This study explores how a group of Dominican teachers build a professional teaching culture of learner-centered pedagogies by working with a U.S.-Dominican education non-profit organization, CREAR. First, this study uncovers the CREAR cultural logics—the knowledge and know how’s characteristic of teaching—that shape CREAR teaching to define learner-centered pedagogies. Second, the study considers how the Dominican teachers’ cultural logics about teaching interact in the process of learning to teach learner-centered pedagogies within CREAR, especially how their experiences prior to CREAR mediate how they make sense of, construct, and accept CREAR’s professional teaching culture. Finally, this study considers how CREAR’s pedagogies for learning to teach rely on both cognitively-rich and practice-based opportunities to learn, which embed teachers in the cultural logics advocated by CREAR. CREAR provides a space for sustained follow up through modeling, mentoring, and monitoring and evaluation. Through these, the teachers in CREAR go through a process of acculturation in their professional development over time, building important relationships that influence the process of learning to teach. This study ends with considerations of implications and recommendations for professional development practitioners and scholars regarding the acculturation process in learning to teach.
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