Relational challenges in an intercultural volunteer programme in Jordan: Views from Chinese participants

ABSTRACT Research on international volunteer programmes has paid little attention to participants’ own situated understandings of intercultural communication experiences in a short-term international volunteer context. The paper reports on a qualitative investigation into the experiences of Chinese participants in a short-term international volunteering programme in an elementary school in Jordan which involved co-teaching the English language with partners from the U.S. It focuses on how participants interpreted the challenges of managing communication and building rapport with the children and their volunteer partners, with particular attention to the attribution of difficulties to perceived cultural differences. Findings show that participants struggled to interpret the significance of behaviour outside their usual cultural frames of reference and that frequent reliance on dichotomous framings of cultural difference created barriers to rapport.