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

environment. While appreciating some aspects of the “foundationalist” root of her education, she came to reposition herself to accept the classroom culture that decentered her own authority, freed her from the stressful posturing as the “expert” teacher, and gave students responsibility over their own learning. The acquisition of the required skills to be an effective facilitator rather than an authoritarian teacher is not necessarily brought along by this or any other immigrant professor (or student). Hence, until such skills are acquired, the immigrant professor or student faces the danger of operating as a less competent or less efficient professional academic. Many international students and immigrant professors from Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and South America, countries where the educational systems are teacher centered, have experiences similar to Szerdahelyi’s.

The complexity of the cultural problems revolving around the identity of the immigrant professor as a minority Other might assume further complex dimensions as demonstrated by Chatterjee in chapter 8 and Theresa Man Ling Lee in chapter 5. Chatterjee’s chapter raises three interrelated challenges that she grappled with as an immigrant professor: crisis of identity, the challenge of her authenticity, and the challenge to her authority. These emerge from the “triple” jeopardy condition of the author being a female professor of an ethnic minority group who, at the same time, taught the literature of other cultures in a predominantly white classroom. Similar to Szerdahelyi’s response, Chatterjee intended to apply a critical pedagogical model (Freirean) to create a learning space that was facilitative of the intercultural understanding of the Other in the texts used by the students.

But Chatterjee soon discovered the extremely tricky nature of the interfaces of those identities for which she would have to develop and deploy appropriate intercultural modulation and negotiation. As a female professor, she found herself in a contradictory position of power and powerlessness, of voice and voicelessness, of the necessity to boldly confront stereotypes demonstrated by students she taught, as well as the necessity to authenticate the voice of the minority Other. Critical pedagogy might have been able to empower her students and entrust them