Cross Cultural Schooling Experiences Of Chinese Immigrant Families

This book introduces the concept of reciprocal educational learning among cultures with very different historical and philosophical origins. The concept of reciprocal learning grows out of a four year study of immigrant Chinese family narrative experiences in a Western context. This book captures the lived moments of such transitional lives both in and out of school settings to demonstrate why a child would appear and disappear from different caregivers’ purview. Through the narrative lens of student and family life, the study illustrates the intersection of Confucian and Western philosophies of education and how their interaction creates complications as well as benefits for both traditions, hence, the idea of reciprocal learning.

This volume explores cross-cultural encounters with schooling among Chinese immigrant mothers in Canada. Using a narrative inquiry approach, the author sets out to spotlight the challenges facing immigrant parents and students as they begin to integrate into Western society and culture, specifically focusing on aspects of their experience including the intergenerational relationship between students and parents, home-school relations, and interactions with other Chinese immigrant parents. Chapters address intercultural differences as a reference point for understanding immigrant parents' views on schooling, moral education, and parenting practices.

This book presents Arab immigrant youths’ voices through storytelling that reveals the challenges and achievements they experience at school and at home in a Canadian educational context. While Arab immigration to Canada dates back to the late eighteenth century, Canada has witnessed a significant rise in Arab immigration rates over the last twenty-five years, marking the fastest growth among all immigrant groups.These stories highlight the complexity of Arab-Canadian youths’ cross-cultural schooling experiences and provide valuable opportunities for reciprocal learning among all stakeholders in Canadian schools. With an educator’s vision, Elkord foregrounds the tensions between Arab youths’ home and school experiences to help build bridges and make high school less opaque to Arab immigrant students and their parents, while offering insights into multicultural education and resources for teacher education.

Annotation Li (education, State U. of New York at Buffalo) examines the experiences of four Chinese immigrant children and their families adjusting to daily life and schooling in Saskatoon, Canada, with a specific focus on the interrelationship between literacy and culture. She analyzes the meaning of schooling with reference to the children's home literacy experiences and their parents' perspectives, and the influence of the parents' cultural values on their children's literacy learning. She concludes that home literacy practices are complex and multifaceted, and offers suggestions for classroom teachers, policy makers, and immigrant parents. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

This is the first book that probes the lived experiences of Chinese immigrant faculty in North American higher education institutions: their struggles, challenges, successes, etc. It explores how their past experiences in China have shaped who they are now, what they do and how they pursue their teaching, research, and service, as well as the reality of their everyday life that inevitably intertwines with their present and past diverse cultural backgrounds and unique experiences. Different from previous books that explore immigrant/minority faculty defined ambiguously and broadly and from the theoretical framework of ethnic relations, this book has a particular focus on mainland Chinese immigrant faculty, which offers a richer and deeper understanding of their cross-culture experiences through autoethnographic research and by multiple lenses. Through authors’ vivid portray of the ebbs and flows of their life in the academe, readers will gain an enjoyable and holistic knowledge of the cultural, political, linguistic, scholarly, and personal issues contemporary Chinese immigrant faculty encounter as they cross the border of multiple worlds. All contributors to this book had the experience of being the first-generation Chinese immigrants, and they either are currently teaching or used to teach in North American higher education institutions, who were born, brought up, educated in Mainland China and came to North America for graduate degrees from early 1980s to 2000.

This book is a narrative inquiry that focuses on four participating Chinese teacher candidates’ cross-cultural learning in Canada and stories of induction in Southwest China. Through the lens of “three-dimensional inquiry space” and “reciprocal learning in teacher education,” the author explores the influence of cross-cultural experiences on the dissonance of pedagogies, teacher-student relationships, socialization, and beliefs about teaching and learning that interweave global and national curriculum boundaries. The chapters provide insight into how Chinese beginning teachers struggle to voice and to socialize among a cacophony of past practices, lived experiences, and cross-cultural experiences.

This edited volume examines new ways of teaching mathematics through a cross-cultural reciprocal learning project between sister schools in Canada and China. Situating teacher learning in the intersection of the two different school systems, curriculums, and cultures of mathematics learning and teaching in both nations, this volume offers teachers a unique and much-needed perspective on how practices between countries become more and more likely shaped by each other in the emerging global society. Born out of a comparative study project sponsored by the SSHRC, this volume compiles five years' worth of findings from reciprocal partnerships between researchers, teachers, school administrators, and students from both nations. Through the process of reciprocal learning and narrative inquiry, the research described in these chapters illuminates the unknown and shares newly-created mathematics education knowledge.