Teaching Abroad as Cultural Negotiations

• In Event: Connecting Communities: Transformative Research Exploring Host and Indigenous Community Perspectives in Preservice Teacher Education Abroad

Abstract

In this presentation, I consider ways that teaching abroad may be understood through the lens of cultural negotiations. I attend to stories of teaching and living experiences of four novice teachers from Canada who began their teaching careers in schools in either Japan or Hong Kong. In particular, I examine the role of tensions within cultural preparations and orientation sessions in shaping experiences abroad.

This study is founded on a lens of education as growth that is interconnected with experience (Dewey, 1938). This perspective on learning serves to connect life with teaching, where experience is seen to be both the shaping force and culmination of teaching. A further theoretical strand supporting this investigation is research into intercultural teaching (Cushner & Brennan, 2007; Garii & Schlein, 2011; Phillion et al., 2008; Walters, Garii, & Walters, 2009) and narrative inquiry investigations of cross-cultural teaching (Elbaz-Luwisch, 2004; Eng, 2005, 2008; He, 2002). This investigation follows the narrative inquiry research tradition of Clandinin and Connelly (2000). The narrative methodological orientation of this work considers stories of experience as the phenomenon under study.

This inquiry focuses on the experiences of teaching of four female teachers who taught abroad as novice Canadians in either Japan or Hong Kong. Data were collected through five 90-minute tape-recorded interviews and technical and reflective field note documentation. All interviews were transcribed and reviewed in-depth for common narrative themes. The data analysis tool of the three-dimensional narrative inquiry framework provided a frame for delving into contextual, temporal, and interactional meaning within and across the common narrative themes.

In this presentation, I discuss the findings of this study of teaching induction in foreign school settings. In particular, I make use of the narrative inquiry construct of “bumping” (Clandinin et al., 2016) to make sense of participants’ storied expression of lived tensions of acculturation, professional induction, and gender as a component of teaching abroad. I further address the role that culture and language orientation in the pre-departure and initial immersion stages may play in supporting and/or complicating intercultural teaching.

Study abroad programs aimed at providing preservice teachers with globalized experiences provide program experiences before, during, and after time in foreign settings to scaffold students in their participation in personally and professionally enriching cultural opportunities. Shaping a lens of teaching abroad as a cultural negotiation allows teacher educators to see their student teachers as active participants who both shape and are shaped by engaging in foreign schools. Significantly, this presentation underscores this lens as an empowering stance for dealing with and making sense of cultural tensions surrounding foreign teaching experiences.

Author

• Candace M. Schlein, University of Missouri - Kansas City
  Presenting Author