International field experiences in Kenya and Nepal supplied data for two collaborative ethnographic research projects that analyze, using the concept of contextually appropriate practice (CAP), how minority-world early childhood preservice teachers define “quality” practices. The term minority-world is used for educators who come from wealthier regions of the globe, which constitutes a small percentage of the world population, such as the United States, Canada, Australia, and Europe. The term majority-world has replaced the term third world, as this term constructs a discourse about third-world countries being less developed. Fifteen preservice teachers from a predominantly White university in the United States served as the participants. Two Kenyan and Nepali teachers also participated to gain an emic perspective of quality practices from local community members. Data were collected through participation observation by the researchers, written ethnographic field notes, individual interviews, group discussions, and reflective journals. CAP was used to inform the data collection and analyze in two ways. First, it was used to guide the questions during the interviews and discussion groups. Second, the tenets of CAP were used to determine themes when coding the data. The findings reveal that U.S. preservice teachers are most likely to exert a “privileged position” by assuming that quality in Kenya and Nepal could be “fixed” by adopting Euro-Western policies and pedagogies, which perpetuates neo-colonialism in the education sector. The history of marginalization, coupled with Euro-Western influences and domination, silenced and oppressed local forms of educating young children in Kenya and Nepal. It is critical to provide preservice teachers with opportunities to expand their views of quality, especially in collaboration with adults from the local teaching community, so that they can provide feedback and mentoring about contextually appropriate practices for majority-world children.

This research examined the critical incidents of 10 United States (US) early childhood student teachers during a three-week university-sponsored international field experience conducted in three urban preschools in Kathmandu, Nepal. The purpose of employing the critical incident technique was to allow the US student teachers to reflect critically on successful and unsuccessful intercultural interactions in an effort to identify cultural assumptions about teaching young children. The approach was used not only to make assumptions visible, but also to make conceptual and behavioral changes based on what was learned from the critical reflection. The student teachers wrote weekly critical incidents, which were then discussed during weekly individual interviews. Three group discussions, a research journal, and field notes were used to triangulate the findings. A qualitative thematic analysis revealed five types of written critical incidents: descriptive, hypothetical, resistive, reflective, and integrative. Illustrative critical incidents are presented to compare and contrast how the international field experience allowed for productive reflection of cultural assumptions for some student teachers while leading to resistance to cultural assumptions for other student teachers. The findings suggest that outcomes vary based on the student teachers’ ability not only to identify their cultural assumptions, but also to challenge their cultural assumptions with actions grounded in ethnorelative reflection when teaching diverse groups of young children in the US and abroad.

Preparing educators to understand teaching as a cultural activity is a crucial element of teacher education programs. International field experiences have shown to accomplish this goal when combined with cross-cultural mentoring and critical reflection. This qualitative eight-month study used ethnographic methods to examine significant experiences of six U.S. preservice teachers while being mentored by five Nepali teachers at an early childhood center in Kathmandu. Findings illustrated how the preservice teachers negotiated their significant experiences around: 1) care routines, 2) adult-child relationship, 3) curriculum & materials, 4) mentor-mentee relationship, and 5) language differences. Findings indicated that the preservice teachers navigated significant experiences by using practices that tended to accept the Nepali school culture or, at times, by displaying perceived privilege and entitlement over the Nepali school culture. More specifically, the preservice teachers showed acceptance of Nepali cultural scripts related to the themes of care routines and adult-child relationships by following practices of the mentor teachers, but their perceived privilege and entitlement were evident when confronting the Nepali cultural scripts related to the themes of curriculum materials and mentor-mentee relationships. Implications focus on why intercultural conflicts might have occurred as well as recommendations to prepare educators to understand teaching as a cultural activity.

This colloquium problematizes the use of early childhood international field experiences as a tool for professional development with Euro-Western pre-service and in-service teachers. The authors critique experiences where minority-world educators teach or implement internships within majority-world contexts. It is critical for Euro-Western teacher education programs to provide pre-service and in-service teachers with opportunities to expand their global views of the early childhood professional through international field experiences. But how can this be done when conceptions of the “professional” are constructed in Euro-Western images, ideas, curricula, ideologies, and privilege? The authors make a call for early childhood teacher educators to reconsider, deconstruct, and re-examine themselves and their pre-service and in-service teachers’ rationale for engaging in international field experiences.

Educational policies and practices in the current age of heightened globalization are increasingly grounded on unjust binary curriculum approaches that favor educational designs from Minority-World countries at the expense of epistemologies of indigenous people in Majority-World nations that are typically deemed culturally inferior (Gupta, 2015). Essentially, those opposing binaries promote neocolonial and neoliberal ideologies while disregarding lived cultural contexts of people in Majority-World countries (Lee, 2012). To grapple with this conundrum, this ethnographic study examined how educators in Kenya and Nepal (N = 26) contested, constructed, and transformed educational practices in contexts of globalization, neocolonialism, and neoliberalism. Qualitative data from four schools in Kathmandu, Nepal (16 participants) and two schools in Kenya (10 participants) revealed that educators struggled with issues of intellectual imperialism. Therefore, they strived to deconstruct the existing unjust binary curricula policies by embracing pluralist educational discourses essential to sustaining indigenous languages and dialects. In doing so, those educators focused on advancing local cultural values, rights, and ideologies without antagonizing influential stakeholders from Minority-World nations.

This research examines one lead teacher's and two assistant teachers’ emotional discomfort as they participated in an eight-month collaborative ethnography of 19 children's peer-culture aggression in an early care and education classroom in the USA. Two questions guided this analysis: (1) What are the emotional themes of teachers in relation to children's peer-culture aggression? (2) How did the teachers utilize an ethic of discomfort when responding to children's peer-culture aggression? Collaborative ethnographic procedures, along with a post-structural account of teacher emotion, were used in a qualitative thematic analysis to determine salient themes and patterns. The data consisted of participant observation, field notes, video recordings of children's play, audio-recorded teacher team meetings, classroom artifacts, informal discussions, and a data-revisiting journal. Over the course of the study, the three teachers moved from resistance to emotional discomfort with children's peer-culture aggression, to a less resistant and more reflexive position toward emotional discomfort and child aggression. This shift occurred as the teachers began to release the goal of certainty and instead acknowledge and accept the unknowing and complexities associated with an ethic of discomfort. The implications center on the importance of teachers’ openness to “staying with” emotional discomfort, as well as making time and space to uncover a range of teacher and child emotions.