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

an Anglo-Saxon society, rather than foster the dominance of curricula considered to reinforce exclusion, she was expected to have opted for “multicultural” research and teaching interests that focused rather on minorities—subjects, according to conventional understanding of multiculturalism, required to be included in the curricula design in white-dominated North American academia.

Thus, as with Chatterjee, Lee was also confronted with a paradoxical situation where her participation in the culture of North American academia came to clash with her personal subjectivity and self-identity. Her cultural challenges in the classroom as a professor became complicated by the supposition of her colleagues that, though she was a member of a minority group that was discriminated against, Lee’s research interest and specialty was in some way upholding the discreditable patriarchal, ethnocentric, and hegemonic white curricula rather than focusing on “including” minorities and their issues in the new, emergent equitable and multicultural curricula. How she resolved this conundrum is very much connected to her definition of what multicultural—for her, intercultural—education is and should be. It was for her, “working through a dialogue between cultures.” As an intercultural educator, thus, her focus ceased being the number of cultures or the course materials that were added, but rather the learning process that got both student and professor to effectively engage with other cultures within each and any course. Thus, her goal was to teach Western political philosophy from such a perspective rather than renounce her research interests and, thereby, allow violence to be perpetuated on her professional self-identity and integrity. Lee’s solution was to emphasize the “inter-” rather than the “multi-” part in the multicultural exchange as most important to her teaching practice.

The Good Teacher

Another area of immigrant scholars’ acculturation process where classroom tensions are easily generated is in the sphere of attaining the effective, or good-teacher, identity. New immigrant scholars want to quickly establish credibility as good scholars—students, researchers, and