Navigating Identity and Consciousness as an "Outsider": Professional Integration at the Intersections of Gender, Nationality, and Critical Scholarship

• In Event: Perpetual Seekers of Understanding: Stories of Immigrant Professors of Education in the United States

Abstract

Purpose. This narrative reflects a 30-year academic journey as an immigrant comprising three phases of my career: a ‘non-immigrant’ international student, an immigrant professor and an immigrant administrator. The goal is to analyze my own persistence at each stage to highlight both struggles and supports that facilitated my success as a female immigrant professor of color.
Conceptual/theoretical framework. Informed by a critical perspective of education (Freire 2018), I intentionally trouble the notion of successful integration as an immigrant professor (Altbach & Yudevich, 2017; Gheorghiu & Stephens, 2016) raising questions about segmented assimilation (Portes & Zhou, 1993) and colonialism (Smith, 2012) within the academy. This analysis seeks also to address the role of immigrant professors in contributing critically to the national discourse on immigration.
Method. Employing “critical bifocality” (Fine, 2018) in presenting this narrative vis-à-vis a broader tapestry of immigrant stories, I underscore that themes in my own story, steeped in comparative privilege, offer opportunities for “re-fractions” – shedding light on parallel, yet different, struggles – particularly those on our southern border - that require our attention.
Insights. Insights emerge along three stages of professional development.
Non-immigrant international student. This period was characterized by homesickness, nagging regret and self-doubt about our decision to migrate, the worry of parenting, the pressure of necessary academic success as a means of survival, and the struggles of a fledgling marriage. As an ‘international TA” I encountered hostility typically accorded ‘foreigners’. We succeeded thanks to mentors and counselors who were globally minded and networks of fellow international students who reminded us that were not alone.
Immigrant professor. As a new Assistant Professor, I encountered administrative hostility almost immediately when the dean refused to sign off on required immigration paperwork to support my Permanent Residency. Numerous male colleagues were alarmingly sexist commenting on my dress, my size, and my rank, while others were taken aback that, as an Assistant Professor, I seemed not to ‘know my place” to “remain quiet until tenured.” Fortunately, I had colleagues and mentors who offered the counterpoint, and successful promotion and tenure taught me that it was my productivity, not my compliance, that mattered. These experiences had a profound effect on me in my role as a professor and as an administrator.
Immigrant Administrator. My experiences as a department chair in the context of the department vs. the executive committee of the college were very different. As an Asian, as an immigrant, as a person of color, and as a female of color, I belonged to categories that represent 30%, 46%, 61% and 38% of my department respectively. In comparison, I was one of three female department chairs (of seven), and the only person of color. Resisting segmented assimilation and leadership as decolonization meant that much like the motif of immigrant integration, successful ‘integration’ of newcomers was understood as an indicator of community support, adaptability and hospitality.
Implications. Our narratives as immigrant professors should be bridges not barriers to better understanding and appreciation of immigrant experiences in the USA.

Author

• Dilys Schoorman, Florida Atlantic University