Taking It with You: Teacher Education and the Baggage of Cultural Dialogue

This case study contributes to counterpoints made to world culture theory and underscores that at the micro, classroom-level, rural Chinese teachers in a reform-oriented professional development course, and reform-oriented U.S. teacher trainers, understand educational reform, and the realities of education in these two cultures, very differently. This study examines interviews conducted with U.S. teachers of English who taught the Oral English Training Course (OETC), a professional development course for rural Chinese teachers of English in Jiangxi province from 2007 to 2013. These teachers reveal how their own understandings and assumptions around teaching and learning shape what and how they teach, and how they evaluate the work of others. This study explains that included in the literal baggage of these foreign teachers teaching in China, is their figurative baggage, which includes their own cultural lens. The thrust of this study lies in uncovering the ideologies, assumptions, and educative constructs of foreign teachers, how these may be perceived by the Chinese teachers that they teach, and how all of this is steeped in the realities in education and the individual experiences of local actors. This study ends with recommendations for collaboration between foreign teachers of English in China, and their students, particularly Chinese teachers of English in China.