‘Teaching is my calling’ | EdSurge News
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As they walk through the colorful hallways of the Children’s Guild School in Prince George’s County, Maryland, teachers and roommates Curt Cruz, Rachelle Evangelista and Richard Sagun exchange greetings and greetings with fellow school staff. school.
However, they did not always feel this warm welcome.
” It was very difficult. We didn’t get much guidance from school at first,” Evangelista recalls.
When the trio of teachers arrived in the United States last August from the Philippines, they say they were initially denied entry to the school that recruited them. There was a mix of papers. At the time, the independent special education day school, which serves students with emotional, autistic, intellectual or multiple disabilities, was severely understaffed and the administrative team did not have the capacity to facilitate the arrival of new arrivals. Unable to prepare, they didn’t know what to expect on the first day.
This experience highlights the challenges that teachers from other countries face when entering the American education system.
“It was a big adjustment,” Sagun recalled.
Sagun comes from a long line of teachers, who inspired him to take up the profession. After teaching for 10 years in the Philippines, he was eager for new experiences and a better salary. He decided to migrate to the United States to teach special education for the first time.
Like many other Filipino teachers, Sagun is well positioned to teach in the United States thanks to his training and fluency in English, influenced by decades of American occupation of the Philippines. The US State Department reports that Filipinos are consistently the largest group of foreign-born teachers arriving in the United States.
For Cruz, becoming a special education teacher was very personal. “I originally wanted to be a teacher for my brother, Miguel,” Cruz explains, explaining that Miguel is deaf and suffers from emotional dysregulation. “I saw his fate. Nobody communicated with him because of the barriers.
Photojournalism and text by Rosem Morton.
Morton is a Filipina visual reporter, registered nurse and journalist safety trainer based in Baltimore. Her documentary work focuses on everyday life amid adversity between gender, health, and race. Morton created this documentary project from photographs and interviews taken in the spring of 2023.
Editing by Rebecca Koenig.
This story is part of an EdSurge series chronicling diverse experiences of educators. These stories are made public with the support of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. EdSurge maintains editorial control over all content. (Read our ethics statement here.) Excluding photography, this work is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
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