By Christine Nganga
Dr. Nganga is an Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership at The George Washington University in the U.S. Her teaching and research interests include leadership practice with a social justice and equity focus, narrative inquiry, and mentoring theory and practice.
The article “Tapestries of Epistemologies: Intersectional and Transnational Feminist Understandings of Caribbean and African Women Faculty’s Influence as Researchers,” by Christine Nganga, Kimberly Williams Brown, Makini Beck, and Joyanne De Four-Babb, is in the current issue of The Educational Forum, and is available free through the month of November.
How Did We Get Here?
The stories of the U.S immigration journeys of women educators are diverse, complex, and intersectional. While working on our article in the Educational Forum, we shared stories of what led us to becoming educators. Although we had shared many experiences about our heritage as friends and colleagues in the past, this opportunity allowed us to journal and our complex experiences as we became teachers and researchers in a variety of global contexts such as Kenya, Trinidad, Jamaica, and the U.S. We hope that sharing our stories below will invite others to reflect on their own experiences of becoming educators as well as the often complex narratives our students bring to the classroom.
Coming to the U.S.
Each of us shared our narratives of how we came to the U.S. For example, Makini remembered the staggered segments of her family’s journey of coming to the U.S. through the stories that her family had shared with her. Her great grandmother arrived in the 1960s from Jamaica. Her grandmother attempted to do the same, visiting the American embassy in Kingston with her five children. The children were granted visas, but her grandmother’s visa was denied for over 10 years. Her grandfather arrived in the 1970s, accompanied by Makini’s mother and her siblings.
Somewhat differently, Christine, Kim, and Joyanne came to the U.S. for academic and professional pursuits as adults. Christine recalled taking her two suitcases with her to attend graduate school in North Carolina, leaving her family behind in Kenya. Similarly, Joyanne first came to the U.S. for her graduate studies and has subsequently lived and worked in multiple countries since completing her graduate education in the U.S. and New Zealand. Kim remembered being an international student after joining the university for her undergraduate studies.
Our journeys had some differences, but we had similar stories to share about the excitement and hopes we had, as well as what we referred to as the psychological terror of being an immigrant, in spite of being legal. Sharing these stories reminded us that, as educators and teachers, we need to always be cognizant of the complex experiences our students bring to the classroom.
Memories of How We Got Into Teaching
We also explored how we came to teaching. Makini’s passion for teaching began while she was very young, and her dolls and teddy bears were her students in her family’s apartment. During our conversations she mentioned how she always wanted to be a teacher. She talked about her desire to connect to other human beings to share knowledge and engage with others on their journey.
Joyanne also envisioned teaching from a young age and had no desire to enter another career. Her parents were both teachers:
From the age of six, I always knew that I wanted to teach and be involved at university. My parents were both primary school teachers. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, my dad completed his first degree in evening classes at the newly established University of the West Indies in St. Augustine, Trinidad. He then went on to teach at a secondary school.
Christine wrote about how her grandmother’s lessons still inform her teaching. For instance, her grandmother’s style of storytelling still plays a prominent role in her teaching and learning when creating lesson plans. She often asks, “How do my learning objectives intersect with my students’ lived experiences?” Her grandmother taught her to think of lived experiences as lessons to be learned.
Finally, Kim did not start teaching until she joined a higher educational institution after her PhD. She described how she learned to facilitate intercultural dialogues as she worked in multicultural affairs and the residence-life office, as a university administrator and later as a faculty member. Her passion for teaching was sparked by her experiences as an undergraduate, when she realized that she wanted to learn as much as she could about immigrants, specifically Afro Caribbean teachers in U.S. schools. Sharing these experiences was meaningful as we reflected on what inspired us to become educators.
Weaving Our Tapestries as Researchers
Finding similarities across our experiences as immigrant/immigrant descendant, African, and Afro-Caribbean educators has helped us to construct a mostly virtual collaborative research community, in which we work together on a variety of ongoing research projects. Although we are located in different places geographically, this virtual space is nurturing and helps us to maintain our lives as academics outside of our institutions. Our gatherings as a community mutually support our personal and professional lives, which is much needed for many academics. We hope our article will inspire others to create similar types of communities where educators can bring their whole selves.