“By any measure, immigration is one of the most stressful events individuals can undergo, removing them from their predictable contexts-community ties, jobs, customs, and (often) language. Stripped of many of their significant relationships-extended family members, best friends, neighbors-immigrants are often disoriented and feel a keen sense of loss.” Suárez-Orozco, C., Qin, D. B., & Amthor, R. F. (2008). Relationships and adaptation in school. In M. Sadowski (Ed.), Adolescents at School: Perspectives on Youth, Identity, and Education (2nd Ed,. Pp. 51-74). Cambridge: Harvard Education Press.

Endurance: the most underappreciated trait of immigrants as they arrive and adapt to assimilated life in America. As educators, it is our duty to our students to empathize with their plights and lives so as to effectively tailor education toward their individual learning situations, thus optimizing achievement. With immigrants, in particular, many educators make the mistake of confining students to an assumed norm or stereotype generated from bias; many believe in false binaries, or teaching from/in deficits. This is detrimental to the education of immigrants, for it perpetuates a cycle of the student thinking that they are less than, thus enabling them to achieve to sub-standards.

These students are already adjusting to a new life in a foreign land, a stressful situation, to say the least. As educators, we should put ourselves in their shoes; imagine starting over, with no familiarity or semblance of comfort. “Stripped” is the perfect word to describe this feeling; as educators, we should make these students feel as empowered as ever in such a difficult time. In making false (and, unfortunately common) presumptions that students’ ELL/immigrant/SIFE status is a “disability” or “deficit,” rather than viewing the bilingual status as a privilege or gift (and not taking the extra mile to acknowledge their literacy in another language), we are degrading our students and adding stress onto their already burdensome adjustment. By considering the process of conforming to standard American English and life (Americanization) as the end-all be-all, we are destroying our students and their respected cultures; we are pushing them even further out of their already debilitated comfort zones, and contradicting our purpose as educators.