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

For many immigrant professors, questions surrounding students’ learning styles, on the one hand, and the professors’ teaching techniques and methods, on the other, might be the first critical cultural problem they have to deal with at a directly professional level. For Anne McCabe (chapter 6), teaching composition to Spanish students required that she radically review her customary understanding of what composition entails. There was a cultural gap between her students’ understanding and her own understanding of the relevance of her curricula to Spanish students’ real-life situations, as well as between their understanding of how text relates to structure in composition and to the local culture and her understanding of such. The resolution of the cognitive gap produced a response in McCabe that called for further studies, a development that enabled her to enlarge her intercultural interpretation of texts and composition. Combining the widened scope of her consideration of composition and text with the use of discourse analysis, McCabe was able to effect a major transition from cultural (cognitive and behavioral) dissonance to consonance.

Similarly, the new academic setting in which Judith Szerdahelyi (chapter 7) found herself as a professor of English modeled the student-centered democratic classroom: a system completely opposed to that in which she was raised and with which she had taught her students back in her native Hungary. After she started teaching at a U.S. university, Szerdahelyi came to understand herself to be an “authoritarian teacher.” She had to work her way through the rudiments of the social-constructivist approach to education and, in particular, Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy, assimilating its critical insights in the process of the transformation of her identity as a teacher, as well as work on the transformation of her classroom practice in a way that was suitable to her new cultural