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

chapter 2) suggests that their experience could be explained by any one or combination of three models: the cultural-mosaic model, the melting-pot model, and the culture-shock / culture-adaptation models. The specific make-up of host communities, their peculiarities, their history, and any elements that constitute their cultural identity may rub against similar identity characteristics that immigrants bring with them. Dissonance, loss of symbolic meaning, and the inability to appreciate the different contexts from which actions and ideas of the two sides emanate can cause problems. Attempts by immigrants to adjust to their host community’s mainstream culture, either wholly or partially, may be hampered or furthered by many factors, some of which might have to do with elements on either of the two sides.

The minisociety of the university or college campus, the world of the lab/classroom, and the related intercourses within academic administration and socialization all generate activities and discourses that are specific to academia. It is within the spheres of these activities and discourses that immigrant scholars may experience contestation or negotiation of a new understanding. They are the spheres where student-to-professor and colleague-to-colleague relationships are operational; where differences in pedagogical expertise and expectations between professor, student, and administration manifest; and where the assessment of teaching and learning effectiveness and scholarly achievements, curricular-design preferences, and socialization or adjustment to campus and classroom cultures take place. For the immigrant academic, it is here that cultural balancing palpably impacts how he or she functions.

Differences in Individual Acculturation Experiences

Experiences of cultural dissonance and discrimination differ from place to place. For each immigrant student, researcher, and professor, these experiences are felt differently depending on many factors, including size and preexisting diversity of the educational institution in which the immigrant scholar works. Keogan’s work shows, for example, that spatial concentration of earlier immigrants affects the conditions and experiences of subsequent immigrants (2002, pp. 223–253). Keogan found local residents of the New York area more able to conceive of