Transnational Teacher Migration and the Reconfiguration of Identities: Turkish Muslim Women Teachers in the U.S

• In Event: Negotiating Belonging Across Borders: Education, Migration, and Identity Formation

Proposal

Introduction
In the current U.S. climate—marked by intensified anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim discourses—migrant teachers, especially visibly Muslim women, navigate sensitive conditions that shape their professional pathways and daily experiences. Teacher migration is often framed in economic or policy terms, but such framings obscure the gendered, moral, and affective labor embedded in cross-border movements.
This paper examines how Turkish Muslim migrant women teachers in the U.S. sustain and transform their professional identities within unfamiliar educational and sociocultural contexts. It highlights how gender, religion, and migration intersect in reimagining teaching not only as employment, but also as a source of dignity, social belonging, and moral agency.
Drawing on 10 life history interviews, the study explores how experienced teachers negotiate the paradox of being pedagogical experts while treated as novices in the U.S. Their professional commitment is preserved yet rearticulated through shifting gender roles, limited institutional recognition, and cultural unfamiliarity. Teaching emerges as both an anchor for identity continuity and a site of social repositioning.
This work contributes to scholarship on transnational teacher subjectivities by conceptualizing teaching as a moral and affective project entangled with dynamics of migration, religion, and womanhood.
Conceptual Framework
The study builds on four strands of scholarship:
Transnational Teacher Migration. Much literature focuses on shortages and credentialing (Bense, 2016), overlooking teachers’ subjective experiences. Migrant educators bring cultural and moral frameworks not always legible in host contexts, making teaching both a continuation and redefinition of self.


Gendered Labor. Teaching’s feminization has historically tied it to caregiving and moral stewardship (Acker, 1995; Grumet, 1988), simultaneously enabling entry and limiting recognition. Migrant women rework this positioning: for some, teaching offers autonomy; for others, it reinforces gendered expectations.


Pious Agency. Following Mahmood (2005), the study shows how religious subjectivities shape teaching as a moral and spiritual practice. For many participants, teaching is service to others and a site of faith-based action, challenging secular assumptions about motivation.


Gender Queuing Theory. Migrant teachers often rank low in U.S. labor markets due to credentials or language but remain drawn to teaching, producing mismatches that create limited but significant entry points.


Together, these frameworks illuminate how migration reshapes gendered, religious, and professional identities.
Methodology
The study draws on 10 life history interviews with Turkish Muslim migrant women teachers in the U.S., varying in age, teaching level, and migration pathway. Some arrived within five years, others over a decade ago, with experience ranging from preschool to high school.
Interviews, conducted in Turkish via video call, covered early schooling, entry into teaching, migration, professional re-engagement, and evolving identities. Each session lasted 60–90 minutes.
Data were transcribed and thematically coded through open and focused coding, supported by memo writing and MaxQDA. Analysis centered on professional recognition, gendered labor, and moral framings of teaching. As a Turkish Muslim woman researcher, I balanced cultural familiarity with reflexive distance. All identifying details were anonymized.

Findings
1. Expertise and Novicehood
Despite years of experience, participants felt like beginners in the U.S., facing credentialing hurdles and cultural differences that rendered prior expertise partially illegible. One teacher described the disorienting shift from leading classrooms to observing silently from the back. Yet migration also fostered hybrid practices, blending Turkish relational care with U.S. student-centered methods. As one noted: “I became a better teacher by unlearning and relearning.”
2. Teaching as Gendered Labor and Belonging
Teaching was more than a job; it offered dignity, public visibility, and contribution to society. Yet migration intensified domestic burdens, leaving women with “double work.” Many balanced professional demands with sole responsibility for childrearing and household labor, finding teaching both empowering and exhausting.
3. Teaching as Spiritual and Moral Practice
Several framed teaching as a spiritual duty. One participant explained: “Teaching is not just a job for me. It brings me closer to Allah.” Another chose to remain in a high-poverty school, saying: “If I also leave, what will happen? Someone has to stay.” For these teachers, migration reconfigured professional labor into moral striving and service.
Discussion
These narratives challenge accounts of teacher migration that focus narrowly on credential mismatch or labor substitution. Turkish Muslim migrant women emerge as active agents of professional and moral reconstruction, treating teaching as a transnational practice linking self, society, and the sacred.
Professional expertise is not limited to formal qualifications but includes navigating across cultural, moral, and affective domains. Their stories complicate linear models of professional adaptation, showing how migration generates hybrid, rearticulated forms of commitment.
This study also underscores the significance of religious subjectivities and moral motivations in shaping teacher identity, expanding the analytic vocabulary of migration and education research.
Conclusion
For Turkish Muslim migrant women, teaching in the U.S. is not simply a regained job but a reimagined practice. Migration unsettles yet reshapes their professional identities, rendering teaching a source of continuity, legitimacy, and aspiration.
By situating their experiences at the intersection of gender, religion, and migration, this study advances more nuanced understandings of teacher subjectivities. It contributes to Global Migration SIG debates by showing that teacher migration entails not only credential flows but also moral, affective, and identity negotiations across borders.

Author

• Esra Bozkurt, University of California, Santa Cruz