This book systematically investigates intercultural experiences of Polish managers and specialists delegated by their multinational company (MNC) on an international assignment to China. The book employs narrative inquiry to explore language, intercultural communication, collaboration, learning, and expatriate adjustment in the MNC. This approach offers new insights into intercultural experiences, communication, and cultural challenges faced by an under-researched group of professionals exposed to intensive collaborations with the local managers and employees. The findings also illustrate how the expatriates learned to better navigate the multicultural and multilingual business context and what factors facilitated and inhibited their learning and adjustment. Encouraging the qualitative, context-sensitive examination of expatriate-local personnel interactions, the book will be an invaluable source for scholars and practitioners interested in, among others, novel approaches to investigating language and intercultural communication in international business, cross-cultural management, qualitative cross-cultural research, as well as for lecturers and students interested in Central Europe and China.

This book examines the identity formation and negotiation of Chinese doctoral students in the UK, and the opportunity for self-transformation this experience offers. As the largest group of international students in the English-speaking world, Mainland Chinese students encounter a range of difficulties and prospects that may be relevant to the wider international student community. Using extensive qualitative and empirical data, the author explores the narratives of eleven Chinese doctoral students at two British universities through a sociological perspective. Balancing analysis with solid theoretical framework and the voices of the students themselves, the author moves away from essentialism and ‘othering’, instead shining a light on the effects of globalisation, internationalisation and recent policy strategies. This volume will be of interest and value to students and scholars of comparative and international education, identity formation, intercultural communication, the sociology of education and study abroad.

This edited volume explores the educational significance of intercultural experience. It offers a broader conception of interculturality than commonly found in the area of foreign language teaching. Contributors represent a diverse range of academic and professional interests. The aim of the book is to encourage dialogue and interchange across this range, and beyond, to stimulate thinking about the educational value of intercultural experience.

It has become increasingly critical for both novice and experienced educators to bring to their diverse classrooms a set of dispositions, skills, and experiences that will enhance learning for all students, especially pupils from diverse cultural and language backgrounds. Intercultural teaching experiences offer opportunities for teachers and student teachers to learn about cultures and cultures of schooling via first?hand interactions. In this way, intercultural teaching enables educators to intertwine the personal, political, cultural, social, theoretical, and practical as a means of making important changes in school and classroom life. A Reader on Narrative and Critical Lenses of Intercultural Teaching and Learning offers readers a set of chapters that highlights the work of researchers, educators, and teacher educators that displays new possibilities for ongoing teacher development and positive social and educational changes. This book engages in critical and narrative exploration of intercultural teaching, intercultural competence, and the relationship between the work of educators in different countries and teaching for diversity. This text also accounts for international, intra?cultural, and intercultural teaching beyond early field experiences and student teaching programs by including the viewpoints of educators with these experiences. Significantly, this book enhances the current dialogue on intercultural teaching and on intercultural competence with first?hand narrative accounts of life, teaching, and research in intercultural professional settings in order to bring to light intricate understandings of this form of educator professional development. In addition, this text critically unpacks aspects of intercultural teacher development and programs supporting such endeavors as they explicitly enhance educators’ capacities for personal, passionate, and participatory teaching and inquiry.

Offers qualitative studies of collaboration processes conducted in globalising companies based in Denmark and with subsidiaries in Asia. It addresses the specific contexts of collaboration and studies how people with different cultural backgrounds work together, both face-to-face and in the virtual workplace.

Autoethnography: Process, Product, and Possibility for Critical Social Research by Sherick A. Hughes and Julie L. Pennington provides a short introduction to the methodological tools and concepts of autoethnography, combining theoretical approaches with practical “how to” information. Written for social science students, teachers, teacher educators, and educational researchers, the text shows readers how autoethnographers collect, analyze, and report data. With its grounding in critical social theory and inclusion of innovative methods, this practical resource will move the field of autoethnography forward.

This book comprises an examination of novice teachers’ experiences in schools and cultures of schooling across the contexts of Hong Kong, Japan, and Canada. Drawing on narrative inquiry and arts-based approaches, this study employs experience as a starting point for making sense of both professional and personal encounters in local and foreign settings. This work thus sheds light on how people make sense of shifting landscapes in an era of increasing intercultural communication and interaction while addressing important curricular implications of intercultural professional development for equity and social justice.

Institutions of higher education are keen to improve teachers’ intercultural experiences, communication, and understanding, but offer few resources for bringing the research literature to direct application in teacher education programs. This volume addresses that gap by examining what intercultural exchanges in teacher education look like, why they are important, and how they can be maintained. The authors examine how socio-cultural beliefs, institutional structures, and external accreditation bodies interact in the process of interculturalization, highlighting the incentives and barriers as well as strategies to implement and maintain interculturalization projects. Highlighting pragmatic examples, this book addresses the challenges and benefits of interculturalization that can be applied to teacher education programs from both a theoretical and practitioner perspective.

This book provides understandings of how intercultural, -racial, -ethnic, -national, and -faith couples and parents in Australia bring up their children and manage their relationships. Which challenges and benefits do they encounter, and which strategies do they use to negotiate their differences and belongingness? In portraying the lived experiences of intercultural couples and parents, Bhugun considers contextual and external factors such as individual and personality traits, the environment, gender and power, religion, socio-economic status, extended family, friends, and diasporic communities. Moving the reader from beyond negative stereotypes to a more nuanced representation of both the challenges and benefits of the phenomenon, Intercultural Parenting and Relationships provides intimate testimonies and offers innovations in theory and practice. Scholars, practitioners, students, intercultural couples, parents, families and the wider community will benefit from the rich insights into the challenges and successes of intercultural relationships and parenting presented in this book.

Traditionally, the fault lines in biblical theology run between the understanding of whether the field is a purely descriptive endeavor, produces a normative theology, or tries to achieve both. However, is this the only grid we should use to approach biblical theology? Should practicing it not rather foremost result in a transformative experience that encompasses and integrates both Testaments? Two Testaments, One Story explores the foundation for a transformative panbiblical theology that empowers believers to live a consistent and compelling life as Christ-followers and global Christians in a pluralistic world. Join the author in this journey, from the preparation work at the drawing board through the extensive study of scripture to constructing the biblical story world’s literary and theological framework. Central to this quest are the concepts of cultural memory and remembrance culture and identifying the Bible’s critical root stories. Their workup establishes the road to unlocking scripture’s story world. Discover the path to a transformative panbiblical theology in Two Testaments, One Story.