Encountering others: A review of teacher professional learning in cross-cultural settings

• In Event: Working within differences: boundary and boundary practices in Chinese schools

Proposal

The wave of globalization gives rise to the internationalization of education. In response to the current complexities and challenges of internationalization, teachers as crucial stakeholders are required to transform teaching and learning in school education and prepare students with a reflective and deep understanding of global dynamics. Teacher education programs across the world have developed a wide range of initiatives infused with global content knowledge and perspectives for both pre-service and in-service teachers (Malewski & Phillion, 2009; Rodriguez, 2011). Amongst them, engaging teachers in international learning exchanges, which exposes teachers to learning experiences in unfamiliar cultural settings, mostly beyond the culture of their home country, is believed as an effective strategy to develop teachers’ cross-cultural understandings and experience of other cultures (Hepple et al., 2017; Klatt et al., 2020; Wilson, 1982).

Although many scholars have applauded such endeavors to involve teachers in international and foreign contexts, the onto-epistemological differences across cultures in teachers’ cross-cultural learning experiences had not been carefully examined in previous studies. To address this gap, this review offers a critical analysis of the idea and practice of teachers’ cross-cultural learning for its assumptions, contexts, and nuances from the decolonial perspective, in order to broaden the discourse on cross-cultural learning and extend the understanding of the challenges and outcomes of teachers’ intercultural exchanges. A decolonial lens decenters the global North in knowledge production, provincializing the universalist onto-epistemology that underpins official knowledge, and reconstructs a non-hierarchical space for diverse onto-epistemologies that have long been marginalized (Chen, 2010; Mignolo, 2011; Authors, 2020). To achieve this goal, the review specifically analyzes the conceptualizations of cross-cultural professional learning, the modes and processes of learning programs, the effects on the intercultural understanding and professional practice of participating teachers, and the challenges to initiating in-depth cross-cultural learning.

By searching the electronic databases of the Web of Science and Education Resources Information Center (ERIC), we identified 65 peer-reviewed articles for analysis. Preliminary analysis illustrates that cross-cultural learning has different connotations in different contexts. Concepts such as intercultural/cross-cultural/cultural competence and global awareness were used interchangeably to describe learning experiences derived from engaging with foreign cultures. When involved in intercultural experiences, despite their varying forms, teachers mainly learn about the culture or the approach to teaching and learning in the host countries without attending to different educational system philosophies. However, teaching is a cultural activity (Stigler & Hiebert, 1999), which is deeply immersed in its social and cultural context. Short-term participation (for most programs) alone is not sufficient for teachers to learn from the cultural others and/or recontextualized their learning experiences in the local contexts. We argue that effective and sustained teacher professional learning in cross-cultural settings is premised upon teachers’ critical awareness of and in-depth reflections on the onto-epistemological underpinnings of their own views and the views of the cultural others (Jin et al., 2020; Lai et al., 2016; Klevin, 2020; Marx & Moss, 2011). The study has implications for opening up new conceptual possibilities leading to onto-epistemological alterity.

Authors

• Licui Chen, Zhejiang University

• Yun You, East China Normal University

• Siyuan Yu, Department of Education，East China Normal University