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social context of the English “cultural” texts he used in his classes did not directly speak to the lives of his Cambodian students. A readjustment was called for—he and others began to use daily life in Cambodia as the context for their teaching activities—to make the right connection with the students.
In chapter 4, Loykie L. Lominé reports the experiences of some immigrant professors who participated in the European Union’s ERASMUS program. The chapter highlights cultural challenges common to immigrant scholars relocating to places where academic culture and rules governing how teaching and learning operate are different. The exchange professors in this program faced the challenges of education administration, teaching styles, and grading and assessment philosophies that were different from those in their own countries or subregions. The cultural context of their new homes rendered useless what were assets and capital in their natal homes, which, in some cases, created an uncertain sense of identity for these immigrants.
In chapter 5, Theresa Man Ling Lee’s experience provides an interesting, if not more complex, cultural-adaptation challenge than chapters 3 and 4 do. Hers was a situation where her self-identity as a minority migrant female professor with specific roots in China, her career choice, her subject of study, and her research interest and expertise came to clash with the prevailing intellectual and cultural climate of the academic society to which she moved. She had to withstand the challenge to her authority as a professor and fight off the expectation that she would embrace the prevailing radical idea of the time that had framed curricular design and pedagogical thinking but that was in conflict with who she was. To give in would have meant the denial of her natal identity, the giving over of her right to choose her career and the sphere of study in which she wanted to specialize, and the negation of most aspects of her identity that were developed within a libratory anti-imperialist cultural context back in her natal home.
The next three chapters explore the cross junction of immigrant professors’ pedagogical practices and culture-filtered divergent expectations between them and their host students and colleagues and how