Immigrant Academics and Cultural Challenges in a Global Environme ...

professors. Proving their effectiveness as scholars, however, involves a process that includes the affirmation or disconfirmation by students, colleagues, and college/university promotion committees. Given the mediation of the process by other peoples—students, members of committees, and colleagues—an alignment or symphony of ideas around what the good teacher is could pose a problem for the immigrant. Though standards and expectations to establish or disavow the good-teacher identity are often officially stated in writing, underlining values and norms for the decision actually vary from culture to culture.

Malin (1994, pp. 94–114) carried out a study comparing and documenting the perception of “good” teaching using panels from three culture groups who were given videotapes of three teachers from the three cultural groups to evaluate. Malin’s analysis identified profound differences across cultures in the perception of good teaching. The standards and values associated with the good teacher were different for the different culture groups. The same characteristic was judged in opposite ways by the different panels, and generally, “[e]ach cultural group preferred the teacher of their own background and, for the most part, the panels’ corporate perceptions and judgments differed consistently along cultural lines” (Malin, 1994, p. 94). Thus, the nonauthoritarian quality of the Aboriginal teacher, which all panels noticed, was commended by the Aboriginal panel as evidence of good teaching but considered to be a problem by the Anglo panel since, for the latter panel, it meant that she lacked “mass control” (p. 97) and was, therefore, weak. Similarly, characteristics like task orientedness or lack of eye contact which they all noticed for the same teachers became characteristics valued and evaluated differently by the panels along cultural lines (Malin, 1994, p. 97). It is, therefore, clear that immigrant teachers from different cultural backgrounds might find it very difficult to function effectively in host academic institutions with different preestablished value systems: value systems that are internalized by host students, by host colleagues, and by those who would evaluate immigrant teachers’ teaching effectiveness. There is an ever-present danger that members of the host institutions, including promotion committees, may actively misjudge an immigrant