Abstract
International high school science teachers are crossing international and cultural borders to teach, raising important issues in education. In this article, we describe the cross-cultural assessment challenges that four international science teachers encountered when they migrated to teach in the United States. These included differences in grade expectations for a given quality of work, the weight given to final examinations, the assessment process, and cutoff scores for letter grades. To become proficient in their new teaching contexts, the participating teachers had to modify (or hybridize) their assessment philosophies and practices in order to conform to the expectations of their new schools. This hybridization process ushered them into what is proposed as the Pedagogical imaginary; a transitional space between the ``purity'' of their native educational conventions and that of their American schools. The implications of these findings are discussed in hopes of improving high school science teaching experiences for international science teachers.
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Deborah J. Tippins is a Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Science Education at the University of Georgia. She served as a Fulbright Scholar in the Philippines where she continues to explore notions of community-based science education. Her research interests include culturally relevant pedagogy, case-based science teaching and learning and post-structuralist feminist pedagogy and research. She is intensively involved in professional development of PreK-8 science teachers. In her spare time she likes to play tennis, travel and take her dog for long walks.
Lorie Hammond is an Associate Professor in the Department of Teacher Education at California State University at Sacramento. Her work centers on community-based multicultural science education. For the past 10 years she has been leading action research projects centered in school-community gardens in diverse urban schools which serve as food security, oral history, science education, and service learning sites involving children, parents, teachers, and pre-service teachers. Lorie just co-edited a book, Innovations in educational ethnography: Theory, methods and results (2006), with George Spindler, and is finishing a book on how teachers can teach and learn with immigrant communities. She has recently been engaged in ethnographic and international research with immigrant women, developing relational and equalizing models of teaching and learning in immigrant communities.
Charles B. Hutchison is an Assistant Professor at The University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is the author of the book, Teaching in America: A cross-cultural guide for international teachers and their employers, and the upcoming book, Teaching diverse and urban learners: Research, best practices, and lesson planning. He is the recipient of Recognition and Key to the City of Boston, and has appeared on, or been featured by local and international news media. He was recently invited to participate in the Oxford Round Table at Oxford University, England. He teaches and provides professional development in science education, cross-cultural and urban education, and instructional strategies for diverse learners.
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Tippins, D.J., Hammond, L. & Hutchison, C.B. International teachers negotiating 21st century science classrooms: a question of hybridized identities and pedagogical imaginaries. Cult.Scie.Edu. 1, 681–692 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11422-006-9029-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11422-006-9029-6