Strangers in the Mirror: Immigrant Students in the Higher Education Classroom

What can immigrant students bring to the higher education classroom? How can instructors facilitate communication between and among immigrants and non-immigrants in the classroom so that all students learn to question taken for granted assumptions about the self and the other? As immigrants ourselves, we have experienced and also witnessed the interactions between immigrants and non-immigrants in classrooms. We have also discussed with other immigrant learners their experiences in United States higher education. Therefore, in writing this article, we draw from our experiences as immigrant learners and teachers of higher education, from lessons learned in tutoring immigrant students, and from the experiences of other immigrants in United States higher education. Our aim is to share some of what we have learned regarding the experiences of foreign-born students in institutions of higher education. The first rule of all good teaching practice is to know the student (Grant & Murray, 1999). In classrooms comprising of adults, knowing the students means more than being aware of their prior knowledge or life circumstances; it means acknowledging that the adult learner is distinctly different from the young learner (Kegan et at., 2001). As a result, program developers and facilitators should consider the characteristics of their adulthood in the teaching and learning process. Not surprisingly, adult education has led the way in higher education pedagogies by being the first to point out that teaching adults cannot be based on the same premises as teaching youth. The assumption that teachers of adults should use a different approach to teaching is based on the widely espoused concept of andragogy, which suggests that adults have a need to know the reason for learning, are self-directed, can set their own goals, and organize their own learning around their present life needs (Knowles, 1989). The assumption, then, is that adults have an individualistic orientation, are self-motivated, and are characterized by self-directedness. Recently, however, several scholars in adult education have been critical of the thrust towards the individualistic approach and have, instead, called for different models that take into consideration the sociocultural contexts of learners' lives (Alfred, 2002; Caffarella & Merriam, 2000; Guy, 2000) and learners' prior socialization to learning (Lee & Sheared, 2002). Those who emphasize the sociocultural approach to adult education have pointed out the absurdity' of assuming that everyone over the age of 25 forms a homogenous entity The same can be said of grouping all immigrants into one category, a concern expressed by some of the immigrant students with whom we talked. Some of them pointed out that instructors, in their eagerness to head off any possible conflict in the classroom, are guilty of glossing over differences within immigrant groups and between immigrants and non-immigrants. They expressed concerns about being rendered invisible through the erasure of difference. Promoting Invisibility by Emphasizing Commonality Several of our immigrant students have expressed that they are 'different' and that such differences needed to be acknowledged rather than suppressed in the classroom. In their view, stressing what all adults have in common or what all immigrants have in common, unconsciously devalues the diverse contexts, struggles, and experiences that immigrants bring with them We quote here from the biographical writing of one of our students from Mexico, who we will refer to as Sarita. She wrote: Why can't we say that yes--we are different? Why be scared of that? I have had very different experiences from my friend who is from Ghana. Our situations were different. We exchanged our ideas of what we believe in and hold dear. That is the way we learn to broaden our views and learn about the world, not by saying but look, we are the same. …