ABSTRACT
The traditional definition of culture as socially transmitted ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving in accordance with one’s group norms and values evokes a geographically circumscribed understanding of the concept. However, increasing globalization, immigration, and ease of online communications calls for a more decentralized understanding of culture that is not entirely bound by place and space. Immigrating to a foreign land, for example, sets in motion the complex and interactive process of negotiating one’s cultural values and cultural identity to adapt to the new environment. In this chapter, we attempt to understand these negotiations among primarily first-generation Asian-Indian immigrant parents and their adolescents to the United States. We draw upon Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) ecological systems theory and achievement goal theory, a social-cognitive theory of achievement motivation (Ames, 1992; Pintrich, 2000), to examine Asian-Indian Hindu (AIH) 1 adolescents feelings of cultural dissonance between their home and school 2 contexts and their academic motivations in relation to parents’ perceived parenting practices and academic motivations for their offspring.
