Cultural Humility in an Intercultural Mentor-Mentee Relationship: Overcoming Emotional 'Borders and Borderlands' of Nepali-Mentors and US-Mentees

This study examines qualitative data collected during an 8-month ethnographic study that explored the emotional experiences of six student-teachers from a university in the Rocky Mountain region of the United States and five Nepali teachers from an upper-middle-class preschool in Kathmandu, Nepal. The study uncovered how emotional experiences of mentors and mentees created emotional borders and borderlands in an intercultural mentoring relationship. We examined the strategies each group used to navigate intercultural differences in the mentoring relationship. Ethnographic methods were used to collect the following types of data: (a) focus groups, (b) individual interviews, (c) classroom observations, and (d) field notes from serving as participant observers. Data were analysed by utilizing cultural humility as an interpretive framework. We propose that cultural humility and the notion of invisible borders/borderlands introduces new ways of theorizing what oppressed groups undergo when interacting with dominant groups. The findings indicated that emotional borderlands arose due to conflicts in ideologies, values, and beliefs between the US student-teachers and Nepali mentor-teachers. However, both mentors and mentees attempted to overcome their emotional discomfort when guided to undergo critical self-reflection through processes associated with cultural humility.