English language education in Honduras: opportunity, adventure, or empire?

Research suggests that teaching in international settings fosters professional growth and promotes tolerance for working in multicultural and linguistically diverse classrooms for U.S. teachers upon returning to the U.S. to work in schools. These studies portray teaching abroad as an unproblematic and neutral project, and narrowly focus on the benefit to the individual teacher during their temporary stay in a foreign country and when returning home to the U.S. Absent from these studies are two groups: 1) teachers from the U.S. who work in non-governmental organizations and private school settings abroad, but have no pedagogical training, and 2) host country citizens (unless they serve a purpose for the U.S. teacher, such as providing growth, teaching cultural nuances, etc.) These studies also lack an analysis of how international teaching, especially in bilingual and English-language contexts, affect the local community outside the bounds of the study’s setting. Scholars of transnational feminist theory suggest consideration of how these relationships shape not just the people who travel across nation-state borders, but also those who are affected in the local context. Scholars of critical pedagogy remind teachers that education is not only pedagogical, but also political and ideological. Grounded in these two theoretical frameworks, as well as Critical Discourse Analysis, this study examines English-language education and teaching in the Central American country of Honduras. The findings suggest that host country citizens express reservations about these partnerships. Although U.S. and international teachers second-guess the utility of English-language education in Honduras, they justify their presence teaching there because of their ability to speak English, and they define what success means in the future of their students.