Crossing the frontiers. Peer coaching and self-managing in the process of the professional development in multicultural environment

Abstract

Our effort focuses on the development of a process of cross-cultural peer coaching through which we have sought to grow as reflective practitioners and strengthen authentic conversations between two individuals, from Poland and the United States. By building a theoretical framework around peer coaching, intercultural interaction, and auto-ethnography we have worked to make explicit our development as educators working to enrich the process of the organizational learning and to make education more open, democratic and human. As Kottler [1997] claims, it is possible to find stages that a tourist goes through during the process of recognizing and knowing another culture that was used to mirror the sensation of the professional growth. The findings shed light on how peer coaching might be strengthened, as well as the development of an observation protocol to structure such reflective and, ultimately, life changing work.