My experience in education has been colorful. My formation as an educator began as a North American transplanted to and growing up in Brazil. I developed a love for soccer, along with a romantic view of family, friendships, and leisure. Now I serve as principal of a PreK–8 school in Colorado. Not a day goes by that I do not recall an experience at the cinder-block public Latin-American classroom of my childhood. I make no claim to refugee status, but I know what it feels like to end up where you didn’t start out.
In the 1990s, a term was coined for the category of people to which I belong: third culture kids (or TCKs). I can relate to many of the descriptions of refugees, particularly the stages of adaptation that they experience. Third culture kids, like refugees, no longer belong to their original group; yet neither can they fully identify as insiders to the group they have joined.
As I write this, in the fall of 2015, the world is facing a refugee crisis brought about by several wars. Rarely have we heard as much about refugees and migrants as we hear at this time. Governments, ordinary citizens, community groups, and churches are searching for an appropriate response. Candidates for public office in several countries are using this crisis as a political football.
In using refugees as a metaphor—teacher refugees—I do not mean in any way to diminish the dire circumstances in which real refugees have found themselves as a result of instability in the Middle East or political, economic, or ecological disasters anywhere else in the world. So I use the word refugee with caution. Having stated that caution, I want to insist that there are people teaching in our schools today who are not there by choice. They teach where they teach because things did not work out somewhere else. In that sense, they are refugees.
Throughout this issue, my colleagues and I have written about the kinds of people we meet on the metaphoric teaching road. Among those people we meet, some are refugees. For any number of reasons, they did not find their way into the profession they desired. Perhaps they floundered in their first post and have never recovered from the bumps. Budgets and family situations sometimes necessitate that someone ends up teaching (or teaching in a certain location) when they never planned to do so. In some cases, refugee teachers may have started out as travelers or adventurers, but some trauma along the way changed their circumstances and changed them. They may have offended an administrator and found themselves in some kind of educational Siberia. In K–12 education, that would be a losing school; in higher education it might mean a work load meant to punish.
Why raise this matter of refugees at all? My colleagues have written about tourists, travelers, adventurers, guides, and pilgrims—all categories that seem more innocent or inviting. Without adding in refugees, that schema could serve to call us to deeper levels of commitment to teaching and also to greater levels of meaning and fulfillment in teaching. That schema, without refugees, could help move us from thinking about a mere job—done with minimal effort—to viewing our work as vocation—something done in a wide, deeply personal, and important frame. Where do teacher refugees fit on such a scale? It appears as a kind of oddball category. But in the world of travelers, one meets refugees. And in the educational world, one meets refugees as well. My job here is to help us all think about them and how we can embrace them as contributing members of our school communities. I am happy to take on this task because I believe it is important. We need to understand refugee teachers and, as colleagues, administrators, and community members, we need to support them so they can find their feet again. The presence of refugee teachers adds a level of depth, complexity, diversity, and nuance to the school family. When healthy communities understand better the stories of refugee educators, they will respond with increased compassion, generosity, and magnanimity.
Refugee teachers are not to be confused with grumpy narcissists. There is an ocean of difference between a burned out, cynical, or entitled worker and a refugee teacher. The former manages to shrivel all budding fruit dry despite having access to perfectly fine soil. The latter works diligently to bear good fruit despite having been forcibly uprooted and transplanted. For the refugee teacher, the classroom is a safe haven; the schoolhouse is a place of relative stability—a new home, a second start, a refuge.
The path of the refugee teacher can feel like an unbreakable, exhausting spiral. It can become self-perpetuating and unbearable without outside support. Painful limitations can impair other dimensions of life, though these adversities are rarely self-inflicted. Systemic injustice, abuse of power, unhealthy relationships, tragedy, and physical need, for instance, can push a teacher onto the refugee’s trail. Refugee teachers depend upon a compassionate community to help them move toward a place of hope, trust, and stability—though this restorative process must not come at the expense of students.
Refugee teachers face a series of paradoxical challenges. They desire to connect and build trusting relationships again, but they may have language barriers and cultural differences to overcome. They desperately desire to put down roots, stabilize, and bear educational fruit, but they depend upon patient, caring, hands-on guidance as they gradually adjust to the new soil. They depend on someone else’s offer of initial support, but do not know whom to trust. They have the potential to bring great strength, perspective, and flavor to a community, but they can bring these gifts only after working through serious culture shock. They can experience paralysis caused by unmet foundational needs that may prevent them from seeing a solution or even articulating their desire for help.
My decision to invest my life in education came as a response to the patience, compassion, and support that teachers showed me at a critical stage in my life. The bumpy transition to North America happened for me at the age of sixteen, though my Brazilian roots were not severed. I will still cry in front of my wife and kids if Brazil loses a World Cup match. But transplanting causes intense growing pains. I said good-bye to the tree fort on nineteen trees that my friends and I had built in the jungle, and awkwardly began to piece together an understanding of my new suburban habitat. The kindness, generosity, safety, and encouragement I received from key teachers at this critical stage in my life, empowered me to move from shock to fruitfulness.
For obvious reasons, real refugees experience social anxiety; after all, their world has been turned upside down. In cases of civil war and the destruction of cities, a refugee’s world may have literally been turned upside down. Again, recognizing the potential dangers of comparing the absolute horrors in some refugees’ stories to the upheavals in some teachers’ lives, I want to note that social anxiety is an inevitable aspect of education. Students wonder where they should sit on the first day of school. Teachers must mentally and emotionally prepare themselves for a difficult conference with a parent. Administrators review and critique the effectiveness of a presentation they have made or a meeting they just led with valued stakeholders.
Refugee teachers are not immune to any of these. For them, however, new layers of social anxiety are piled up on top of the standard amount. Do I belong here? Is this sustainable for my family and me long-term? How can I be fully present in staff discussions about equity when I am still licking my wounds from gross injustices I have experienced myself?
When anxiety goes up, performance goes down. Neuroscientists explain that this is because the amygdala—our brain’s emotional control center—has the ability to override the prefrontal lobe, which commands a person’s executive functioning. In school communities with healthy cultures where staff care for one another, listen to one another’s stories, encourage each other, and affirm the unique contributions of each person, the amygdala enjoys calm and peace. The brain experiences health, and as a result, performance increases.
This exploration of refugee teachers leads me to two conclusions, one for refugee teachers themselves and another for those who supervise them or work alongside them. First, to refugee teachers themselves: I read the story of a migrant family (refugees), members of a persecuted religious minority who fled the chaos that ensued from violent revolution and civil war in their homeland. They suffered under an unimaginably evil dictator, endured famine and lost all their economic prospects. They sold all they had to get to Europe with two young daughters, even making dresses out of two pillowcases, the only wedding presents they had not sold. They succeeded in getting as far as Liverpool, then Montreal, and finally Saskatchewan. This couple was fleeing Stalin’s Russia in 1926. As I write, nearly ninety years later, among their legacies are numbered dozens of people who have contributed to human flourishing: storekeepers, teachers and principals, nurses, fathers, mothers, writers, software developers, mental-health workers, inventors, artists, librarians, mechanics, professors, truck drivers, ministers and missionaries, accountants, program managers, and chaplains. This couple not only survived, they thrived. I want to encourage any of my readers who think of themselves as refugee teachers: God will heal your professional wounds. You will find a community that will embrace you. Among your students and former students—your teaching legacy—will be numbered dozens and perhaps hundreds of people who will contribute to human flourishing. Keep showing up for work. And some day, perhaps someday soon, you will realize that you are no longer a refugee. You will wake up a traveler, a pilgrim, or an adventurer, and some day, you will guide others into this profession.
To the supervisors and colleagues of refugee teachers, I say these things: Let us embrace these people who have been wounded. God has given them gifts to teach. Our schools, our students, and the world all need the benefit of those gifts. We need to provide a safe context so that those wounded among us can find their professional feet again. In the name of Christ, let us do that so that these teachers can flourish and build the professional legacy that God wants for them.
Jason Edwards grew up as a missionary kid in rural Brazil, South America. He taught for five years at an international Christian school in Sao Paulo, Brazil, where his son, Elijah, was born. He currently serves as principal of a PreK–8 school in the Denver area. He also teaches graduate education courses at Colorado Christian University. He loves hiking, playing indoor soccer, and cycling with his family.