In Focus: Jessica Lander

Jessica Lander photo, REACH, HGSE

By Rosie Hughes

Jessica Lander teaches social studies and civics to immigrant-origin students at Lowell High School in Massachusetts. She is also an author and a journalist, writing op-eds about education policy for outlets including the Boston Globe and her alma mater, the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE). She is currently on sabbatical from her teaching position to research and write her third book, on educating immigrant-origin young people in the United States. In addition, together with former students, she recently launched the national We Are America Project, an initiative to spark new conversations around what it means to be American.

We spoke to her about what led her to this work, how she uses research, and preliminary takeaways from her book project. 

“If we want to do a better job educating immigrant students, who better to ask than those immigrant-origin students who have gone through our schools?”

What led you to become interested in immigrant and refugee education?

I am privileged to have a family that has been able to travel and who took me with them on trips when I was really little. So I grew up learning that the globe is my classroom. Travel has always given me a deep appreciation for different countries, different ideas, different perspectives. I think working with immigrant-origin children has come naturally out of that. I went to work at Lowell High School because I hoped I could be useful. There was a large population of Cambodian children there and I had lived in Cambodia, so I hoped I could help be a bridge for families and for students. And I love learning from my students.

What has it been like to take your classroom learning from HGSE into the field?

My perspective on how to support my students is deeply enriched by what I learned in Professor Sarah Dryden-Peterson’s class, Education in Armed Conflict; about what education looks like in a refugee camp; and about where my students are coming from. I still remember Sarah [Dryden-Peterson] talking about the average amount of time a person spends in a refugee camp. I still use it when I’m advocating and talking to people. When you tell them it’s seventeen years, many people are surprised. They don’t realize how long a refugee lives on average in a camp. I think that perspective has really shaped how I advocate for my students.

Now with my book, I’m trying to help us have a more nuanced understanding of who our immigrant-origin children are, and the different educational approaches needed for different sets of students. A student who has many years of strong formal education needs a very different set of supports than a student who has had little or no formal education. Some of our young people at Lowell are learning how to do school for the first time, how to hold a pencil, how to be in an academic classroom.

Could you talk about how you integrate research into your work?

I am a reporter, so when I write op-eds I’m very much integrating research. My op-eds are grounded in research and also best practices across the country. And then for my book, I am using a mix of more journalistic profiles and portraits of schools and students, but also looking at the research on immigrant education.

Are there any preliminary impressions or findings from your book research that you would be willing to share? 

It’s early on. But one thing that is interesting to me is there’s some really incredible work happening to support immigrant-origin children across the country. But it seems like many of the people I talk with don’t know about the other great work happening. That’s often because this work is all-consuming. And so it is hard to have breathing space to look up and try to connect. And even then, it’s really hard to identify other people doing this work well.

Another thing I’m loving from my work so far has been sitting and learning from some of my former students who I am profiling. It has been powerful and rewarding to hear both about their experiences and stories coming to the country and also about how they perceive school here; about what was important to them and what were the barriers for them. They need to be our teachers. If we want to do a better job educating immigrant students, who better to ask than those immigrant-origin students who have gone through our schools?

Quality EducationSarah Dryden-PetersonInterview, Integration, Equity, Globalization