Immigration involves living harmoniously in shared spaces, both for immigrants and host country’s citizens. Teachers hold a pivotal role in creating safe learning spaces for immigrant students as well as for local students. Cosmopolitanism (Appiah, 2006) suggests that immigrant and the local people must work together to create safe spaces in classrooms that will contribute to building healthy communities. Also reflecting cosmopolitan views, Hansen (2017) encouraged teachers to be inquisitive about different cultures in order to create safe and welcoming spaces. The experiences that immigrant students bring to classrooms are valuable pedagogical tools that teachers can use to design meaningful instruction. While American teachers are often criticized for being primarily monolingual and monoracial, local American teachers’ efforts to fulfill their obligations to immigrant students are often overlooked. Thus, this study focuses on the teaching practices of a White American teacher who spoke three languages and had lived in Yemen for six years. She presented a profile that promised to address these critiques. As a Muslim student from Türkiye, I obtained my PhD doctoral degree in the United States. Thus, I experienced being treated as an immigrant. Although I recognize that many American teachers are white and monolingual, I encountered a teacher who brought different and more expansive experiences to her teaching. Hence, I conducted an intrinsic case study (Stake, 1995) in order to better understand on Erica’s (pseudonym) teaching practice. I spent one year with Erica and her assistant teacher in her sheltered ESOL classroom. I also visited Erica at church and at various social occasions. I collected two semi-structured interviews, two paired-depth interviews, nine stimulated recall interviews, observational data, and discussion of personal artifacts to build my account of Erica as a teacher. In this paper, I focus on Erica’s discussion of a particular artifact – a framed Arabic image - which invited a rich discussion of religion and stereotyping in the Middle East. Specifically, the frame presented a Bible verse in Arabic, which non-Arabic speakers may have assumed to be a Quranic verse. Our conversation about the artifact revealed how her experiences in Yemen “crystalized” (Roswell & Abrams, 2019) her thinking about education and served as a memoir of her lived experience. Erica underlined that her background as a former immigrant and how it shaped her commitment to teaching immigrant students.

Appiah, K. A. (2006). Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World. Allen Lane. Hansen, D. T. (2017). The teacher and the world: A study of cosmopolitanism as education. Routledge. Rowsell, J. M., & Abrams, S. S. (2019). Immateriality Redux: Tacit Modalities and Meaning across Timescales. In Negotiating Place and Space in Digital Literacies: Research and Practice (pp. 242-259). Stake, R. (1995). Case study research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.