Shifting realities: Immigrant teacher transitions into early childhood settings in Aotearoa New Zealand

Imagine you are an immigrant early childhood teacher… this article tells your story of transition and diversity. It interweaves tensions and complex realities and explores issues and concerns for immigrant teachers in the cultural places and relational spaces of early childhood settings. Based on teacher narratives and a post-structural discourse analysis, it suggests that immigrant teachers' realities are not always 'rich' or celebratory, but are often complex entanglements of struggle and contradictions. The article urges fresh considerations of early childhood relationships to allow for fluid, shifting identities and cultures – yours, ours, and the centre's. Sonja Arndt is a lecturer in early childhood education at the University of Waikato. Her research is concerned with critical (re)conceptualisations of notions of the foreigner and foreignness. Shall we be, intimately and subjectively, able to live with the others, to live as others, without ostracism but also without leveling? (Kristeva, 1991, p. 2, emphasis in the original). The happiness of tearing away Imagine you are an immigrant early childhood teacher. You have recently moved to Aotearoa New Zealand, and are trying to make sense of your new realities here. Kristeva's opening quote, where she recognises the intimacy and private struggle of being the Other, of living amongst differences, concerns you and your new reality. It speaks also to the other 'non-foreign' teachers in your centre, and to ways to enhance engagements across all of our differences. Kristeva (1991) suggests the possibility that maybe we are all Other, that we could all live 'as others', strangers also to ourselves, and that we might all get on together without marginalizing practices that 'ostracise' or 'level'. Her quote represents the aim of this article: to highlight tensions that arise in the cultural places and relational spaces of Aotearoa early childhood environments, and to explicate tensions arising from well-intentioned aspirations and practices. Its particular concern is for immigrant teachers, like you, whose stories, alongside others, have informed my research. You found it extremely hard to leave your homeland – you had never been this far away before – from your favourite places and the spaces that you loved. Even those places that had become difficult, towards the end, now, from a distance, remind you of the home that you left behind. Leaving your best friends and extended family has been particularly hard, and it still hurts to think of them. However, you are pleased, really, that you have …