Blog 2

Phillip Massa

February 5, 2012

Phitsamay Uy

Blog 2

                What became apparent to me while reading “Children of Immigration” was the various reasons individuals move to another country. The authors empathize that not every immigrant travels to a country by choice. In fact there are various pathways that lead immigrants to their new countries. Carola and Marcelo Suarez-Orozco do a magnificent job identifying each of these pathways and explaining their importance to that specific immigrant. The authors specifically talk about what is called a “refugee pathway”. More often than not individuals leave a country for reason of safety, health, war, or a corrupted government. The authors point out that, “the most fundamental difference between an immigrant and an asylum seeker (individuals looking for a safe place to live) is the motivation for migration. Whereas migrants more or less voluntarily choose to move, asylum seekers are by definition involuntary newcomers” (27). Now what needs to be distinctly addresses is how this affects the immigrant children of refugee pathways.

                Unlike immigrants refugees can’t carefully plan their move, there life changes overnight. The quick unplanned move generates tension between family members. Sadly refugee children tend to drop out of school, join gangs, because of a lack of cohesion in their communities, or in certain circumstances contradict expectations and succeed attending college advancing careers. As a teacher I think it’s important that we understand what some children in our multicultural classrooms may be dealing with.

                As an educator I hope to value the cultural differences of my students and be more understanding of their backgrounds. The more we can learn from each other the richer both of our experiences can be. I have to be understanding and most importantly patient. A personal experience from when I was a student came to mind when I was reading this book. When I was a sophomore in high school there was a student who was from Afghanistan. He was in America to escape the war that was raging in his country. As students we thought nothing about him other than he was different. He looked different, acted different, dressed different, and learned differently. Did he even speak English? What distinctly stood out about this experience was how he wasn’t engaged in the classroom. Rarely was he ever involved in classroom discussion, but most importantly it seemed as if our teacher went out of way to make the Afghani student different from us. He was singled out and I never heard him ever speak in class. Looking back on his experience now I can only think that this refugee immigrant wasn’t living under the best circumstances and had little to no one to turn to. In addition he wasn’t embedded into our classroom culture, but was rather pushed away from it. Unfortunately, our differences were expressed more than our similarities.

                Although this experience wasn’t positive it truly stuck with me during my educational career. After reading the section regarding refugee pathways I can’t help but think of the alternative actions that could have been taken to make him feel more comfortable. I will take this experience as a lesson learned however, because a multicultural classroom can’t grow on differences. It can, however, grow from a common goal of education success, and expressed similarities. I want my students to be open and understanding to diverse cultures. This is a tough task, but it starts from identifying the scenarios a culturally different student may come from and building a positive atmosphere around them.