Migrant Identities And Teacher Training Educational Research For Cross Cultural Encounters

Educational institutions all over the world continue to attract the services of foreign-born scholars. In addition to the culture shock that immigrants experience in unfamiliar countries, these scholars often undergo "pedagogical shock." Through autobiographical accounts of foreign-born professors from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the US, this volume examines the experiences of foreign-born professors around the world to provide insight on the curricular, school-systemic, and sociological differences and challenges that are encountered, and how to help resolve them. It will help administrators, institutions, and immigration and comparative education scholars understand the cross-cultural challenges and coping strategies that define the private and professional lives of foreign-born professors across the globe.

This book illustrates how the experiential histories of teachers shape and inform the knowledge of teachers as professionals. Situating personal experiences into the context of social, political, and economic events gives clarity to the intercultural dynamics of being Chinese and Western. What can we learn from each other to transform our teaching and learning? The book engages in a cross-cultural perspective that is highly relevant for teachers, teacher education, curriculum making and policy planning for a global community. The book is also an invitation to internationalize the classroom for teaching and learning in a diverse and global world, and to educators and policy makers to expand our understanding of cross-cultural complexities for an increasingly diversified and global community. By viewing the classroom through the multiple lens of different cultures, educators have an opportunity to cross over to see, experience, and understand how others live.

This multidisciplinary collection examines the connections between education, migration and translation across school and higher education sectors, and a broad range of socio-geographical contexts. Organised around the themes of knowledge, language, mobility, and practice, it brings together studies from around the world to offer a timely critique of existing practices that privilege some ways of knowing and communicating over others. With attention to issues of internationalisation, forced migration, minorities and indigenous education, this volume asks how the dominance of English in education might be challenged, how educational contexts that privilege bi- and multi-lingualism might be re-imagined, what we might learn from existing educational practices that privilege minority or indigenous languages, and how we might exercise ‘linguistic hospitality’ in a world marked by high levels of forced migration and educational mobility. As such, it will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in education, migration and intercultural communication.

The authors of this book - teachers of foundation courses to pre-service and in-service teachers in Canada, Israel, and the United States - use culturally heterogeneous settings as points of departure for inquiry and cross-cultural encounters of difference, and illuminate how, among people of differing ethnic, religious, socio-economic, political, ideological, and gendered backgrounds, the telling of experiential stories can shift personally and culturally polarized positions. Key in the work documented here is the encouragement of narrative rather than argumentative modes of expression: the instructors found inquiry more likely to stay alive when they were able to access and incorporate both the mutual interest of and the personal tensions between their students. The book illustrates how personal dynamics can subtly move individual inquiry forward, and help alleviate animosity and polarization.

This edited volume brings together the voices of different academics to illuminate the role of culture in determining the character and quality of the social and professional lives of mobile academics. The book examines specific issues on cultural diversity and the management of the heterogeneous classroom and diverse teaching/learning contexts. Teaching, learning, and research are processes carried out in situated contexts and within constructed, inherited, and negotiated cultural milieu, contexts that invariably affect the performance of the immigrant academics in their new homes and host academic institutions. The chapters in this volume provide analyses, reflections, and synthesis of intercultural and cross-cultural experiences. They include how migrant and expatriate scholars or students negotiate their cultural identities in new environments, how they engage with issues of differences in language accents, and how they navigate issues of minority versus majority status. They look at how immigrant scholars modulate their natal cultures in their new homes, how they work and rework their pedagogical beliefs and practices to suit the new and diverse classroom situations, and how native academics and the larger members of the receiving societies encompass the new challenges and opportunities of their now diverse society in a framework that they can understand. As the educational landscape goes increasingly global by the minute, studies such as these that deliver much insight on how migrant, immigrant, and expatriate academics, in their interaction with their hosts and with other immigrants, negotiate and resolve various psychosocial and socioeconomic challenges and dissonances, provide valuable and much-needed perspectives. This unique book provides an important discourse on the mobility across the boundaries of cultures and their primary subject of examination--to which the concepts of culture, change, and mobility are applied--is the mobile or sojourning academic (as students, teachers, and researchers). This is an important book for those in cross-cultural studies and education.

This book analyzes equity and diversity in schools and teacher education. Within this broad and necessary context, the book raises some critical issues not previously explored in many multicultural and urban education texts.