The Bridging Cultures project is an ongoing 15 year effort to apply basic research and theory on two major cultural pathways of development to the problem of cross cultural value conflict between Latino immigrant families, the schools,

and U.S. society more generally.  The Bridging Cultures training was based on Greenfield’s theoretical work on independence interdependence as developmental scripts, ethnography in the Latino immigrant community, and subsequent research on cross-cultural value conflict between the Latino immigrants and the schools.

In the Bridging Cultures training, teachers are led to understand the conflict that Latino immigrant families, who arrive in this country with a strong collectivistic or familistic value orientation toward child development or socialization, experience when they meet the individualist orientation of the U.S. in general and of it’s schools in particular period.  In the training, teachers move from understanding this cross-cultural conflict to observing instances of these value conflicts in their own schools.  From there they move to make changes to mitigate the conflict for Latino immigrant children and their parents.  Bridging Cultures has also been extended to interventions with Latino immigrant parents and immigrant adolescents who have experience long term separations from their parents in the course immigration process.