Feeling culture: The emotional experience of six early childhood educators while teaching in a cross-cultural context

Abstract

This research uncovers the emotional experience of six US early childhood educators during a 3-week teaching experience at two preschools in Kathmandu, Nepal. The following research questions guided the study and data analysis: What emotions do early childhood educators experience while teaching in a cross-cultural context? How were these emotions related to a Western discourse of teaching young children? Ethnographic methods of data collection consisted of formal and informal interviews, focus groups, weekly journals, group blog with written text and photographs, and participant observation by the lead researcher. Analysis of the themes uncovered the following: (1) a discourse of the Privileged Westerner and Marginalized Other was related to the emotions of excitement and nervousness about teaching/helping young children in Nepal, and (2) the emotion of frustration with the educational practices of the Nepali schools was related to a national love for their own Western educational ideals.

The purpose of this research is to provoke new thinking about the role of emotion while teaching in a cross-cultural early childhood context. This research set out to examine specifically the emotional experiences of six US early childhood educators as they taught young children during a 3-week teaching internship in two urban preschools located in Kathmandu, Nepal. While seminal studies on the cross-cultural aspects of child development, child socialization, and early childhood care and education have been a large part of the field (Lancy, 2008; Levine, 1980; Levine and New, 2008; Lewis, 1995; Nsamenang, 1992; Ochs and Schieffelin, 1984; Rogoff, 2003; Super and Harkness, 1986; Tharp and Gallimore, 1988; Tobin et al., 1989, 2009; Whiting, 1963), to date, no studies of early childhood educators have documented the emotional experience of teaching young children in a country significantly different from the teacher’s home country.

Emotion and teaching across cultures

When teaching young children in a cross-cultural context, it is imperative that teachers understand their own emotional reactions, attachments, and investments. For example, research has illustrated that when learning about and discussing cultural variations in educational practices, teachers often have emotional ambivalence and discomfort as they reflect on old core values under new knowledge (Chubbuck, 2010; Chubbuck and Zembylas, 2008; Jacobson, 2003, 2008; Zembylas, 2008). Teachers carry deeply held emotional attachments to their own ideologies about how to care for and teach young children, as well as holding assumptions about developmentally appropriate practices often based on Euro-Western theories of the child, childhood, and child development (Cannella, 2002; Greenfield and Cocking, 1994; New, 1993, 2000). Emotional factors become particularly relevant when teachers find themselves in unfamiliar cultural settings where locally based teaching practices reflect a set of values, norms, and beliefs about childhood that are distinctively different from instructors’ own culturally constructed knowledge about teaching young children.

Education reproduces cultural values, norms, and ideologies (York, 2003). Difficulty in preparing early childhood educators for teaching in a cross-cultural context or in a country different from their own arises in settings where teaching strategies and curriculum do not necessarily transfer from one cultural context to another (Tobin et al., 1989). Moreover, teachers carry hidden cultural “emotional” assumptions about what are “best” and “appropriate” teaching practices for young children (Colley, 2006; Madrid and Dunn-Kenney, 2010; Madrid et al., 2013; Osgood, 2010). Teaching approaches that work in one cultural context may not necessarily work in another. In addition, Western theories of child development and child care have dominated the field of early childhood education, perpetuating discourse that supports a Western framework of developmentally appropriate practices (Cannella, 2002). The increase in internationalization in education and growing numbers of educators traveling abroad to teach has exposed a need to prepare early childhood educators for teaching in culturally diverse regions. Educators must be able to take into account the culture of the child, to understand the notion of cultural relativity, and to discard ethnocentrism (Rogoff, 2003).

In addition to understanding the cultural implications of educating the young child, additional emotional and psychological stress occurs when teachers transition into a new country or to an unfamiliar cultural setting, in a phenomenon often called “culture shock” (Pederson, 1995; Ward et al., 2001; Xia, 2009). Oberg (1960) defined culture shock as the “psychological disorientation people experience who suddenly enter radically different cultural environments to live and work” (as cited in Xia, 2009: 97). Research has shown that culture shock can lead to a variety of emotional responses, sometimes within the same day, and ranging from euphoria at seeing a new country to the emotional discomfort or frustration arising in finding oneself in unfamiliar surroundings (Ward et al., 2001). Culture shock emerges to affect the emotional aspect of instruction, where a teacher adjusts not only to learning how to teach in a different cultural context, she must also adjust to new, unfamiliar, and unknown sets of routines, customs, values, food, language, social practices, and religions. The degree to which one experiences emotional stress and culture shock can depend on her understating of the term “culture” and its implications:

It seems that culture is a vague concept, which includes extensive content such as sight, smell, sound, value, tradition, custom, behaviour and the way of thinking. All these elements may be different from one country to another … when people are away from home and enter a new environment. They have to come into contact with many new values, new practices and ways of living. This is especially true for those people who face a new cultural pattern different from their own. (Xia, 2009: 97)

Another dimension complicates the issue of teaching in cross-cultural contexts, as the teacher must learn how to navigate not only a new culture but also a new educational system, while managing emotional reactions associated with understanding culture, and how culture manifests itself in classroom life.

Conceptual framework: Teacher emotion

Zembyla’s (2005, 2007) postmodern notion of teacher emotion and Ahmed’s (2004) cultural–political notion of emotion guide the conceptual framework of this inquiry. Both scholars view emotions not as solely internal affective constructs but as fluid, dynamic, and negotiated constructs performed, produced, and reproduced. As seen from this framework, emotions are cultural phenomena negotiated within relationships of discourse, power, and language and within social relationships (Gergen, 1999; Lutz, 1988; Madrid et al., 2015). Zembylas (2008) postulates, “Research shows that educating [others] about cultural diversity, discrimination and inequality and embracing critical pedagogies can evoke a range of powerful emotions to educators and learners alike—from passion and anger to shame and intense emotional discomfort” (p. 61). The problem for most educators lies in recognizing that strong emotional reactions and emotional discomfort are common when disrupting deeply held cultural ideologies or when ideological beliefs are challenged. Ignoring or not reflecting on intense emotional responses can lead the teacher to reproduce dominant assumptions about the education of young children. For example, in my own ethnographic research on teacher emotion and socially just practices (Madrid et al., 2013), a classroom teacher experienced worry, struggle, and discomfort as new knowledge disrupted her understandings about what were “right” and “just” practices for her preschool students. Discomfort was intensified when the teacher realized that she could not rely on her emotions to determine what actions were just and which unjust.

The present research advances discernment of the role of emotion in teaching by asking US early childhood educators to interrogate their own emotional reactions and emotional investments concerning teaching practices for young children while participating in a teaching internship in a cross-cultural context (i.e. Nepal). The cross-cultural context provides a contact space where ultimately there will be emotional discomfort experienced by educators situated in an environment where values, norms, beliefs, and daily routines are significantly different as viewed through a Western lens. Teachers will be required to confront and reexamine their own emotional reactions and attachments toward setting, people, and objects. Boler’s (1999) pedagogy of discomfort posits that “within this culture of inquiry and flexibility, a central focus is to recognize how emotions define how and what one chooses to see, and conversely, not to see” (p. 177). Emotions, when engaged as sites of critical reflection, can be forces that allow teachers to uncover ways in which their emotional reactions are linked to their own ideological beliefs and conceptions about which classroom practices are “right” and “wrong.” This study allowed a nuanced look at how emotions were embedded within educators’ Western cultural ideologies regarding teaching young children and how “unconscious privileges and invisible ways in which they comply with dominant ideology” (Zembylas, 2008: 65) were constructed through the identity of the Privileged Westerner that was compared with their Nepali counterparts framed as the Marginalized Other. The following research questions guided the study, with the first research question guiding the larger study and the second research question emerging as the study progressed: What emotions do early childhood educators experience while teaching in a cross-cultural context? How were emotions experienced related to a Western discourse of teaching young children?

Methodology

The data presented here were derived from a 3-month qualitative study of experiences gained by six US early childhood educators during a teaching experience at urban preschools in Kathmandu, Nepal. Ethnographic methods were used to triangulate the data and build trustworthiness, to obtain multiple perspectives, and to situate the analysis (Madden, 2010). Qualitative research methods consisted of participant observation, field observation, formal and informal interviews, and focus groups (Hatch, 2002). Notes, weekly journals written by participants and researcher, a group blog containing written text and photographs, transcripts of interviews, and focus group interaction comprised the data for this study.

Cross-cultural teaching context and participants

The six early childhood educators were five White middle-class females and one male ranging in ages from 20 to 31 years from the western region of the United States. For purposes of reporting in this study, participants are listed as “female” in order to protect confidentiality for the male teacher. The educators, along with the White female US researcher and university supervisor/project coordinator, traveled to Kathmandu to complete an early childhood teaching internship as the capstone experience for Bachelor’s degrees in Elementary Education with a Minor in Early Childhood Education from a mid-size university in the United States. The internship required supervision by both a mentor teacher and a faculty supervisor who traveled with the educators to coordinate placements and to lead the trip, while local Nepali teachers acted as mentor teachers for the educators placed in their classrooms. Each of the six educators worked full-time for 3 weeks in different classrooms in one of two early childhood programs in the city. The schools used a Montessori-based curriculum and served upper-class Nepali children. Most local teachers and students were fluent in English. The six educators, the university supervisor, and the researcher traveled to placement sites together, stayed together in a local hotel, and spent nearly every evening together during the trip. Weekends were spent as a group touring historic sites in Kathmandu valley and nearby villages.

Role of the researcher

The ethical methodological issue central to this qualitative study was the reduction of power relations between the six participants and the researcher while researching emotional experiences (Holland, 2007). Relationships of power posed a dilemma in the project as the research site moved from our university to Nepal and back to the United States. Roles were not firm in activities such as preparing for travel abroad, navigating air travel, managing hotel arrangements, eating meals, sightseeing, and returning home.

Daily life during the internship naturally opened uncharted spaces to negotiate subjectivities in the process of leaving the home country. To reduce the methodological problem of power, the second author of this article served solely as the university-designated supervisor, while the first author served solely as the researcher. The researcher did not participate in any way as a supervisor or coordinator, and she was not responsible for preparing the educators for the internship or for assigning grades at the end of the internship. The researcher’s role was to understand emotional experiences arising in the teachers during the internship. Participants quickly understood the difference in roles of supervisor and researcher. For instance, participants would seek out the researcher when they confronted emotional difficulty or simply wanted to talk; they did not seek her out in matters of teaching strategy, curriculum development, or logistical issues. Similarly, the supervisor did not engage in data collection activities; she engaged only in facilitating focus groups or by participating in informal interviews.

Data analysis

Using Spradley’s (1980) ethnographic analysis of participant observation, a wide lens helped explore and document emotions arising during the cross-cultural teaching experience with the general question of “what is going on here?” After an observation, an interview, or a focus group, the researcher would record and note critical incidents in the field notes that were often used to guide the next interview, focus group, or observation (Pederson, 1995). The initial data analysis was a recursive ethnographic action, where visiting and re-visiting the data during fieldwork contextualize findings within the larger body of data (Emerson et al., 1995; Kantor and Fernie, 2003). The next stage of data analysis consisted of transcribing the entire body of data, followed by a search for emotional themes. Analysis of themes focused only on data emerging in the teaching experience itself and not in the overall experience in country. For example, some data described how the teachers felt about being in Nepal as compared to how they felt about teaching in Nepal. Coding, therefore, looked only at teacher emotions pertaining to teaching in Nepal. The last of the data analyses came from sharing interpretations with a Nepali colleague who serves as coauthor in this article (Redmond, 2003).

Findings and interpretations

Research findings are divided into two sections illustrating emotional themes arising in the teaching experience. Within each section, the data show how teacher emotions were related to discourse of the Privileged Westerner and the Marginalized Other, centered on the following emotions: (1) Excitement and Nervousness about teaching in Nepal and (2) Frustration with the educational practices of the Nepali schools.

Pre-departure excitement and nervousness

I feel like my role there will be to … to serve those kids and the schools and really do whatever I can to help them. (Francine, Interview, June 2014)

Prior to the start of the cross-cultural teaching experiences, the lead researcher spent several days talking with each of the six educators in individual and group interviews. Two of the six students had done some teaching in another culture, but those experiences had been brief. Questions for the teachers were as follows: (1) Tell me about how you feel as you prepare to teach in another culture, (2) What did you do to prepare to teach children in another culture? and (3) What do you think you have to offer? In this pre-departure stage, the emotions of Excitement and Nervousness were central for all six students.

When asking the teachers what they had done to prepare to teach children in another culture, they generally stated that they had not done much because they felt “children were the same everywhere.” A few teachers noted that they had read a book or had looked up Nepal online, but the consensus was that not much could have been done to prepare to teach in another culture. The assumption was, “a child is a child,” regardless of culture or nationality. Little data emerged around feelings of preparedness. The teachers were, however, very excited and nervous about “helping” the children in Kathmandu. In the excerpt below, Lily, a White Christian teacher, discussed the emotions she had experienced as she prepared for the trip:

I’ve gone through stages of being terrified. All these irrational fears going through my head to being ecstatic and excited to get over there and just jump in and get going. I’m nervous. I mean, I don’t know much about Buddhism and Hinduism but [they are] very different from my belief system, and so in that respect I’m nervous in a way, but I am excited to learn about those [beliefs] and just become more knowledgeable … I just don’t know a whole lot about them and so I’m interested to just kind of see where they’re coming from.

Lily touches here on emotions of ambivalence and on how she vacillates between nervousness at confronting the unknown and excitement in learning more about another culture. Earlier she discussed how both these emotions were attached to her own ideological Christian beliefs, very different from Hinduism or Buddhism. Lily understood that stepping into a new cultural setting would present her not only with educational differences but also with religious differences likely to cause emotional discomfort. In the same interview, she voiced, rather strongly, her belief that her “Christian God would protect her” from Hindu and Buddhist influence opposing her Christian faith. Lily expanded on the emotional tension she felt, specifically about her fear of exposure to places in “spiritual warfare” with her Christian beliefs. She noted that she would not be scared but would reframe her fear to excitement in “serving the children” and God’s (i.e. her Christian God’s) purpose in sending Lily on the trip. Following is an excerpt from this conversation exploring some of Lily’s emotional tension and discomfort:

I’ve just grown up being very aware of spiritual warfare, stuff like that and so I’m going into temples, Buddhist and Hindu temples. I think there might be some tension so I’ve just been nervous about that but just preparing myself. I know that God will protect me in essence so … That’s just interesting and preparing myself and just knowing that I’m where I’m supposed to be and you know I’m supposed to go on this trip. So there’s a reason and so in that part I’m nervous, but I’m not scared. I know it will be fine just I’ve never experienced something like that, you know? I think it just goes back to that I really feel like my role there will be to serve those kids and the schools and really do whatever I can to help them.

Just as in the case of Lily presented above, each of the six teachers experienced excitement and nervousness associated with being in a new culture and serving the children of Nepal. Reasons for the emotions, however, varied among the teachers. While Lily’s nervousness had to do with her Christian beliefs and anticipated spiritual warfare, Tasha’s emotions of nervousness and fear had to do with becoming a racist teacher/person if she did not expose herself to other races and challenge her assumptions as a White person from the United States:

I just don’t have a lot of experiences with other cultures, other races, anything like that. Especially if I’m going to be teaching, I don’t want that to be where I’m approaching teaching from, you know, ignorance of that kind of … it’s not that I’m uncomfortable around other people, but races are just … just really didn’t have experience with it … I was so afraid of letting that … just be honest, I was so afraid of becoming a racist person … Obviously you know when you see someone, you know your first thing is, the first thing you see is their skin and that’s, you know, just a fact of life but it doesn’t have to be a bad thing. You know? So that’s a big reason I’m doing Nepal. I’m going in pretty open-minded but I feel like it’s going to completely open my eyes to what I have in my life.

In this excerpt, the contrast in the underlying reasons for the emotions of excitement and fear in the six teachers is evident. Tasha’s emotional discomfort lay in the fear of not being open to the critical thinking and emotional reflexivity needed to work and teach children from other races and cultures, while Lily’s excitement and nervousness resided in protecting ideologies she would employ to consider how she could serve the children through her Christian faith. On one hand, Tasha sought to be “open-minded” and “to see the world” in an effort to shift her perspective about culture, race, and teaching; on the other hand, Lily was using her emotional discomfort to attach more deeply to her ideological beliefs.

On the surface, the motivations of Tasha and Lily seem to be in stark contrast. Stanley (2013), however, suggests that

The motivation of “seeing the world” and “saving the world” are similar in that they take as their basic premise the assumptions of the right, for Westerners, to spend extra periods of time in developing countries for their own reasons, whether framing this as enjoying themselves on holiday or philanthropically helping. (p. 28)

In addition to the discourse of “helping/service work” or “seeing the world/being global,” there appeared a subtheme of not seeing the world through the identity of “tourist” but in the identity of a “cross-cultural worker.” Identified in the literature on motivation for working abroad is a subculture of individuals who desire to travel, but embedded within that subculture is “volunteer-tourism” or “work-tourism.”

Service-work discourse was also found within the emotional experiences and motivation reported by the six teachers. For example, when asked why she was excited to teach in another country, Courtney noted,

I’ve always been really, really interested in service work and I’ve done a lot of volunteering and service in pre-schools, and different things in our own community.

In the interview, Courtney continued to talk at length about how a cross-cultural teaching experience would help her to understand cultural differences and to see the world while not doing the “touristy thing,” which would set her apart from her other friends and acquaintances:

That’s kind of why I’ve always wanted to do the international travel. I have a lot of friends who have done the Spain and London thing and all that stuff, but I always told myself if I get a chance to travel somewhere I don’t ever want to do the touristy places. I want to go somewhere where I can make a difference and that can impact me. I wasn’t willing to do something that was like the easy travel per se.

Courtney’s statement is given here as illustrative of the connection between the discourse of “service help” and of “seeing the world,” noted in the focus groups, interviews, and informal conversations. As Stanley (2013) points out in her study of Western teachers in China,

Like backpacking-tourism, “saving the world” is one of the discourses among foreign teachers. This motivation type—helping—carries overtones of “the White Man’s burden” under which imperialism was justified as a noble purpose, wherein Western expertise could help lift non-Western people “out of poverty and ignorance.” (p. 28)

The notion of the noble Westerner doing service work and not simply being a tourist was further illustrated in the excerpt below from Laura:

And I don’t know, just to experience the culture and to go to a third world country and to see how they live and everything. And just to be able to talk to people and the teachers and see how everything works in their school system and … But hopefully at the same time wanting me to go and like give back and I don’t know help the other people …

The theme of the White Man’s Burden was tied to emotions of excitement in the six teachers and ran as a central thread in all data.

The next example shows clearly how the White Man’s Burden was built around the discourse of the Privileged Westerner and the Marginalized Other. In a pre-departure interview, Nancy noted that in her excitement to prepare for the cross-cultural teaching experience, she had talked to her fifth-grade class about Nepal and about what it meant to live in a third-world country. ¹ The discourse, however, did not support an uncovering of culture as a social construct; rather, it supported the notion that a US way of life equaled privilege, while other countries’ ways of life did not equal privilege:

So it’s kind of fun because in my fifth grade classroom since we knew we were going to Nepal for so long, and this was in the spring when I was student teaching. My students would be, “Oh, we don’t get iPad Dream B sets” and then complain. I’m like, “You guys, some countries don’t even have silverware to eat their own food. I mean, take a look at what we have and how fortunate we are to have iPads at recess, maybe play a board game. We’re still fortunate enough to have board games.”

Rather than examining cultural customs and history, Nancy perpetuates the “White Man’s Burden” in which privilege is linked to the US way of life and to affluence (i.e. having an iPad and using silverware). Nancy positions Nepali children as less fortunate on the basis of cultural practices, creating for young American children a Western and non-Western binary of “haves” and “have-nots,” with emotional comfort portrayed as inherent in the Western world of capitalism and affluence.

Frustration during the experience

But I think I’m really lucky because I’ve heard horror stories from other people, getting moved around and feeling like their teachers hate them or not being able to speak English really at all, or not being able to understand their accents because they’re so thick. (Courtney, Interview, June 2014)

Despite the excitement and nervousness felt in anticipation of teaching or helping young children, expressed in the pre-departure interviews, upon arrival into Nepali classrooms, the excitement unraveled as the teachers found themselves in a country with an educational system that differed from their Western approach to teaching young children. The effect is illustrated in the excerpt above (Courtney) in its reference to “horror stories” of teachers who don’t like them and thick Nepali accents. Within the theme of frustration was also discourse around a nationalistic love of their American educational ideals, expressed through the pre-departure discourse of “saving/helping.” The central findings in the emotions of the six teachers concerned frustration with the educational practices of the Nepali schools and a national love for their own Western ideologies. Reasons for experiencing such emotions, and how each teacher navigated these emotional spaces, varied slightly, but a factor common to all six teachers’ emotional experiences was the underlying discourse of the Privileged Westerner and the Marginalized Other.

To illustrate the level of emotional frustration that commenced on teaching in Kathmandu, an excerpt from Nikki, the internship coordinator, is provided below. Ten days into the duration of the experience, Nikki requested an emergency meeting because of her own emotional frustration with the teachers’ inability to think reflectively about the Nepali teachers and their classrooms. Each day, consistent, constant, and ethnocentric complaints arose about the deficits of the Nepali teaching experience. The evening before the meeting, the six teachers questioned Nikki about what they were missing by teaching in Nepal rather than in the United States:

From that moment, when that question was asked at dinner, I had been trying to rack my brain about how to move us past that, and that’s why we’re here. So there is no doubt we could spend the rest of this night lining out all the things that are completely different from the experience within the U.S. and we could most certainly say all the things this experience is not. We could do that for the rest of the evening. We could make a poster of the things this experience is not, okay? But that is a lower-level thinking skill. We’ve got to move beyond it. We’ve been here a week and a half. We’ve got to move beyond it. So my question to you, then, is what does that accomplish for us? What does it accomplish for you and what does it accomplish for our group to spend our energy talking about all the things that dissatisfy you about this experience thus far?

Key in this excerpt is the idea that students were spending large amounts of time discussing their frustration with Nepali classrooms. Teachers were displaying a type of culture shock. Criticisms ranged from Nepali teacher–teacher interaction, child–teacher interactions, child–child interactions, to Nepali curriculum development. No critical reflection or reflexive deconstruction as to why host-country practices made the teachers feel uncomfortable, and/or why Nepali classrooms might differ from their Western counterparts, was evident.

Rogoff (2003) suggests,

People who have immersed themselves in communities other than their own frequently experience “culture shock.” Their new setting works in ways that conflict with what they have always assumed, and it may be unsettling to reflect on their own cultural ways as an option rather than the “natural” way. (p. 130)

Analysis of the data uncovered how problematic it was for the six teachers to interrogate their Western assumptions and their emotional attachments to the notion that US educational ideology was one option and not the natural option. For example, each evening after the teachers returned from their respective school sites, the group found a place to eat. At dinner, the group collectively detailed the horrors, frustrations, and dislikes from the day of teaching. Teachers noted how the Nepali teachers did not like them, how Nepali curriculum was outdated, how Nepali teachers did not have a set schedule, how Nepali teachers did not seem to understand developmentally appropriate practice, how teachers made children sit unentertained for long periods, how teachers did not put the child first, how teachers made children do worksheets, and how teachers’ needs superseded the children’s needs.

This is not to say the teachers did not also have many positive comments about Nepal or their relationships with teachers, children, and/or people in the community, but when talking specifically about teaching practice, conversations focused strongly on perceived deficits of the Nepali curriculum rather than on its strengths. Data showed that it was rare for the six teachers to question or reconsider, from a nonethnocentric perspective, how their emotional frustration stemmed from cultural practices grounded in a Western belief about educating the young child. All of the “unnatural” Nepali teacher behaviors promoted a type of discomfort and culture shock linked to exasperated feelings of “not enjoying” the teaching internship: Tasha:

So it occurred to me that I wasn’t enjoying it because that’s not what I enjoy. I was worried; it’s like “oh wow, I’m sitting here in a class and I’m not enjoying teaching.” This curriculum is not what I would do. I was just watching someone else lecture, which I don’t enjoy, I’ll be honest. But this week has been very different from last week. I am still troubled with their style of teaching as there are a lot of lectures and a lot it is very teacher-oriented—very. So I struggle with that.

Lily:

I feel like in America our focus is so childcentric and we do what the kids need first and their needs and goals and development always come first. Where here, it’s the opposite. It’s children sit, children relax, children … you’re yelled at if you interrupt, and adults finish their conversations. They do planning in the classroom instead of on their own time, which is kind of disconcerting to me. I feel like there could be a way better time utilization. I just think that the focus is on adult priorities versus children’s priorities.

As noted by Tasha and Lily, not only were the six US teachers critiquing the Nepali teachers’ way of educational life, but they were also comparing Nepali education to the US system, thereby reinforcing Western ethnocentrism regarding proper care and teaching of young children. In the United States, positioning an early childhood educator as unable to “put the child first” or as being “teacher-oriented” would frame the teacher as ineffective, self-centered, and an uncaring teacher (Cannella, 2002). In addition, from a Western early childhood perspective, focus on adult priorities versus child priorities and the use of lecture versus hands-on activities would threaten a teacher’s credibility and her knowledge of developmentally appropriate practice. It would also question the teacher’s emotional disposition as one who understood how to “put children first” and how to care “properly” for young children.

The daily complaint sessions by the six teachers supported collective emotional discomfort that reproduced rather than challenged ethnocentrism within Western educational ideology. A collective discourse as “Us” being the Privileged Westerner and the Nepali teachers as “Them,” the Marginalized Other, was justified by suggesting that US educational practices felt more progressive and child-centered, while the Nepali educational practices felt more deficit-based, outdated, and less progressive. In creating this emotional theme collectivity, the teachers were reproducing a narrative of national love for US educational ideals. Ahmed (2004) notes, “Love … reproduces the collective as ideal through producing a particular kind of subject whose allegiance to the ideal makes it an ideal in the first place” (p. 123). For example, the six teachers’ collective frustration supported “in the name of love,” a national allegiance to Western educational practices, solidified by group complaints about problems with the Nepali classrooms and curriculum.

To illustrate this collective frustration and national love for a US ideal, data from an interview with Nancy are presented. Here, Nancy explores how the experience was not teaching her anything new about curriculum or about how to teach young children with limited resources; rather, the cross-cultural teaching experience was affirming her feelings that her Western way of teaching was the right way. Before the experience, Nancy used certain Western pedagogies because in her Western education, she had been told that they were right. After seeing Nepali classrooms, she now knew that a Western pedagogy was indeed the right way:

That’s kind of the way it feels like to me—like I’ve stepped back in time about 20 or 30 years. It almost feels like more than that. It’s not that I haven’t learned a lot. I still have. But what it’s doing is affirming. What I was expecting [from teaching in Nepal] was more like learning tools about how to do things with limited materials. Instead, what I’m learning is affirming why I’m doing things [back home in the USA], which to me is just as valuable; you know, to reaffirm your beliefs, and it makes you feel good to know you’re doing what you think is right because it’s right.

Rather than allowing the cross-cultural teaching experience to promote intercultural competence or to disrupt Nancy’s Western understanding about teaching in a cultural context, the experience did the opposite for her. The cross-cultural teaching experience affirmed her belief that Western teaching styles were indeed the correct and best way. Nancy’s affirmation unfortunately made her “feel good” about her rightness, showing how emotion, without critical reflexivity, can reproduce ethnocentrism as people justify their negative reactions toward another culture because it does not “feel right” (Ahmed, 2004; Chubbuck and Zembylas, 2008; Madrid, 2013; Zembylas, 2008; Zembylas and Chubbuck, 2009).

In addition, the notion that the Nepali educational system was 30 years behind the US educational system was based on a neo-colonial framework in which Western-based schooling and lifestyle are positioned as more civilized and as culturally superior to the school system and lifestyle of developing countries or indigenous populations (Stanley, 2013). The claim that any group is behind another suggests a linear developmental trajectory and demonstrates an allegiance to more “advanced” society. For educators to teach in a culturally relevant manner and to understand how educational systems are culturally situated, educators must actually disaffirm their beloved and cherished cultural beliefs about what is the best and proper way to teach, as well as set aside beliefs about what practices are thought to be more advanced or civilized.

Rogoff (2003) claims, “People often view the practices of other communities as barbaric. They assume that their community’s perspective on reality is the only proper or sensible or civilized one” (p. 15). Discourse about the US way being the right or best way was replete in the data, as the six students expressed concern over the nature of some of the Nepali teaching strategies and teacher–child interactions. For example, Francine discussed how affection teachers showed toward children was opposite to how affection is displayed to students by teachers in the United States. Francine explained that older children in Nepal were given affection while younger children were not; she acknowledged that she wished US teachers in the upper grades could show more affection toward children but are not allowed to do so because of laws and regulations. The teacher described next an upsetting incident where a child was told to sit and eat all her food before leaving the table and how it felt like “torture” for her:

So the teacher is yelling at her to eat faster and faster so she started eating faster but she couldn’t chew and swallow fast enough. So she was getting it in her cheeks and it was … they were so full and then she started to get sick because she was just sitting there with all that food in her mouth and a full hot belly so she looked like she was going to throw up.

Like, tears are just starting to roll and she can’t control like how she’s feeling with the teacher screaming at her. So then, she starts to drink milk trying to like wash it down and like some of it went down but then the teacher was like yelling at her to take smaller sips or something. So then, she had so much in her mouth and she still felt like she was going to vomit. It just started coming out, and the teacher threw a rag at her and just kept yelling at her like “don’t you vomit. Like you swallow, you swallow, you don’t vomit.” And she’s just sobbing at this point and she doesn’t know what to do. She can’t swallow but she’s going to throw up.

The teacher just kept yelling at her like down at eye level slapping the table. It felt like torture. I felt like I was witnessing torture and I was just like, “I can’t do this.” So I walked over to my teacher and put my hand on her back and I said, “Can I help her? Like can I help her for a little bit?” And she’s like, no, she needs to learn to be independent and I was like, oh my gosh, this is not an issue of independence like … well she just needs a comforting hand on her back to know that she’s okay.

The researcher, on one occasion, observed a similar event. Field notes indicated the Nepali teachers’ reasons for mealtime practices were due to teachers’ belief that children were being spoiled at home by parents and needed to learn how to eat on their own. Moreover, the Nepali teacher said the parents were giving children too many treats. This was why some children refused to eat the school lunch. According to Francine, the experience was like torture for her. Teachers in cross-cultural settings must sit with discomforting practices of the new culture and contemplate how the unfamiliar practices are based on factors relevant within the patterns of daily life for children and teachers as determined by the local customs, routines, and rituals (Chubbuck and Zembylas, 2008). In this instance, Francine was upset by the practices of the teacher, and she suggested that the child simply needed a comforting hand. Her solution (offering the comforting hand) differed greatly from the teacher’s response (hitting the table and yelling). The Nepali teacher, however, felt her actions were justified, as the child needed to learn independence, indicated by her rejection of Francine’s offer to “help her for a little bit.” The salient message in Francine’s emotional reaction to the event is illuminated by her statement, “I felt like I was witnessing torture.” The mealtime practices of the Nepali teacher seemed barbaric to Francine when viewed from a Western, child-centric educational lens. By using the term “torture,” Francine clearly indicates her perception of severe and unnecessary actions of the teacher, while the Nepali teacher viewed her practice as being best for a spoiled child to learn independence. Both teachers felt justified in their emotional actions and reactions.

Discussion

This cross-cultural teaching experience showed that teacher emotions were related to discourse of the Privileged Westerner and Marginalized Other and were centered on following emotions: excitement and nervousness about teaching in Nepal, frustration with the educational practices of the Nepali schools, and a national love for Western educational ideals. We found that the teachers initially were excited and nervous to teach in Nepal. Their feelings were embedded in notions of “helping” or “saving” children in a majority-world country. Upon arrival in the cross-cultural teaching context, the six teachers experienced frustration and emotional discomfort at witnessing the Nepali educational system, and the teachers were influenced by a type of national love for their own educational ideals about teaching young children. The cross-cultural teaching experience seemed to reinforce rather than to challenge the teachers’ understanding of education as a system that reproduces cultural values, norms, beliefs, and practices without an interrogation of emotional actions and reactions as ethnocentric. The six teachers’ frustration and culture shock led to lack of critical analysis of the Nepali practices as seeming immoral or inappropriate only through a Western lens.

Practical implications and conclusion

Returning to Boler’s (1999) pedagogy of discomfort, this study asked how US early childhood educators could learn “to recognize how emotions define how and what one chooses to see, and conversely, not to see” (p. 177). For teachers in cross-cultural settings to develop intercultural competence, they must be willing to “re-see” their emotional responses to disturbing situations like Francine’s (above). How could Francine have used her emotional discomfort to learn more about the Nepali teacher’s understanding of the child, not from a deficit view but from one of cultural relevance and nonjudgment? What were the underlying assumptions about a spoiled child that justified the Nepali teacher’s actions that Francine could not see because of her frustration? Teachers must ask themselves if the practices are indeed as barbaric and unnatural as they feel them to be or if teachers are simply choosing to see from their unconsciously held privileges and dominant ideologies.

The practical implication of this research is that it takes a significant amount of time and reflection for early childhood educators to understand how their emotional responses are embedded in national identity and cultural ideology (Colley, 2006; Jacobson, 2003; Lewis, 1995; Madrid, 2013; Madrid et al., 2015; Osgood, 2010). It is not easy to step into a new teaching context where teaching practices are significantly different from a teacher’s home country. More important, the use of cross-cultural teaching experiences to promote diversity and cultural relativism can lead to ethnocentrism rather than intercultural competence if undertaken without reflection (Cushner and Chang, 2015; Willard-Holt, 2001). In addition, with the globalization of education and an increase in international teaching internships, there might be too much emphasis on surface-level types of diversity instruction without a deeper understanding about the meaning of the teacher–child relationship as culturally constituted. Nikki, the internship supervisor, declared in a post-interview,

The light-bulb moment I had for myself this morning was that I think I thought that if you just take people to a place, the place changes them. What I’ve learned is that a place doesn’t do anything. The place has absolutely no power to do anything unless we open ourselves up and do the interpersonal work required for it to change us. So I was really naïve. I genuinely thought … I think I even said it in our first interview, all we have to do is just take you guys there and you all make all your own meaning from it and it will be perfect. But like, that’s asking too much, really, like without us trying to do some work together. I think you have to do some work to arrive at something different.

People often assume that exposure to diverse groups will promote cultural competence and intercultural understanding. Exposure alone, however, does not mean that teachers will understand how their emotional actions and reactions are grounded in social and cultural worlds.

When discussing overseas student teaching, Cushner and Chang (2015) warn, “Those in the field of study abroad know that it is simply far too easy for students to have an international experience that focuses on surface or objective-level elements of culture without it resulting in significant intercultural change” (p. 166) Stanley (2013) also reminds us that

It may be that participants’ own motivations and their willingness to question what they already know, determines the extent to which they either challenge received ideas or instead head home with pre-existing notions reinforced, supported with the dubious authority of expert. (p. 30)

Cushner and Chang (2015) and Stanley (2013) advise that cross-cultural teaching experiences can actually reinforce pre-existing notions as teachers return home with the added problem of real-life experience to support their pre-existing stereotypes. That is, the teacher may have an idea about a cultural stereotype that exists based on knowledge alone, but after a cross-cultural teaching experience, she now has experience to support a stereotype. In this study, for example, Tasha noted how the experience solidified her belief that Western ways of teaching were the “right” way, and it made her “feel good” to know that on the basis of her lived experience in Nepal.

Future research should examine the emotional experience of teaching young children in cross-cultural contexts over longer periods. This study looked at a brief 3-week teaching internship in Kathmandu. Given more time, the US teachers might have moved from initial emotions of culture shock and ethnocentrism to a deeper period of critical reflection (Pence and Macgillivray, 2008; Willard-Holt, 2001). Finally, research should examine how university programs can prepare early childhood educators to understand the cultural nature of emotion in their teaching practices and the importance of emotion in the reflection process during teaching experiences with diverse groups of young children.