Voices of Foreign-Born African American Teacher Educators in the United States (Education in a Competitive & Globalizing World Series) (The Silenced Voices in Eduation)

This is a book that exposes silenced and invisible voices in Colleges/Schools of Education. These voices of African immigrants are seldom heard in serious educational quarters since most foreign-born teacher educators try their very best to play by the rules as immigrant minorities. However, they find themselves between cultural continuity and cultural discontinuity. They are pressured to do well by their families in their native countries; but these pressures force them to forget home and think about survival strategies in their new found home. Very often, they do well and at tremendous costs! Additionally, they are expected to be happy and endure all kinds of mistreatments with a smile because they seem to have fewer survival options. On the one hand, they are generally treated as Blacks; and as Blacks, they encounter racist behaviours. On the other hand, they are treated as invisible, primitive, and inferior Blacks who have nothing to share and who are supposed to be seen and not heard. As a consequence, they endure discrimination from both native born African Americans and Whites in America. Interestingly, when they are confident, they are labelled as arrogant, troublemaker, foreigner, chauvinistic, and so on. When they are quiet, they are labelled as incompetent, timid, naïve, unprepared, and so on. The tendency is to forget that they are human-beings with aspirations to do well and contribute to their "new" society, that is, America. The critical question then is, how can they do well or contribute to the advancement of their new society if they are not given opportunities to learn, teach, serve, or grow? About the Author Festus E Obiakor, Ph.D., is Professor, Early Childhood and Special Education, Dewar College of Education and Human Services, Valdosta State University, Valdosta, Georgia. A teacher, scholar, and consultant, he has served as Distinguished Visiting Professor at a variety of universities. He is the author of more than 150 publications, including books, articles, and commentaries; and he has presented papers at many national and international conferences. He serves on the editorial boards of reputable nationally and internationally refereed journals, including Multicultural Learning and Teaching (MLT) in which he serves as Executive Editor. Dr. Obiakor is a leader who has been involved in many landmark scholarly works in the fields of general and special education, with particular focus on African American and other culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) learners and he continues to prescribe multidimensional methods of assessment, teaching, and intervention for these individuals. Based on this premise, Dr. Obiakor created the Comprehensive Support Model (CSM), an intervention model that values the collaborative, consultative, and cooperative energies of students, families, teachers/service providers, communities, and government agencies.