Immigrant Academics and Cultural Challenges in a Global Environment
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the accompanying cultural dissonance was tackled. In chapter 6, Anne McCabe, an American-trained professor of English composition in Spain, found out that her American-derived pedagogy was unsuited to educating host Spanish students because of their cultural role expectations. She discovered that Spanish composition textbooks conceive composition differently than she was used to. Similarly in chapter 7, Judith Szerdahelyi, an immigrant professor in the United States, found that her early training in her original home was based on an outmoded philosophical foundation that, in her new home, rendered her incapable of building a new identity as an effective student and an effective teacher. In chapter 8, Anuradha Chatterjee, a female teacher of Indian origin, found teaching in the American classroom doubly culturally challenging. Aware of her minority, female, and “alien” status and suspicious of the character of student responses to her treatment of multicultural texts on Others, she wondered whether her ethnicity and self-identity contributed to why her students resisted her authority and seemed to question her authenticity as an ethnic teacher. More than this, she found her efforts to deal effectively with student resistance to her authority and to modulate and negotiate her identity by applying critical pedagogy and postcolonial theory—both repertoires of her American training—to be counterproductive.

Chapters 9 and 10 are easily counterposed to each other. Chapter 9, by Todd Cleveland, includes a description of cultural problems involved in face-to-face interaction by people sporting different norms and expectations. Cleveland then describes the consequent cost in time, effort, emotion, and efficiency that are exacted in the process of getting a job done with the myriad reasons for the misunderstanding of motives, movements, speech, and action. Chapter 10, by Joseph Gelfer, eulogizes the rise of the Internet and cyber workspace and argues for its authenti-cation as a viable conferrer of professional and self-identity—just as physical space is. Gelfer would rather that identity be tied to action than to physical spaces, and according to Gelfer, a lot of work obviously gets done—and, arguably, a lot of life gets lived—in the Internet virtual workspace. Gelfer conceives of the Internet as being more than a communications