Cross-cultural experiences of Chinese immigrant mothers in Canada, challenges and opportunities for schooling

This excellent book results from a creative endeavour of reciprocal learning between Chinese and Canadian schools, which allowed teacher education students, teachers, principals, and educational researchers to spend time in each other’s schools and colleges. The book’s author, Xiaohong Chi, was a graduate research assistant at the University of Toronto, Canada, which facilitated several aspects of the link. This book is based on her dissertation study, which focused on Chinese immigrant families in Canada, specifically mothers’ perspectives. They enrolled their children in schools with a learning regime and culture vastly different from their own. The book contains seven chapters that provide more detailed explanations of intercultural education. The author studies Chinese cultural traditions from Liang Shuming and Lin Yutang in the East, to Benedict Anderson and Pierre Bourdieu in the West. The book is framed in the author’s own experience as an international student in Canada. She compares Canadian schools and societies to Chinese ones to better understand them. A new culture and system forced her to reassess certain long-held beliefs. Readers can learn about Chinese immigrant students’ families from the research questions she presents in Chapter 1. Chapter 2 dives into the research’s theoretical underpinnings. The comparison between Chinese and Western cultures helps explain and understand Chinese immigrants’ cross-cultural experiences in this chapter. The author looks at research on Chinese immigrant parents’ educational experiences in North America. Some of this research looks at family expectations and student achievement, while other research examines parent-teacher connections. Border pedagogy was one of the most effective techniques for developing school-family ties. In addition, how her research subjects view Canadian schools is discussed.