity concerns. Reconsiderations of cross-cultural practices are seen as critical and urgent, for example, to avoid perpetuating marginalizations in multicultural settings (Dervin, 2016; Rhedding-Jones, 2000, 2001; Robinson and Jones Díaz, 2016), and for teachers’ cultural sense of belonging (Li, 2007). Cherrington and Shuker reflect this tone and situate it in direct relation to teachers’ Otherness. They conclude that within Aotearoa/New Zealand, investigations that ‘enhance educators’ attitudes and knowledge about diversity are key priority areas if we are to better understand how practitioners can work effectively with children, families, and colleagues from diverse backgrounds’ (Cherrington and Shuker, 2012: 89; my emphasis).

Diverse backgrounds influence individuals in myriad ways and play out in their everyday living, teaching, working lives and relationships. Te Whāriki (Ministry of Education, 2017: 19) affirms that children grow up amongst many different cultures and ethnicities, and calls for teachers to be ‘aware of the different views that the cultures represented in their ECE [early childhood education] setting may have’. Implicating teachers themselves, the curriculum framework suggests that culture itself is a concept that is difficult, and lived and felt in many ways. As Dervin (2016: 9) states, it is ‘neither bounded nor closed; it is not homogeneous’. Furthermore, culture is socially constructed, and any cultural label, or reference to cultural heritage, therefore arises from our individual and collective encounters and experiences of culture by which we are surrounded. Cherrington and Shuker’s (2012) concern is mirrored in teachers’ reflections on their sense of belonging, or lack thereof, in their settings, as described in prior research. Teachers from minority cultures have described feeling left out and full of ‘frustration, difficulties, alienation and isolation’ (Lee and Dallman, 2008: 40) – feeling that their differences are delegitimized. The ‘different set of issues’ to address urgently, then, is those that legitimize teachers’ differences, as well as their orientations towards their own and their colleagues’ understandings, world views and sense of belonging.

Rethinking teacher belonging

In the above contextual confluence, it is clear that teachers’ sense of belonging and their Otherness are not based on a simple dialectic of the self in relationship with Others. Instead, teacher Otherness is complex and should be considered, according to Dervin (2016), as multilayered and as encompassing, for example, ideological differences, biases, habits, opinions and attitudes. In this sense, the non-bounded, non-homogeneous nature of culture, or what Kristeva (1991: 3) calls the ‘non-existence of banality’, implicates teachers, and all ‘human beings’, within their surrounding context. Cherrington and Shuker (2012) stress this point, reporting that teachers from minority cultures feel the pressures of their context, and ideologically and linguistically isolated within their team. They feel that their voices are not heard, and emphasize the need for attention to teachers’ attitudes towards cultural Otherness as a foundation for effective cross-cultural practices. Teachers’ confrontations with unfamiliar constructs of teaching, learning, language and childhood within their teaching team, then, become a crucial part of the multicultural challenge (Taylor, 2012), in working towards equitable engagements with and across diversity, and ultimately towards a sense of belonging for teachers in early childhood settings. Building effective and inclusive teacher identity practices and relationships requires further examination and research ‘to develop practitioners’ dispositions and skills for working effectively with colleagues who may come from very different backgrounds, in order that the advantages of diversity within a team may be recognized and maximized’ (Cherrington and Shuker, 2012: 89). Concerns with different kinds of knowledge are raised here: What are effective practices and relationships? For whom are they effective, for example, and how should the benefits of diversity be maximized and recognized?

Rethinking teachers’ belonging in early childhood settings therefore requires a rethinking also of the reverence of knowledge as the ‘answer’ to the ‘problem’ of diversity. This raises concerns about effectiveness and recognition not only in the problematic dichotomy between knowledge and what is not seen as knowledge. It exposes the very assumption that some knowledges may be considered as invalid, or non-knowledge, discrediting the Other and any knowledge that is different from accepted norms. Elevating the drive for a solution, or for certain knowledge, also creates a tension in the conception of diversity as a problem in the first place, and that this ‘problem’ needs to, or can, be managed (Baldock, 2010). Applied to the concern with teachers’ belonging, the idea that managing diversity is presumed to be achievable by developing knowledge about those who come from diverse backgrounds overwhelmingly relies on knowing particular strategies and practices that are considered to be ‘correct’ or ‘useful’ to help ‘manage’ multicultural educational settings (Ho et al., 2004; May and Sleeter, 2010; Robinson and Jones Díaz, 2016; Walsh, 2007). Dervin (2016) highlights the risk of homogenizing culture – and thus responses to it – as such homogenizations commonly fall back on dominant constructs and world views. They thus further neglect the view of culture as a complex, often uncertain and social construct. Following this discussion, striving for particular or ‘useful’ knowledge as a foundation for developing teachers’ sense of belonging in early childhood settings seems at best risky, and ultimately even dangerous, as appropriate knowledges themselves are difficult, often unavailable to us and thus unpredictable.

Interrogating and enhancing teachers’ sense of belonging may be addressed, then, through an attitude of increasing openness to uncertainty. In this sense, the risks and complexities outlined in this first section of the article motivate an approach to teachers’ belonging in early childhood settings that recognizes the uncertainty and unpredictability of cultural Otherness, of intercultural encounters and of subject formation within this context. In the next section, teachers’ belonging is examined by drawing on Kristeva’s philosophical theory on the ‘subject in process’ and her notion of the foreigner. These concepts, I argue, provoke possibilities for rethinking and rearticulating teachers’ cultural Otherness and their sense of belonging in their early childhood settings in different ways.

Thinking difference differently through a Kristevan lens

Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian post-structural feminist philosopher, linguist and psychoanalyst who moved to the intellectual milieu of Paris, France, as a young doctoral student in the 1960s. Operating in a largely male intellectual world, Kristeva’s work became widely known as challenging, opening up to complexity and shifting conceptions to increasingly ethical and critical insights in linguistic, psychoanalytic and philosophical circles (Lechte, 1990). Her work is rarely applied in education (Söderbäck, 2012), however. This article is an attempt to use Kristeva’s work to inspire a rethinking and rearticulation of the realities that teachers experience in their early childhood settings, in increasingly nuanced ways: as the Other, as members of teaching teams, and as teachers tasked with working in a context which is already often influenced by multiple cultures and ways of thinking and being. This examination is a response to the calls and context of teachers’ sense of belonging outlined above. It begins by introducing Kristeva’s foreigner lens, as it might apply to teachers who are culturally Other.

Kristeva’s foreigner lens

Kristeva’s (1991) foreigner lens stresses the difficulty of being able to know the Other. She develops the notion of the foreigner from her philosophical, linguistic and psychoanalytical work to explicate some of the awkwardness, uncertainty and changeability of conceptions of the self in relation with the Other. For Kristeva (1991), the concept of being the Other, or the foreigner, is fluid and fluctuating. As it might be for teachers from different cultural backgrounds, being the foreigner involves various forms of being removed from one’s origins, from the homeland (or motherland), or from other places of safety or known pasts. Foreignness can feel like a ‘demented whirl’ (Kristeva, 1991: 6), where one is never exclusively in one or another place or state. The foreigner can be rootless, a wanderer, hiding behind a range of masks in his/her attempts to fit in with the new community or place, hiding disappointments and sadness.

Through her foreigner lens, Kristeva argues that not only is it complex to be the foreigner, but all of us are implicated by foreignness, and all of us are foreigners within ourselves. In order to explain, she questions whether all of us can not only ‘live with … others’, but also ‘live as others’ (Kristeva, 1991: 2; original emphasis), as, she continues, ‘strangely … the foreigner lives within us’ (1). In other words, we all are always in various ways foreigners to ourselves, unknown and unknowable. Even as we learn more about ourselves, and as teachers engage critically and reflectively with their practice and professional identity, there remains always an element of the unknown within each of us. Furthermore, Kristeva (1991) claims that it is only once we recognize this foreigner within ourselves that other foreigners become less threatening.

The idea that we all embody a variable and constantly evolving foreigner within affects conceptions of belonging in a teaching team. It further means that what is knowable about ourselves and an Other can only ever be temporary, as any such knowledge becomes quickly outdated and superseded (Todd, 2004). Immersed not only in a public and political uncertainty, as outlined in the contextual overview above, but also in their own private (potentially masked) ‘demented whirl’ or nuanced realities, teachers from minority cultures’ disclosure of any information about themselves can be presumed to be often risky, and incomplete, rather than representative of any total or final truth (Kristeva, 1991; Todd, 2004). This orienting argument crucially affects who is seen as the Other, and thus who has a sense of belonging, within an early childhood teaching team. It provokes a shift through the recognition that all teachers, all of us, are actually foreigners – and hence unknowable – not only to others, but also to ourselves.

Kristeva’s (1991) notion of the foreigner illustrates the uncertainty that teachers might feel when attempting to learn the subtleties of working with others from different cultural backgrounds. It is steeped in the notion that ‘we cannot have first-hand knowledge of another’s life’ (Todd, 2004: 338–339). This renders almost impossible teachers’ quest for knowing and supporting Otherness to any ‘true’, ‘knowledgeable’ or ‘managed’ level, driven by not only local but also global benchmarks and expectations (United Nations, 1989). A strong rights and social justice emphasis impacts on teacher orientations towards Others, and towards knowledge of the Other. The localized, temporally and socially complex realities of each early childhood setting require moving beyond what Rhedding-Jones (2000: 5) calls the ‘glibness of “multiculturalism”’ and the danger of producing ‘yet another normalisation’. Conceptualizing all of us, and all teachers in an early childhood setting, as foreigners to ourselves counters a blanket reproduction of attitudes or approaches towards teacher Others and the further marginalization and simplification of their diverse and multiple realities. The concept of the foreigner within is underpinned by Kristeva’s philosophical theory on subject and identity formation, which she calls ‘the subject in process’.

The subject in process

Kristeva’s theory on the subject in process explicates some of the raw intricacies of teachers’ subject formation. Drawing on her notion that identities are ‘infinitely in construction, deconstructible, open and evolving’ (Kristeva, 2008: 2), it exposes the idea that teachers – and all of us – are never completely the products only of their own experiences, but are always also influenced and affected by their pasts, their present and their surroundings. Thinking of teachers as subjects that are continually in process reinforces the idea that our subject formation is always in flux, never static, and creates openings for (re)articulations of the complex, constantly shifting realities of being the Other in a teaching team. Key elements of Kristeva’s theory involve processes that energize the subject through ongoing meaning-making, that transform through what she calls ‘abjection’ or the expulsion of that which is unnecessary, and also act in a spirit of love as a constant responsibility to the Other. The theory of the subject in process further involves the notion of revolt, as a state of ongoing questioning and inner uncertainty (Stone, 2004). Within the ongoing process of subject formation being seen as evolving, highly contingent and unstatic, each of these elements of Kristeva’s theory offers potentially significant shifts to more complex thought and articulations of teacher Otherness and therefore their sense of belonging. Each element contributes to this complexity, first, in a constant meaning-making through the notion of the semiotic.

The semiotic: a constant meaning-making

Acting mostly within the unconscious, Kristeva (1991) suggests that a constant meaning-making process underlies the ongoing construction of the self. In conceptualizing the subject as in constant process, this meaning-making – which Kristeva (1998) calls the ‘semiotic’ – is dependent on the connectedness of the subject to her surrounding context. For teachers, then, it involves their connectedness not only to the immediate early childhood centre families and community, but also to its structures – that is, to local and global regulations, political and economic imperatives, and societal views, norms and expectations. As it acts within the unconscious, it represents what teachers may feel but perhaps be unable to articulate, which is nevertheless meaningful about their experiences of differences and similarities, belonging and alienation, elation and despair. In this way, it contributes to their meaning-making of their own subject formation, as they encounter, respond and react to their surroundings in intimate and intricate ways.

The meaning-making of the semiotic recognizes this connectedness between the subject and her context, which Kristeva refers to as the ‘symbolic’. McCance (1996: 147) confirms Kristeva’s insistence on this relationship, where subject formation always ‘requires both the semiotic and symbolic modalities’. For teachers from diverse cultures and backgrounds, this involves recognizing the fundamental inner knowledge involved in reforming their daily routines, habits and rituals, redefining understandings in their new context. Connected always to their inherited genealogies, histories, stories and life practices, teachers from different cultures may attempt to retain remnants of the culture from their previous context, while immersed at the same time in their new context, country and early childhood settings (Dervin, 2016; Li, 2007; Rhedding-Jones, 2001).

Teachers’ reconciliation of their pasts impacts on their individual and personal routines and rituals. It implicates their homely practices, infused and invigorated with tensions, for example, between retaining old and integrating new values, teaching practices, realities and contexts. Their sense of belonging in their early childhood setting is affected by the semiotic, as this element elevates the heterogeneity of their new context. It makes multiple meanings matter – that is, not only those of their own past and present, but also those of their colleagues, the children in their setting, and the families and communities with whom they work. Teachers’ belonging involves strengthening the diverse knowledges arising in their context, allowing them to make sense of these aspects in conscious and unconscious, knowable and unknowable ways, as they encounter and interact with their teaching team and early childhood relationships. The semiotic is closely related to another element in the subject in process, which involves letting go, or abjection, in the process of adopting new attitudes and practices.

Abjection

Teachers’ development of a sense of belonging in a new context depends on their letting go of some of their past. Kristeva’s notion of abjection literally refers to expulsion. For teachers, it might apply to the ‘expulsion’ of particular ideas, feelings or practices, and is responsible for both instability and transformation in teachers’ relations in the world. Following Kristeva’s (1998) theory of the subject in process, it represents expulsions or separations that lead to the subject’s becoming ‘I’. Abjection performs a critical transformational function, leading to a reformed re-emergence of the self through that which is abjected, or expelled. In effect, then, as Kristeva (1982: 3; original emphasis) says: ‘I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which “I” claim to establish myself’. This indicates, metaphorically, how teachers’ responses to their surroundings knowingly or unknowingly abject or accept thoughts, ideas or feelings. Through the semiotic meaning-making relationship with their unconscious described above, teachers also abject, or transform, their prior selves as they constantly establish and re-establish themselves. In this way, local foods, teaching beliefs, dress or behavioural nuances and practices might become expelled as necessary, as teachers establish and re-establish ways of thinking, believing, being and belonging to their early childhood environment.

Abjection offers a useful articulation of teachers’ experiences of non-belonging. This includes, for example, feelings that lead to attempts to hide their differences, to ‘prevent [themselves] from being attacked by others in relation to [their] culture’ (Lee and Dallman, 2008: 37). In Lee and Dallman’s (2008: 37) research, teachers recall being assimilated into the dominant culture, to ‘be the same’, to downplay their difference, and being told ‘you aren’t a minority!’, even when they knew that they were. Clearly, cultural Otherness can be a source of anxiety, where ‘loss of identity, loss of status, loss of family networks’ (Rivalland and Nuttal, 2010: 28) represent possibilities for transformation through abjection and loss. Attitudes that favour ‘sameness’, on the ‘assumption that sameness brings group coherence and reduces conflict’ (29), only exacerbate teachers’ desires for cultural invisibility, leading to them abjecting that which might otherwise allow them to strengthen and elevate their identity. Worrying homogenizations of culture, in what Chan (2009: 31) calls a multicultural ethnocentrism or practices of ‘delegitimising historical and localised variations and specificities’, highlight the urgency of an increasing openness towards minority cultures and ways of being. Like Guo (2015), Chan (2009) argues for the importance of teachers engaging in more depth with diverse pedagogical and cultural discourses, to break down barriers and increase openness to the uncertainty of Otherness. Kristeva’s conception of love as another element in her theory of the subject in process implicates such a critical responsibility and attention to the Other through responsive relational connectedness.

Love

An ethics of love underpins the subject in process through a drive to believe and to care (Stone, 2004). Channelling love towards both individuals and society encompasses teachers’ moral, ethical, personal and professional commitments to their colleagues, children and their families, and communities in an early childhood setting. It opens up to thoughtful, respectful and deeply moral orientations, as Delaune (2018) examines in Te Whāriki, rather than what Guo (2015: 69) points out as a dominant focus on care alone, which can also lead to teachers becoming ‘caught up in’ surface-level, uncritical practices. As Guo sees it, teachers’ care and a superficial knowledge are insufficient in multicultural education without a commitment to inclusion, agency, active participation, decision-making and identity formation, with transformation as a central concern.

A relationally connected commitment to love affirms and underpins the moral commitment and attention called to teachers’ orientations to the Other. A Kristevan lens elevates teachers’ cultural Otherness to a far deeper concern than reciprocal respect, where, for example, as teachers in Harvey’s (2011: 37) research expected, ‘[i]f you show respect to someone they will show it back to you’. Different connotations of respect arise from different historical or local perspectives, and from diverse interpretations and meanings of the verbal and non-verbal languages used to convey respect. Similarly, a ‘treating them the same’ approach, even when intended as a sign of respect, posits difference as a problem. In Rivalland and Nuttal’s (2010) research, teachers rationalized their position towards difference, stating that if they pay attention to difference, ‘children notice it … the difference … which can then cause … friction’ (29). In other words, teachers saw difference as a ‘potential cause of conflict, which needs to be avoided, diffused and managed’, and ‘sameness’ was ‘equated … with equal opportunity for all’ (29). According to one centre director, ‘you just accept people as they are’, so equality is achieved by ‘treating our children equal and our parents the same’ (29). In terms of elevating teachers’ sense of belonging in a centre environment, this is both a troubling subjugation of diversity and represents a lack even of any consideration of teachers being Other.

Love inserts an essential ingredient into treatments of cultural Otherness: an ideal of openness. An ethics of love embraces an openness to difference at an unknowable level, which recognizes rhythms, tones and ‘fundamental otherness’ (Lechte, 1990: 32). A capability to love an Other, between teachers in a teaching team, for example, then involves appreciating, at a level of deep struggling or working towards, and recognizing each Other’s Otherness. This means that love is fundamental to attempts, efforts and orientations towards ‘living with and as’ the Other, as Kristeva (1991) hopes. ‘Love means being open to change’ and, in a Kristevan sense, it offers the potential to form teacher subjects as ‘an open system’ (Lechte, 1990: 32) – that is, open to face the wider world, society, their colleagues and other members in their early childhood setting. It implies an openness that does not pose difference as a threat, which should be hidden, downplayed or diminished, but rather is seen as a stimulus, an ideal, where love becomes a moral energizing and inviting motive for change.

Revolt

When we consider early childhood teachers through Kristeva’s theory of the subject in process, the above conceptions of semiotic meaning-making, abjection and love are centrally concerned with raising levels of awareness, experiencing and examining the paradoxical state of teachers’ Otherness within their early childhood setting. They involve teachers’ belonging as subjects in process, ongoingly ‘reconciling difference while retaining subjectivity’ (McAfee, 2004: 117). In this way, the theory of the subject in process recognizes teachers’ ongoing subject and identity formation, and, as Stone (2004) emphasizes, such developments are within and without, revealing all individuals as diverse and complex: they are ‘“multiple selves” (light and dark, loving and hating, always incomplete) as subjects in process’ (131). For Kristeva, recognizing the foreigner within and the other foreigner without (e.g. a teacher’s colleagues) furthermore ‘establishes a politics’ (132). Such a politics is grounded in an ethics not only of love, but also of encounters, roles and responsibilities, arising through those differences. The final element of the theory of the subject in process involves Kristeva’s conception of revolt. Revolt offers what might be seen as a useful way forward, towards more complex recognitions and articulations of teachers’ Otherness and their sense of belonging.

Through a Kristevan (2014) lens, revolt is a process and a commitment to deep and critical questioning and thought. In the process of ongoing questioning, Kristeva (1998/2002: 5) points out that revolt is not necessarily to be seen as some kind of major revolution, but refers also to the ‘little things, tiny revolts’ which evoke inner change and transformation. In rethinking orientations to teachers’ Otherness and their sense of belonging in early childhood settings, Kristeva’s (2014) notion of revolt therefore adds the importance of an inner permanent state of questioning. It counters the risk of differences becoming suppressed and hidden, as might occur in an overbearing, narrowly focused structural environment (McAfee, 2004). A commitment to revolt evokes a questioning attitude. It responds to the danger of focusing narrowly on practices of sameness, equality or supposed ‘commonalities of all humanity’ (Rhedding-Jones, 2000: 5). Instead, it offers an approach to resist generalizing techniques or strategies that can lead to further normalizing practices, and it counters the expectation that what works in one situation will be appropriate in another (Biesta, 2010). Thus, revolt counters what Kristeva (1991) calls ‘leveling’. Rather than enhancing fairness or teachers’ rights, unquestioning leveling practices can disconnect teachers from a sense of belonging in their early childhood settings. Instead, an attitude of revolt offers a hopeful way to elevate teachers’ sense of belonging in their teams, settings and early childhood communities by recognizing the complexity of each teacher’s differences, and the intimacy and intricacies – or the ‘demented whirl’, as in Kristeva’s quote above – that Otherness might involve.

Revolt involves digging deeply into meanings and conceptions. It requires continuing questioning, returning to origins, thinking through discourses, thought and realities. It offers the potential to develop increasingly complex engagements with and conceptions of knowing the Other, to enhance understandings of teachers’ belonging in their teaching teams and wider early childhood settings. While recognizing that it is insufficient to deduce from teachers’ attitudes and practices towards children’s Otherness how Otherness might be construed amongst teachers in their teaching teams, the first half of this article has given an insight into some worrying orientations. On this basis, conceptualizing subject formation and Otherness through a Kristevan (1991) foreigner lens supports the argument for more critical encounters with cultural knowledge, as called for at the beginning of this article. Kristeva’s notion of the foreigner offers a deepening of reflective practices by calling for a commitment to a deep and ongoing intimate connection to each of our subjectivities. It strengthens the argument for multiple, flexible knowledges and, together with her theory of the subject in process, renders the concepts of knowledge, being and belonging as multiple and uncertain.

As a deep and ongoing questioning, revolt affirms that we are unable to know not only the Other, but also, and most crucially, ourselves. We are, as Kristeva (1991) claims, always also foreigners within. To reposition teachers’ sense of belonging within their wider context means to recognize the increasingly globalized and neo-liberal agenda, which positions early childhood education as an increasingly important societal indicator and influence (Moss, 2007, 2013). Simultaneously, it leads to what Peters and Tesar (2017) see as an erosion of trust and cooperation, and resulting ethical and social inequalities. Such inequalities minimize the relational and educational perseverance and long-term commitments to which Te Whāriki aspires (Delaune, 2018; Ministry of Education, 2017). Duhn (2006: 191; original emphasis) has argued that this policy environment produces a particular Te Whāriki child: a lifelong, globally and locally competent cosmopolitan child-learner who is ‘an assemblage of educational and neo-liberal discourses’. Similarly, then, this early childhood environment arguably forms Te Whāriki teachers, who are equally immersed in the micro-level mundane everydayness of this relational/collective yet individual/neo-liberal juxtaposition. Duhn’s (2006) argument infuses teachers’ structural milieu with ‘shared understandings’ and ‘world-views’ of hollow, economic pressures, competing with Te Whāriki’s holistic, relational, and contingent attitudes and practices.

Concluding comments

All of us, following Kristeva, are subjects that are always in process. And all of us are, and remain, foreigners within. Early childhood teachers within this Te Whāriki, local/global Aotearoa/New Zealand landscape are often called on to foster, nurture and celebrate children’s and their families’ cultural identities. In this article, I argue that for them to do so, teachers themselves need to feel a sense of belonging within themselves and within their early childhood setting. This calls for a rethinking and rearticulation of attitudes and orientations to cultural Otherness that go beyond the surface – that is, that are open to and allow for the difficult, complicated, unpredictable processes of becoming part of an early childhood teaching team and community. I argue for (re)inserting some of the raw, nuanced intricacies of relating, revisioning and questioning into teachers’ identity work, to provoke increasingly open attitudes towards diversity in early childhood settings for themselves and their colleagues in their teaching team. Kristeva’s theory of the subject in process and the idea that we are all foreigners in a certain way, even to ourselves, offer a challenge to rethink teacher Otherness and to (re-)elevate cultural belonging in early childhood settings.

This article has presented a theoretical foundation for the urgent and critical ongoing questioning and research that it calls for. It posits an increasingly open attitude to difference and diversity, and an energized, critical and thoughtful attitude of questioning and transformation as both necessary and possible through Kristeva’s notion of revolt. The arguments within this article support an ongoing sense of enquiry and curiosity, paying attention to early childhood teachers’ meaning-making of their cultural realities, their transformations, and their commitments and moral engagements within teaching teams and early childhood settings. Teachers’ belonging, the article acknowledges, depends on recognizing all of us as subjects in process, always ‘in construction … open and evolving’ (Kristeva, 2008: 2). Teachers’ belonging depends, then, on seeing all of us as foreigners, even to ourselves.