En Conjunto: The Journey of Belonging
As we take time off (hopefully) to celebrate the 4th of July, our task force was invited to reflect on our gleanings as we have engaged in anti-bias work regarding language and immigration. Reflecting on our experience of living in the United States as immigrants in general, and as ACPE Certified Educators in particular, we acknowledge our desire to belong. The diverse histories of immigrants, which make up the American identity, invite us to engage with our own stories that brought us to this country. Whether we immigrated for education purposes, family unification, religious freedom, or economic opportunities—we understand that our identity as immigrants is an important part of our supervisory practice as ACPE Certified Educators. The certification journey itself is a symbolic migration story, a before, in-between, and hopefully in-beyond.
However, the lived experience of bias against immigrants, the xenophobia that has augmented in our communities in the last few years concerns all of us, and the bias that we encountered due to our foreign-accented English call us to join in the dialogue to make ACPE a truly anti-bias organization. We have found in the CPE process a place where optimally each person is accepted and celebrated for who they are—valued for their history, culture, gender, sexual orientation, language, and religion. This place helped us dismantle the lie that assimilation leads to belonging. Rather our experience calls forth a community where difference is celebrated, accents are an invitation to curiosity and wonder, and heritage is shared and embraced.
As we began our work en conjunto reflecting on the task given to us by the ACPE Anti-Bias Working Group, we soon realized that in order to get to work, we needed first to acknowledge our grief and lament the pain and wounds that we were each carrying around our ACPE journeys, specifically when it came to certification. Soon, a cacophony of voices emerged and in the process, we found a healing community where tears and laughter were shared and suddenly we found community in our loneliness. For instance, our colleague Ki Do Ahn shares: “When I was going through the certification process, I was looking for anyone who can guide me in the perspectives of different culture, system, and languages from my own that I grew up. However, it was hard for me to find somebody. I had to do everything, in the concept of adjusting to the ACPE certification process by myself. It was lonely time for me. When I, first met the group of the Anti-bias task group and hearing stories from them. I felt very much connected in a sense of surviving and feelings of lonely. I felt “We” (marginalized communal self) in otherness.[1] Through the meetings, I was encouraged to share my painful experiences in certification process and I was glad that ACPE is taking this seriously. I hope this is not the beginning and the end of this process. I invite ACPE colleagues to work together in anti-bias, especially in the perspective of language and immigration perspective. I also invite ACPE could be “We” (postcolonial concept of togetherness).”
Our process was also messy as we encountered our own assumptions in real-time and remained open, humble, and vulnerable to do the work of challenging our own biases. For instance, in appreciating the invitation to be part of this group, Yhanco Monet shared: “I found myself in a Zoom call with some colleagues. I knew some colleagues from the Latinx CoP. Yet, there were other two members whom I did not know. As we introduced ourselves by name and where we worked, it was evident one of the two members was from Asia. Yet, the remaining member was an enigma to me. She looked blond, centered, with a perfect English and a fancy British accent. I could not help myself, so I geographically placed her somewhere in the northern hemisphere while I questioned the group for not having someone from Africa. I felt so embarrassed when she corrected me about her national origin. She was from South Africa. Since the start, this became one of the most important/single lessons that I learned as a member of this group. It humbled me to recognize that being an immigrant did not exempt me from stereotyping, and why not, from being wrong about other people’s identities. This single experience became a starting place for me to reflect about language biases present in the ACPE Certification process and CPE supervision. For me, the genesis of this journey consisted in acknowledging my own biases, to be humble and gracious to know that it was okay to make mistakes and being politically incorrect for as long as I wanted to learn. This made it easier for me to find courage and to speak my mind so I could learn and grow as a professional educator and spiritual caregiver.”
Likewise, our colleague Pam Lazor shared: “Participating in the Language and Immigration Task group has been a journey of learning and healing for me. At first, being the only white, native English-speaking member of the group, I felt very cautious and a bit out of place. When one group member made an assumption about my cultural background it was a moment of both humor and connection for me – because we could all relate to having assumptions made about who we are, where we are from, why we are in the US. As we spoke about our experiences in the ACPE certification process, I felt so many other points of connection with my colleagues – such as how all of us had to give up “we” and claim “I” for our theory papers to pass; how we resisted this and felt the moral distress of claiming something for ourselves that we knew we only had because of vast webs of community and others who had gone before us – but in the end had to surrender if we wanted to follow our passion and calling. How, even though English is one of my native languages, I had struggled in similar ways as my colleagues, to understand what was required by certification due to conceptual language and hidden structures that I had never encountered before. Even beyond ACPE, how several of us gave up part of our names when going through the citizenship process, again for pragmatic reasons, and how we still feel loss and regret from this decision. One of the most enlightening discussions we had was about white supremacy’s structure of domination through requiring English proficiency and “competence” – including cultural competence, and how for all of us language is wrapped up in culture. We asked, “what is the official language of ACPE?” What is the official theory, who are the official theorists, of ACPE, and what is the official culture of ACPE?
As we celebrate July 4th and the journey of freedom and belonging in this country, we also celebrate ACPE's commitment to becoming an anti-bias organization that truly models spaces of freedom and belonging for all of us with our unique tapestries of voices, theories, and identities. As we continue doing this messy and necessary work en conjunto, we hope that as, our Language task force, ACPE continues to do the work of recognizing our assumptions and biases made around people’s identities. May we welcome our discomfort to embrace the ‘otherness’ that comes in many forms for each of us, whether through accents, experiences, identities, correct spellings and pronunciations of names, correct pronouns, and any other ways that invite each of us to be culturally humble and a more compassionate human being.
[1] “En Conjunto’ is a term coined by Latinx theologian Jose David Rodriguez and Loida Martell-Otero. See Teologia en Conjunto: A Collaborative Hispanic Protestant Theology. En Conjunto literally, "in conjunction with;' "conjoined to") expresses the conviction of a growing number of Latino theologians that this nexus of influencing contextual factors is not tangential to but rather formative of one's theology. This article was written en conjunto by members of the Language and Immigration Task Group are Ki Do Ahn, Bicri Hernandez, Yhanco Monet Rodrigues, Silvia Tiznado-Smith, Pam Lazor, and Cristina Garcia-Alfonso.
[2] Hee An Choi, A Postcolonial Self: Korean Immigrant Theology and Church (New York: State University of New York Press, 2015), 88–89.