ABSTRACT
The further a student’s home culture is from that of the school culture or the further the individual student is from the school culture’s conception of the ideal student, the more difficult their school experience may be. The way we, as educators, deal with the divergence of home and school culture is often dependent on how we conceptualize the problem. Cultural border-crossing is a metaphor for transitioning between different cultural spaces. This metaphor can be used to facilitate the development of teachers’ understanding of students’ experiences transitioning from home to school and back. This chapter focuses on how the border-crossing strategies of four high school physics teachers – enculturation, acculturation, and assimilation – affected how they helped their own students to do the same. The chapter ends with reflections on how these approaches affect marginalized students and how teacher educators can help teachers to develop effective and inclusive approaches to science.
