Cultural Resilience in Karen Refugee Parents

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Cultural Studies of Science Education ISSN 1871-1502 Cult Stud of Sci EducDOI 10.1007/s11422-015-9681-9

Keystone characteristics that supportcultural resilience in Karen refugee parents

Susan G. Harper

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ORIGINAL PAPER

Keystone characteristics that support cultural resiliencein Karen refugee parents

Susan G. Harper1

Received: 26 June 2014 / Accepted: 23 May 2015© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

Abstract This participatory action research study used the conceptual framework of

social–ecological resilience to explore how Karen (pronounced Ka·ren) refugee parents re-

construct cultural resilience in resettlement. The funds of knowledge approach helped to

define essential knowledge used by Karen parents within their own community. Framing

this study around the concept of resilience situated it within an emancipatory paradigm:

refugee parents were actors choosing their own cultural identity and making decisions

about what cultural knowledge was important for the science education of their children.

Sustainability science with its capacity to absorb indigenous knowledge as legitimate

scientific knowledge offered a critical platform for reconciling Karen knowledge with

scientific knowledge for science education. Photovoice, participant observation, and semi-

structured interviews were used to create visual and written narrative portraits of Karen

parents. Narrative analysis revealed that Karen parents had constructed a counter-narrative

in Burma and Thailand that enabled them to resist assimilation into the dominant ethnic

culture; by contrast, their narrative of life in resettlement in the U.S. focused on the

potential for self-determination. Keystone characteristics that contributed to cultural resi-

lience were identified to be the community garden and education as a gateway to a

transformed future. Anchored in a cultural tradition of farming, these Karen parents gained

perspective and comfort in continuity and the potential of self-determination rooted in the

land. Therefore, a cross-cultural learning community for Karen elementary school students

that incorporates the Karen language and Karen self-sustaining knowledge of horticulture

would be an appropriate venue for building a climate of reciprocity for science learning.

Keywords Karen refugee · Funds of knowledge · Sustainability science ·

Social–ecological resilience · Cross-cultural learning community

Lead Editor: M. Reiss.

& Susan G. [email protected]

1 Department of Mathematics and Science Education, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA

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RezumatKār ṣụksʹāwicạy bæbmī swn rwm dảnein kār nī ca chı krxb næwkhid khxng khwāmyụdhyùn

khxng rabbniweṣ thāng sạngkhm thīca sảrwcẁā chāwkaherīyng (xxkseīyngKa·rén) phxmæ phūlī phạy xīk khrậng srāng khwāmyụdhyùn thāngwạtʹhnṭhrrm nı kār tậng thìnṭhān hım ngein khxngwiṭhī kār khwām rū thī chwy nı kār kảhnd khwām rū thī sảkhạỵ thī chı doy phū pkkhrxng chāwkaherīyng nı chumchn khxng tạw xeng krxb kār ṣụksʹā khrậng nī rxb næwkhid khxng khwāmyụdhyùn xyū phāynı krabwn thạṣn pldplxy phxmæ phū lī phạy pĕn nạk sædng thī leụxk xeklạksʹṇthāng wạtʹhnṭhrrm khxng tạw xeng læa kār tạdsincı keīyw kạb sìng thī mī khwām rū thāngwạtʹhnṭhrrm pĕn sìng sảkhạỵ sảhrạb kār ṣụksʹāwithyā ṣāstr khxng dĕk khxng phwk kheā with-yāṣāstr kār phạtʹhnā xỳāng yạngyụn thīmī khwām cu nı kār dūd sạb phūmipạỵỵā tĥxngthìn kạbkhwāmrū thāngwithyāṣāstr thī thūk txng tāmkḍhmāy thīnả senxphæltfxrm thī sảkhạỵ sảhrạbkārklạb mā khụndī khwām rū chāw kaherīyng thī mī khwām rū thāng withyāṣāstr pheụx kār ṣụksʹā-withyā ṣāstr PHOTOVOICE kār sạngket xỳāng mī swn rwm læa kār sạmphāsʹṇ bæb kụngkhorngsrāng thūk nảmā chını kār srāng phāph læa kār lèā reụxng thī kheīyn phāph khxng phxmæchāwkaherīyngkārwikherāahkār lèā reụxng thī sædng hı hĕnẁāphxmæchāwkaherīyngdị srāngkheāntexr lèā reụxng nı phmā læa thịy thī chwy hı phwk kheā thī ca txtān kār dūd sụm nıwạtʹhnṭhrrm khxng klùm chātiphạnṭhu thī dod dèn; trngkạnkĥām kār lèā reụxng chīwit khxngphwk kheā nı kār tậng thìnṭhān hım nı shrạṭhxmerikā thīmùng nên ṣạkyphāph nı kār kảhnd withīchīwit tnxeng lạksʹṇa Keystone thī thảhı khwām yụdhyùn thāng wạtʹhnṭhrrm thī thūk rabu hı pĕnswn chumchn læa kār ṣụksʹā pĕn pratū pị sūxnākht thī pelīyn thī thxd smx xyū nı wạtʹhnṭhrrmprapheṇī khxng kār thả fārm helā nīphxmæ chāwkaherīyng dị rạbmummxng læa khwām sadwksbāy nı khwām tx neụxng læa ṣạkyphāph khxng kār tạdsincı xeng hyạng rāk lụk nı phændindạngnận chumchn kār reīyn rū kĥāmwạtʹhnṭhrrm sảhrạb nạkreīyn radạb prathm ṣụksʹā kaherīyngthī prakxbdwy phāsʹā kaherīyng læa kaherīyng khwām rū dwy tnxeng xỳāng yạngyụn khxngphụch swn ca pĕn sthān thī cạd ngā nthī hemāasm sảhrạb kār srāng brryākāṣ khxng kār lækpelīynkār reīyn rūwithyāṣāstr

S. G. Harper

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One of the ways that science educators have successfully created hybrid space for

culturally-appropriate science learning has been to “de-settle” expectations and assump-

tions implicit within the dominant culture of institutionalized education in the United

States (Bang, Warren, Rosebery and Medin 2012). Within this learning paradigm, the

borders of the traditional infrastructure for knowledge production have become more

porous, both in terms of the cultural knowledge that shapes learning inside and outside the

classroom, and in terms of the mainstream understanding of STEM knowledge that is

taught in the classroom. Community-based understandings of scientific knowledge rooted

in cultural knowledge have proven particularly effective in advancing the science learning

of indigenous students for whom streams of ecological and cultural knowledge form a

confluent whole. Indigenous scholars have advocated for the inclusion of cultural

knowledge in science learning as a way of educating students through embodied knowl-

edge connected to their understanding of the world around them (Cajete 2000). Similarly,

Ann Rosebery and colleagues have advocated for an alternative discourse of science

learning that “conceptualizes the heterogeneity of human cultural practices as fundamental

to learning, not as a problem to be solved, but as foundational in conceptualizing learning

and in designing learning environments” (Rosebery, Ogonowski, DiSchino and Warren

2010, p. 323). In applying this paradigm to their work with Haitian immigrant students,

they concluded that a blending of scientific discourse with cultural discourse produced a

deeper level of conceptual understanding in science learning. In other words, a hybrid

space for science learning that yielded an alternative science discourse was not limited to

mainstream meaning-making practices; rather, the underlying assumption was that students

with diverse cultural discourses could readily participate in science as a way of knowing

without conforming to or assimilating the dominant culture.

Cross-cultural science learning communities that embrace the funds of knowledge of

families and community elders have closed the gap between educators and the families of

culturally-marginalized students (Gonzalez, Moll and Amanti 2005). For the families of

refugee students, the legitimation of their cultural and scientific knowledge within an

educational setting could provide space to build bridges of cross-cultural understanding

between schools and vulnerable communities. The programs that have achieved a level of

success have collaborated intentionally with families and community representatives to

create a cross-cultural learning community within which linguistically marginalized stu-

dents can access opportunities for academic and social advancement (Buxton, Allexsaht-

Snider and Rivera 2013). Lori Hammond’s collaborative work with a local Mien com-

munity in a summer institute for pre-service and in-service teachers demonstrated both the

rewards and the difficulties that can result when two very different ways of knowing come

together and try to find common ground (Hammond 2001). In this project, Mien parents

used their expert knowledge to build a Mien house on public school grounds. Hammond

contended that Mien scientific knowledge was embodied in their self-sufficient technolo-

gies; by employing a multi-science approach, she was able to incorporate indigenous

science into Western science to create a “dialogic learning community in which various

voices were heard” (2001, p. 987). Mien parents viewed gardening and house-building as

indigenous knowledge that connected them to their cultural heritage at the same time that it

made them self-sufficient. Even though the house-building project was a constant nego-

tiation of traditional and modern ideas (since the house was built on school grounds, there

were certain non-negotiable building codes that had to be met), and many obstacles had to

be overcome, the end result was viewed by all parties as a cross-cultural bridge to greater

understanding. Once engaged for their expert knowledge, the Mien parents felt empowered

Keystone characteristics that support cultural resilience in…

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to contribute their cultural knowledge in a climate of reciprocity and began to participate

more in the science learning of their children.

Challenging the assumptions of legitimate cultural knowledge in the mainstream

classroom has precipitated discussions of what can be considered legitimate scientific

knowledge and how indigenous epistemologies can contribute to meaning-making in

science education. A counter-narrative for science learning has emerged that recognizes the

confluence of social, cultural and ecological streams of knowledge, thus making it par-

ticularly cohesive with some indigenous epistemologies. The transdisciplinary field of

sustainability science has been cited increasingly by scholars attempting to link indigenous

epistemology with Eurocentric scientific knowledge in a critical impetus to sustain natural

and cultural resources in the face of increasing global commodification (Carter 2007).

Sustainability science provides a critical theoretical framework for approaching problems

of decolonizing science learning space and creating a hybrid space for learning that is not

only culturally appropriate for local indigenous communities but also seeks to address

contemporary sustainability issues embedded within a history of Western colonization. In a

review of the sociocultural perspectives that inform sustainability science, Lyn Carter

suggested that science education as a discipline needs to extend past the borders of hal-

lowed expert knowledge into the political and cultural arenas that engender science

problems so that students can engage in the “messiness” of genuine scientific knowledge

construction (2007, p. 171). This approach to science education implies a base of socio-

cultural knowledge, a platform of cultural heterogeneity. Therefore, indigenous

communities seeking to liberate their educational spaces from the knowledge systems of

their colonizers could be considered justified in re-situating scientific discourses within

their own ways of knowing. Carter advocated a more inclusive vision for science educa-

tion: “Concern over sustainability, now often manifest as global warming, when connected

to destabilized ideas of science, and the increasing prominence of culturally diverse stu-

dents, knowledges, and practices, profoundly challenges what it means to enact science

education appropriate for our ecologically fragile, rapidly globalizing, techno-scientific,

and complexly multicultural world” (2007, p. 166).

Studies on the science of sustainability and indigenous communities have demonstrated

how essential culturally-based science education can be to advance marginalized students

past the deficit learning discourse perpetuated by the dominant culture into emancipatory

spaces. One study in Malawi, a sub-Saharan country in Africa, found that a third space

(Greenwood 2001) for science learning was critical for negotiating the gradual decolo-

nization of science pedagogy and incorporating knowledge on sustainable agricultural

practices from the elders of the community into science education (Glasson, Mhango, Phiri

and Lanier 2010). Malawian teachers who had been trained in Eurocentric science concepts

and who taught exclusively in English were resistant to adapt their pedagogy to a more

culturally appropriate learning space that included the language and embodied scientific

knowledge of local communities. Researchers determined that sustainability science pro-

vided the necessary framework to negotiate with teachers to include the everyday

knowledge and practices of students and their families, thus contributing to the self-esteem

of the students and the entire community (2010, p. 138). In another example, a First Nation

scholar who chose ethnobotany over one of the more mainstream science disciplines for his

field of study was censured by Western scholars for making a poor choice; for him, it was

the difference between studying embodied scientific knowledge contextualized and made

relevant by his own cultural community, and choosing disembodied knowledge (Chinn

2009). In Hawaii, Pauline Chinn (2011) has called attention to the traditional ecological

knowledge of the local indigenous population, their vital connection to sustainability

S. G. Harper

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science and the ongoing task of mitigating anthropogenic shifts in ecological systems. For

real world problems such as climate change, indigenous knowledge on sustainable prac-

tices of conservation that preserve a delicate balance between social and ecological

systems has connected Hawaiian students to scientific ways of knowing more intimately

than decontextualized Western scientific knowledge could have (Chinn 2010). Culturally

relevant pedagogy captured “dynamic, cultural and historical activities characterized by

diverse worldviews and ways of constructing and legitimizing knowledge” and brought

science alive for students marginalized by the pedagogical legacy of colonization (Chinn

2009, p. 640).

For students from first generation refugee families who have experienced the trauma of

violence and long-term displacement, the identification and retention of indigenous

knowledge systems is critical to re-building their cultural identity as well as building their

identity as science learners. Therefore, a framework of resilience in addition to the

framework that sustainability science provides for incorporating indigenous knowledge

into science learning was helpful in understanding how a displaced community sustained

essential cultural and scientific knowledge in resettlement. Cultural resilience is a phrase

that has been used by researchers in the field of conservation ecology to refer to an

indigenous community’s ability to restore essential balance to their lives in the face of

profound displacement and loss (Turner, Gregory, Brooks, Failing and Satterfield 2008). In

the same way that the preservation of keystone species enables an ecosystem to survive

natural disturbances without losing essential functionality (Walker and Salt 2006), key-

stone cultural characteristics can act as the anchoring points that allow refugee families to

retain their cultural identity while learning to exist in the hybrid space of a blended culture

(Garibaldi and Turner 2004). Framing this study around the concept of resilience situated it

within an emancipatory paradigm within which refugee parents were actors choosing their

own cultural identity and making decisions about what cultural knowledge was important

for the science education of their children. A deficit model in parental engagement assumes

the role of parents to be passive participants rather than active agents with decision-making

power (Calabrese Barton, Drake, Perez, St. Louis and George 2004). Integrating refugee

parents and their cultural knowledge into the educational lives of their children in reset-

tlement has proven to be critical to academic advancement as early as the pre-school level

(Kirova 2012). However, first generation refugee families tend to cultivate a climate of

invisibility that precludes involvement. One study with first generation refugee parents

from Burma found that even though they regarded the school culture as a safe haven for

their children, these parents experienced a cultural barrier that prohibited them from

participating in school activities (Isik-Ercan 2012). Their own perceived lack of knowledge

and proficiency in the English language prevented them from taking a more active role in

their children’s education. Building up communication through relationships and a more

personal approach such as in-home visits was advocated for these Burmese parents, who

felt intimidated by existing school-parent venues. Zeynep Isik-Ercan pointed out that

“homes are open and social spaces” for refugee families, a cultural practice carried over

from crowded refugee camps (2012, p. 3035). Therefore, they advocated for an alternative

ecological model of viewing refugee students’ acculturation experiences in school that

incorporated the entire family and community with all of its cultural richness and expe-

riential knowledge into a learning paradigm rather than setting the school culture against

the home culture in a dichotomy of interests (2012, p. 3029).

This two-part research project focuses on the cultural and experiential knowledge of a

small community of Karen (pronounced Ka-ren) refugee parents who have resettled in the

southeastern United States. Three sets of Karen parents were asked to identify


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characteristics of their culture and scientific knowledge rooted in their culture that they

deemed most important for their children to retain and value as they integrated into the

educational system in the United States. By visiting Karen families in their homes and

eliciting their “multi-science” knowledge, I hoped to draw them into the learning process

and eventually bring them to the school to share their knowledge in a school garden project

(e.g. Hammond 2001). The second part of this project involved the design and imple-

mentation of an afterschool science program within which Karen refugee students and non-

Karen students could build a cross-cultural learning community and populate it with

meaning in relation to culture and science. Scientific inquiry was conducted alongside

Karen language lessons and exercises in building understanding of their own student

culture and the cultures of Karen families and non-Karen families in an attempt to make

scientific vocabulary and ways of knowing more accessible for Karen students. This paper

addresses the first part of the research with Karen parents. In the following section, I give a

brief overview of the Karen people and resettlement in the United States, at points looking

to literature on second- and third-generation Hmong (originating from the mountains of

Thailand, a neighbor of Burma, in addition to other countries such as Vietnam and Laos)

resettlement in the United States since the literature on Karen people is very limited. For

this portion of the research, the following questions were explored: What key aspects of

their culture do Karen parents identify as critical to the healthy development of their

children’s cultural identity as Karen Americans? Of those, which aspects contain the most

potential to contribute to a cross-cultural science learning community for Karen students?

The study population: Who are the Karen people?

Of the 86,000 Karen refugees residing in refugee camps along the Thai–Burma border in

2012, 4688 resettled in industrially-developed countries; 4000 of those resettled in the United

States (UNHCR 2012) (Fig. 1). An ethnic minority in a country the size of Texas, the Karen

people of Burma have experienced decades of civil war with the Burmese government.Many

Karen families have lived in refugee camps on the Thai–Burma border for 10–20 years,

without access to employment or higher education, unable to return to their villages for fear of

military attack and prohibited by the Thai government from becoming citizens of Thailand.

In 2005, Thailand allowed the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for

Refugees) to appeal to Western countries such as the U.S., Canada and Australia for

resettlement options for Burmese refugees. Karen families resettled in the U.S. with the

hope of gaining higher education for themselves and their children but encountered many

obstacles (Kenny and Lockwood-Kenny 2011). Jack Dunford (2008, pp. 2–3), the Exec-

utive Director of the Thailand–Burma Border Consortium, recorded his impressions of

Karen resettlement in America:

One of the biggest challenges for the refugees is language and since I normally meet

with the leaders when I visit the camps and see English classes going on in the

schools, I was surprised at just how weak the Karen are in English. This of course is a

major barrier to getting work and being able to function in their communities. We

heard stories of people being literally house-bound because they were afraid to go out

and stories of people who had gone out and wandered for days because they didn’t

know their address or how to ask for help…Dreams of higher education for older kids

though seemed difficult to attain. Even if they can get funding/scholarships, there is

tremendous pressure to be bread-winners to help their families get established.

S. G. Harper

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Resettlement for Karen refugees often involved a secondary migration based on existing

kinship networks and waning support from resettlement agencies which contributed to an

increasingly fragmented education for their children (Kenny and Lockwood-Kenny 2011).

Volunteer organizations in states with large refugee populations instituted outreach

programs to increase social stability for these culturally marginalized communities and

engage parents in education. In Fort Wayne, Indiana, Burmese community leaders ini-

tiated an outreach program for parents called the New Immigrant Literacy Program in

2003 that offered tutoring for students and community education programs for parents

(Isik-Ercan 2009). A collaborative approach led to less friction with parents rooted in the

culture of their home country during the acculturation process and facilitated healing and

developmental growth as well as academic achievement for students. Another study that

focused on teacher-parent relationships between school representatives in Wisconsin

public schools and a local Hmong population found that the creation of a parent liaison

position successfully bridged cultural and language gaps for communication and part-

nership (Rah, Choi and Nguyen 2010). Although local Hmong authorities reported that

half of the Hmong refugee parents in their school district were illiterate in their native

language as well as in English, making written communication very difficult, some

Hmong men and women served as teachers and bilingual specialists and were able to

facilitate communication for others. Another culturally-appropriate liaison service

between parents and schools developed by a private refugee agency in the southeastern

United States, Refugee Family Services (RFS), sponsored after-school tutoring, a sum-

mer camp, individual tutoring, at-risk services, English lessons for adults, job counseling,

Fig. 1 Map of the Thai–BurmaBorder


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cultural information for the community and refugee families, and, through their cen-

terpiece program, a cultural liaison staff who bridged the cultural understanding gap

between school administration, teachers and refugee parents (McBrien and Ford 2012).

The entire liaison staff were women, culturally and/or nationally matched to their clients,

who spoke the native language of their clients. As of 2008, this program could be found

in forty-three schools across a ten-mile radius. The researchers for this study found that

teachers who worked with RFS liaison staff were more likely to report increased

knowledge of the refugee culture, engage in intentional efforts to make the school

environment more refugee-friendly, work more successfully with refugee parents, and

have high expectations for advanced education through college or vocational schools for

their refugee students (2012, p. 123).

While these models illustrate the importance of eliciting parental involvement in order

to enable academic advancement for refugee students, little attention has been given to the

cultural knowledge of first-generation refugee parents themselves and how that knowledge

could enhance their children’s science learning. This research seeks to address this gap in

the science education literature, by integrating the parents’ funds of knowledge: their

ecological, social and cultural streams of knowledge that act as currency within their own

community, into a cross-cultural science learning community for Karen students (Gonzalez

et al. 2005). However, in recognition of the climate of invisibility that Karen parents may

have cultivated in Burma and Thailand in response to the violence of war, this research

also seeks to situate Karen knowledge within an emancipatory framework. Sustainability

science with its capacity to absorb indigenous knowledge as legitimate scientific knowl-

edge offers a critical platform for reconciling Karen knowledge with scientific knowledge

for science education, and a conceptual framework of resilience provides a critical lens

through which we may view the narratives and counter-narratives this community has

constructed to survive in the hostile environment of Burma and Thailand and now in

resettlement. In this research, I worked collaboratively with Karen parents to articulate

their cultural and scientific knowledge, thus demonstrating the value of their knowledge to

a cross-cultural science learning community and to the process of rebuilding resilience in a

new country. Space was created for Karen parents to author their own hybrid cultural

narratives with the expectation that their confluent knowledge streams would contribute to

the science education of their children in an afterschool science program.

Framing knowledge within an understanding of resilience

Funds of knowledge

This study relied upon the funds of knowledge approach (Gonzalez et al. 2005) to define

the domains of knowledge that functioned as currency within the Karen community. This

approach has been used to integrate the knowledge of bilingual households into a com-

munity of learning. Gonzalez and colleagues situated their approach in a Vygotsky (1978)

understanding of the primacy of culture to learning. By extending this understanding of

individuals as culturally created beings who construct knowledge through social interaction

to the classroom, teachers and students alike became learners. Gathering funds of

knowledge appropriately from participating communities involves a reciprocal exchange

of stories and ideas; it is this reciprocity of knowledge-building that creates a cross-cultural

learning community.

S. G. Harper

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Immigrant communities such as the Hmong people who have lived in the United States

for several generations have leveraged the funds of knowledge approach to construct a

counter-narrative for education that privileges their own ways of knowing. Bhaskar

Upadhyay (2009) explored how a Hmong teacher used her own experience of marginal-

ization in mainstream science learning to inspire a more inclusive approach in her

classroom. She introduced Hmong students’ gardening experiences into the classroom as a

way to build on their cultural funds of knowledge, and created a climate of reciprocity that

would engage Hmong parents in science learning. Hmong parents responded by supporting

the students’ science learning, and taking a more active role in communicating with the

teacher, particularly since they could speak in their own native language. This was radi-

cally different from the Hmong teacher’s own experience in the science classroom, in

which the teacher did not use any examples from Hmong communities to help students

understand scientific concepts, a choice that marginalized Hmong students. In the study,

she stated that she grew up believing that her Hmong culture was an obstacle to science

learning. Another Hmong community that had multiple encounters with racism and deficit

teaching in schools constructed a counter-narrative composed of essentialist cultural

knowledge in an effort to carve out socio-political representation in a hostile environment

(Ngo 2013). Even though they could have chosen the discourse of hybridity to articulate

their cultural identity, the community leaders employed an essentialist discourse to push

back against the pressure to assimilate. As second generation immigrants, this Hmong

community responded to what they viewed as a direct relationship between a higher rate of

academic failure in Hmong-American young people to the loss of identity that resulted

when students severed connection with their home language and culture. Community

leaders determined that only a narrative stressing a reified view of their culture was strong

enough to combat the “otherness” their children were experiencing in schools: “School

omission of the histories and experiences of Asian Americans has implications for the

construction of identities—particularly citizenship and belonging” (Ngo 2013, p. 972). In

addition, they looked for an embodied representation of their culture in the schools to

amend this identity crisis; in other words, their cultural knowledge could only be repre-

sented adequately by educators from within the Hmong community.

For a first generation refugee community such as the Karen, the funds of knowledge

approach positioned the Karen parents as the authors of their own cultural narrative; it is

this cultural narrative legitimated in science education that created a climate of reciprocity

for the afterschool program. However, as this generation of Karen families emerged from a

climate of violence and long-term displacement, their heightened vulnerability arguably

could place them more at risk in public arenas such as education where other immigrant

communities have struggled to define their cultural identities in the face of pressure to

assimilate. For this research study, it was important to define terms such as “culture” and

“indigenous knowledge” in ways that did not make assumptions about the choices this

community would make in shaping their cultural identity. Therefore, culture was defined

within the context of the funds of knowledge approach as a hybrid space of blended

knowledge and values, with the expectation that this definition would remain fluid and

subject to the community’s self-constructed narrative (Gonzalez 2005). The definition of

culture as a static body of knowledge limited to a particular people living in a specific

location could not apply to communities that have been subject to long-term displacement.

Margaret Eisenhart (2001) challenged the notion that culture could be defined with enough

clarity to distinguish any borders at all. Since social groups no longer adhere to a single,

uniform set of cultural norms, and indeed exist within the framework of a constantly

evolving globalization, distinct cultural bodies have permeable boundaries. Individuals


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may choose to adopt the discourses and mores of a particular identity group for a period of

time, and then move to another identity group as their circumstances change. Or, as Jan

Nespor (1997) suggested, individuals appropriate funds of knowledge associated with

activities or social groups as they move in and out of various spaces over time. Individual

students can choose symbols, discourses, and identities to shape their own self-represen-

tation to meet pre-determined goals. Students who have had to construct their cultural

identity with fluid boundaries, subject to multiple perspectives, discourses, and sources of

knowledge, may have more social and cultural confidence to access rigorous science

concepts. Likewise, parents who develop the social and cultural capital (Bourdieu 1977) to

redefine their cultural identity from multiple perspectives and discourses are more likely to

“author” their own interactive resilient spaces within the formal and informal science

education of their children (Calabrese Barton, Drake, Perez, Louis and George 2004).

Indigenous knowledge, also recognized in some fields as traditional ecological

knowledge (TEK), has been defined by its connection to sustainability science, as men-

tioned earlier, but has also been recognized by scholars in anthropology in reference to

issues of power and sustainable development of natural resources. One scholar cautioned,

“it is on the basis of the relation to power (and perhaps only on that basis) that one can

define the difference between local/traditional/practical knowledges on the one hand, and

global/Western/theoretical knowledge on the other” (Agrawal 1999, p. 178). The question

of what constitutes legitimate indigenous knowledge and how that knowledge functions in

relation to the distribution of power remains critical to a discussion of the integration of

traditional ecological knowledge with all of its cultural knowledge and values into science

education. William Cobern and Cathleen Loving (2001, p. 52) have argued that indigenous

knowledge must remain apart from Western scientific knowledge in the classroom if it is to

avoid assimilation into the dominant Western interpretation of science. They recognized

that Western scientific knowledge has preempted local knowledge in classrooms around

the world, and local understandings of science are in danger of being marginalized because

they are viewed as embedded within cultural traditions. Even though indigenous knowl-

edge has contributed significantly to the body of scientific knowledge and should be

preserved, the domains of that knowledge needed to remain separate to maintain the

integrity of each (2001, p. 60). In that Western science has come to be associated with

institutions of legitimacy such as governments and schools, the assimilation of indigenous

knowledge without differentiation could be tantamount to dis-embodiment, in the sense of

removing it from its cultural context (Snively and Corsiglia 2001). Michiel Van Eijck and

Wolff-Michael Roth (2007, p. 931) also maintained that TEK and Western scientific

knowledge are incommensurable because they applied different epistemological frame-

works, the one including cultural reality alongside physical reality, and the other restricted

solely to physical reality. Moreover, they argued that the concept of a cultural identity

upon which cultural knowledge is founded is a misconception at best; indigenous com-

munities continued to shape their identity from the dynamic flow of past and present,

multivocality and multilocality, in the constant process of shaping and re-shaping

knowledge as the community experienced life and nature. Such a flow of knowledge was

difficult to capture for categorization and legitimization within the Western science epis-

temological framework (2007, p. 932).

While these arguments problematize the efficacy of integrating indigenous knowledge

into scientific knowledge, they do not address the political viability of bridging the gap

between indigenous people such as the Karen refugees and proponents of the expert

knowledge regime. In a critical ethnography of a Navajo community in San Juan County,

Utah, Donna Deyhle (2009) used an emancipatory paradigm to break down the socially-

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constructed image of the Navajo Indian propagated by the school district in San Juan

County, and to interrogate the distribution of power dictated by this mis-representation.

Within the social construct of “manifest manners,” White men’s assumptions and expec-

tations of the Native identity kept individuals locked down in one stagnant perspective of

reality until they could claim their own space within history and within contemporary

reality (preface, p. x). Deyhle challenged the distorted or “romantic” view of the Navajo as

separated “other” through the critical dialectic between “surveillance” and “survivance”:

survivance represents more than just cultural survival or assimilation; it is an active

resistance to the surveillance of the white man and a rejection of his constructed image of

the Indian (preface, p. xviii). Through their stories, the women gave voice to their choice to

maintain a Native presence in the face of the socially-constructed representation of Navajo

imposed on them through a discourse of “manifest manners.” Storytelling can serve as a

political mechanism by which indigenous people represent their own embodied knowl-

edge, carve out their own pedagogical space and populate it with meaning generated from

their own ways of knowing and learning.

Questions have arisen concerning the generification of indigenous knowledge that

occurs through the process of distilling and cataloging selected portions of knowledge in

order to conform it to the Western scientific knowledge paradigm privileged in science

discourse around the world. If the constitution and organization of indigenous knowledge

is dictated by the Western scientific community, or by mediators limited to their own

Western partial perspective, the identity of indigenous peoples could be rendered

unproblematic and apolitical by means of monolithic categorization as “other.” One of the

pathogens associated with the institutionalization of indigenous knowledge is the con-

struction of a monolithic representation of that knowledge. This displaces the emancipatory

energy of recognizing indigenous knowledge as a valid entity and replaces it with

instrumental energy compliant with Western hegemony. Anja Nygren (1999, p. 268) has

suggested that the construction of monolithic representations for local knowledge creates

space for discrimination and marginalization; he proposed an “alternative view of situated

knowledges which are simultaneously local and global.” Nygren’s study of the migrant

populations displaced by the contra war in Nicaragua situated their knowledge within the

historical narrative of political upheaval and disconnection from their land, which was a

poor fit for the paradigm of indigenous knowledge propagated by the Western development

discourse. Local knowledge, by this definition, emerged from an incubator of time and

place and was legitimated by consistent interaction with the environment; in this catego-

rization, migrant or displaced populations were pushed to the margins as alien “other.” The

migrant peasant communities that hugged the border zone of Rio San Juan in Nicaragua

saw themselves politically, historically and socially as loggers or farmers, as Sandinistas or

Liberals, as Catholics or Protestants, as women workers, as cattle-owners; the knowledge

they used to relate to the forest was a hybrid mix of traditional and imported. One healer

traced his knowledge to his uncle, Catholic monks in Chontales, the indigenous herbalists

on the Atlantic coast, USAID rural health workers, training from the Ministry of Health,

and his experience as a guide for foreign ethno-pharmacologists and bio-scientists (1999,

p. 278).

Students from communities and ethnic groups who have experienced a transitory life-

style may have a hybrid understanding of place and culture that does not translate easily

into Western scientific categories for learning. Their understanding of scientific knowledge

may have emerged from a diversity of perspectives not anchored in any specific time or

place. Subgroups within cultures of migrant, refugee or immigrant communities may locate

their identities in unpredictable spaces, problematizing the work of science educators


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trying to facilitate border crossings into the Western scientific understanding of physics, for

example (Aikenhead 1997). If an introduction to Western science could include a transi-

tional space where the culture of the student could be present to ease the passage, through

language, traditional worldview, or games, then the student might not be faced with the

impossible decision of sacrificing their ways of knowing in order to assimilate to the

dominant culture’s knowledge. A connection to the emerging field of sustainability science

can be found here: Glen Aikenhead (1997, p. 227) has argued that the scientific literacy

required by all students to function in their socio-economic realities is embedded in socio-

cultural contexts that inform practical real-world decision-making. For the purposes of this

research study with Karen refugee parents who have had to re-construct their cultural

identity within the larger contexts of the unpredictable violence of war and the institu-

tionalized homelessness of refugee camps, the redistribution of power through the

legitimization of their indigenous knowledge in the public arena of education could con-

tribute substantially to the stabilization and retention of their culture in resettlement and the

long-term re-building of resilience.

Social–ecological resilience

A model of social–ecological resilience frames the understanding of human interaction

with the environment as a dynamic process subject to constant change. Rather than

assuming a system is stable and self-regulating, always striving to exist in a state of

equilibrium, the resilience perspective assumes that a system is constantly adapting to

change. Surprise, not stability, is the order of the day. The ability of a social–ecological

system to absorb disturbance and retain essential functionality is a measure of its resi-

lience. Resilience can also be a way to look at a system’s capacity for renewal in the face

of total upheaval (Folke 2006). For example, to achieve a sustainable level of production,

an ecosystem practices an economy of energy designed to use natural energy sources to

develop new growth without wasting nutrients. Ultimately, this process returns energy to

the system so that a dynamic flow of “natural capital” (defined as “stocks of resources

generated by natural biogeochemical processes and solar energy that yield useful flows of

services and amenities into the future”) is maintained (Izac and Sanchez 2001, p. 9). This

process relies upon sentinels of slow-moving evolution and adaptation such as mature

mangrove trees along a tropical coastline or the build-up of rich organic matter in the soil.

These sentinels interact in nested cycles with agents of sudden or rapid processes of change

engendered by natural or anthropogenic disturbance to minimize their impact (Walker and

Salt 2006). Social–ecological resilience is the measure of disturbance a system will tolerate

before the set of processes defined by the slow-moving sentinels that have sustained the

functionality of the system shifts to allow the institution of a new regime (Folke, Carpenter,

Walker, Scheffer, Elmqvist, Gunderson and Holling 2004). The popular belief that

ecosystems can absorb any amount of change and rebound into the same functioning

equilibrium is misleading; pressure applied to natural systems by disturbance can result in

the extinction of species that do not adapt quickly enough (Nelson, Adger and Brown

2007).

Social–ecological resilience as a conceptual framework allows us to apply this same

paradigm of sustainability and adaptability to indigenous people. Nancy Turner and col-

leagues (2008) identified eight types of invisible losses that indigenous communities can

sustain that result in a loss of resilience: cultural/lifestyle losses; loss of identity; health

losses; knowledge losses; loss of self-determination and influence; emotional and psy-

chological losses; loss of order in the world; and indirect or direct economic losses. Their

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work with indigenous communities facing the loss of their land and resources could also

apply to refugee communities that have faced tangible and intangible losses through

decades of violence and internment (Turner, Gregory, Brooks, Failing and Satterfield

2008). Turner equated the disruption of cultural stability to the ecological damage of

climate change; without attention to restoring the system, valuable resources that are

critical to functionality could be lost (2008). Damage to the cultural integrity of an

indigenous community could result in the erosion of social infrastructure and cultural

practices that root individuals in meaningful activities and values. To restore resilience, the

authors recommended six processes: focusing on what matters to the people who have been

directly and indirectly affected; describing what matters in meaningful ways; making a

place for these concerns in decision-making; evaluating future losses and gains from a

historical baseline; recognizing culturally derived values as relevant; and creating better

alternatives for decision-making in the future.

Using resilience as a conceptual framework in this research served a dual purpose: (1) to

situate this work within the ecological cycle of renewal and adaptation that individual

species or communities must have to survive disturbance; and (2) to situate this work

within discussions of sustainability science and the critical impetus to recognize the

confluence of knowledge streams that indigenous people bring to science education.

However, even though I have categorized Karen knowledge as indigenous knowledge for

the purpose of this research and discussion, I recognize that this categorization emerges

from my own Western partial perception (Haraway 2001). Although their cultural

knowledge was tied to sustainable land management practices in Karen State, Burma,

resettlement in the United States may shape their knowledge in unpredictable ways. A

focus on resilience prohibits to some extent the categorization of Karen knowledge.

Theoretically, this model assumes that their knowledge system is undergoing constant

change as they adapt to a new environment. Key characteristics that acted as sentinels to

secure the cultural integrity of this Karen community in the face of violence and war

subsequently provided a foundation of shared meaning in the early years of resettlement. In

the same way that keystone species sustain the functionality of an ecological system,

keystone cultural characteristics may prove to be the lynchpin for the collection of long-

term social infrastructure and cultural capital that can sustain a displaced community

(Aldrich and Meyer 2014).

Using visual ethnography to gain perspective

Critical participatory action research addresses the socio-cultural imbalances that are

prevalent in the experiences of bicultural students struggling to situate themselves within the

dominant learning discourse in American schools (Harman and Varga-Dobai 2012). Within

this framework, parents as well as students can find a voice to articulate the ways of knowing

that are meaningful to them, resulting in a climate of reciprocal learning. Moreover, critical

participatory action research works toward the goal of social transformation. In the tradition

of Paulo Freire’s liberation pedagogy, education is a community-based political enterprise

(Torres 1992). Therefore, this research project was designed to be a vehicle for conscienti-zação, a critical step in the education and activation of parents to work for sustainable changein how science learning and teaching occurs with Karen children (Freire 2003).

Within the larger framework of critical participatory action research, visual ethnography

allowed the participants to define their own communities of practice and the embodied


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learning that takes place within those communities. It was a unique way to create space

within which marginalized people could speak in their own voice from their own expe-

riences and literacies. For refugee parents, visual ethnography provided a means for

creating a first-person narrative apart from the dominant discourse of the written word.

Sarah Pink (2007) has addressed the issue of representation through visual ethnography by

suggesting that images have the power to generate new types of knowledge. In visual

ethnography, there can be no objective truth, only the meaning given to images by the

ethnographer and participants.

Photovoice was the primary method used to develop visual narratives. Based on fem-

inist theory and the critical pedagogy of Freire, Photovoice has been used extensively in

visual ethnography, primarily in public health research with socially marginalized popu-

lations (Wang 1999). One recent project with socially marginalized young people took

place in Dar es Salaam and Soweto (Kessi 2011). It focused on the re-imagining of

identities through the production of photo-stories that liberated young people from the

public image of victim. The young people used their photo-stories to resist the social

stigmas leveled by the public against their community, and claim the identity of people

who step forward to help each other through difficult circumstances. Another Photovoice

project with young people in Africa was set in an internment camp in Northern Uganda

(Green and Kloos 2009). These young refugees were completely dependent upon aid

offered by international humanitarian organizations. By telling their stories, they became

actors rather than victims, rebuilding their identities in terms of socio-cultural resilience.

In this project, I interpreted the visual data reflexively, acknowledging my own personal

lens through which images were filtered as well as the lens of the culture in which the

images were embedded. As a white, middle-class woman who has enjoyed access to

education and relative socio-economic stability through citizenship in the U.S., my

interpretation of visual artifacts, in this case, photographs, might be radically different

from the interpretation that refugee participants have (Mosselson 2010). Photovoice pro-

vided a platform for participants to represent their own cultural identity, through their

lenses, however hybridized by extended contact with the culture in the United States.

Although my interpretation of events inevitably contributed to the construction of meaning

that took place within the visual ethnographic methods, I was able to offer space for the

Karen participants through this method to define their own socially-constructed spaces

outside of my biases and assumptions.

Karen participants

The Karen community that hosted this research project consisted of several families who

had chosen to move back to a rural environment after being placed by a refugee agency in

an urban setting. All of the families had moved to the southeast within the past 5 years and

all had been in the United States for under 6 years. The Karen couple who served as

translators for this project hosted all but one of the interviews in their home. Three Karen

married couples participated in the research project, which took place over 4 months in the

summer of 2013. All of the participants had children who attended the local elementary

school. I had taken Sgaw-Karen language lessons with one of the women participants for

8 months prior to the start of the project, and had volunteered at an afterschool program at

the local elementary school. The afterschool program had developed in part around the

needs of the Karen families who had moved into the area. Participants were selected by the

Karen woman who served as my language instructor. All of the participants were forced to

flee from Burma between the ages of four and six with their families to refugee camps on

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the Thai–Burma border. One couple had lived in the refugee camp for 20 years; another for

ten. The couple who served as translators for the project had recently passed their citi-

zenship tests. Two of their three children were born in Thailand in Mae La, one of the

largest refugee camps on the Thai–Burma border. Their third child was born in the United

States after they arrived here. The other couples had similar stories of children born in

Thailand and the United States.

Data collection

A participatory action research design allowed me to collaborate with participants on the

construction and implementation of the project, including the final narrative portraits. My

language teacher or her husband served as interpreter (Reissman 2008, p. 46) for all five of

the semi-structured interviews, which took place on separate occasions, primarily at their

house. Two of the interviews took place with married couples with family and friends

present; three of the interviews were with individuals. The interview questions focused on

the participants’ cultural and educational history in Burma and Thailand, and on the key

theme of building a science curriculum for an afterschool program at the local elementary

school. Participants were asked to identify scientific and cultural knowledge that would be

important for the development of their children’s cultural identity as Karen Americans. As

a science educator, I viewed this step as essential to engaging parents as stakeholders in the

development of a cross-cultural science learning community.

Visual narratives for Photovoice were collected as part of the interview process: once

the interview was complete, the couples used an iPad to take photos of any place, person or

thing that held meaning for them. I drove the participants to multiple local sites so that they

could take photos of extended family or physical places. This process usually took 1–2 h,

and since the translators did not accompany us, conversation was usually limited. Once all

of the interviews and photo sessions were completed, I developed all of the photos for the

focus group session, held at the end of the summer. The focus group protocol was designed

according to the Photovoice specifications (see “Appendix 1”). The translators hosted the

event at their house and provided a complete meal of Thai and Karen food. The focus

group session was videotaped for later analysis. All three couples participated; the photos

were spread out on the floor and couples were asked to select five that were most mean-

ingful to them. Participants were very comfortable in a group setting and contributed to

each other’s stories.

In addition to Photovoice and semi-structured interviews (Spradley 1979), I collected

data from participant observation during several visits to the home of the primary Karen

couple; my volunteer hours at the afterschool program at the local elementary school where

the Karen children attended; and two community-wide celebrations held at the home of the

primary couple. All of the data were checked by the primary Karen couple to ensure

accuracy. Data from the semi-structured interviews and participant observation were used

to verify the data collected through Photovoice (Spradley 1980). Field notes from the

interviews, the excursions to gather visual data, and the shared meals provided valuable

insight into the Karen culture and helped to verify the data collected from the interviews.

The purpose of the research project was clearly stated during the interviews and focus

group discussion: to discover what aspects of the Karen culture would be important to

include in a cross-cultural afterschool program at the local elementary school.


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Memory boxes: narratives of the past and present woven together

Data from the interview transcripts, participant observation field notes, and focus group

discussion were analyzed using thematic narrative analysis (Reissman 2008) to identify

distinct areas of cultural knowledge valued by this Karen community. In addition, I used D.

Jean Clandinin and F. Michael Connelly’s (2004) three-dimensional analytic frame as a

tool to identify physical and emotional spaces that participants populate with meaning.

Within this Dewey-based construct, three complementary narrative inquiry spaces focused

attention on personal meaning and social significance: situation (place); interaction (this

space contains historical as well as emotional currency, as participants look inward, out-

ward, backward and forward); and continuity of events through time. Once these spaces

emerged from the narratives, I looked for common themes, acknowledging at this point

that any identifiable themes would be subject to my own interpretation of the data based on

my own experiences and knowledge. From this analysis, domains of knowledge emerged

fairly easily, since all of the participants were eager to share their stories and to participate

in the Photovoice exercise.

My objective in using narrative analysis was to capture creative constructions of the past

interwoven into the reality of the present. It was important to allow space for participants to

interpret past events in their own voices, shaping history to fit their image of who they are

and who they imagine they will be in a blended Karen American culture. From these

narratives, I could see how individuals participated in the production of a social memory,

which anchored them in a climate of belonging rather than invisibility (Eastmond 2007).

For example, Marita Eastmond described how a headman under the rule of the Dalai

Lama’s government in exile created a myth to give cosmic significance and a historical

place to the experience of suffering that people were enduring. She determined that nar-

ratives and myths in Hmong refugee camps provided “a creative revitalization of Hmong

culture” that in turn emphasized unity in the face of disorder and violence (Eastmond 2007,

p. 256). Clandinin and Connelly referred to this concept as “memory boxes” in which past,

present and future narrative threads are woven together (2004, p. 66). The integration of

past with present and future is essential for refugee parents and students so that any

emotional trauma they may have experienced is not silenced or devalued by a host culture

that cannot relate to that part of their cultural identity (Mosselson 2009). As first generation

immigrants, parents in this Karen community play a pivotal role in constructing a social

narrative that gives meaning to and legitimates their past, present and future cultural

identity; however that changes and adapts in the future, it serves to build resilience for the

community in this moment.

In addition, portions of the data were woven into narrative portraits, an arts-based

education research tool. Narrative portraits use the relationship of the researcher with the

participant, and the participants’ relationships with each other, to construct meaning

(Lawrence-Lightfoot and Davis 1997). In this project, narrative portraits served as an

interpretive tool for analyzing patterns of cultural identity and weaving in reflexivity,

“owning” my subjectivity in a sense. This written narrative of each of the couples could

help bridge the gap created by a language and cultural barrier. Participants were not

presented through my eyes as objects of curiosity, but were personalized through the

representation of relationship. Narrative portraits served to distribute power and vulnera-

bility so that points of connection and commonality could emerge. Thematic narrative

analysis worked with narrative portraits to produce a “quilt” of multi-layer meaning

emerging from multiple voices (Ellingson 2009). The final portraits revealed a multi-

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layered reality that would not have been possible with Photovoice alone. Narrative portraits

were constructed by the researcher for three Karen married couples (see “Appendix 2” for

an example).

Then the written narratives were combined with the photos taken by each couple and

presented to the couples in poster form (Fig. 2).

Finding identity within a counter-narrative

One of the advantages of having such a strong community here, HTG tells me, is that

they can pass their values on to their children. The children can learn about the

values that sustained the Karen people through decades of civil war and internment,

and that keeps them together now in resettlement. It is important, he agrees, for the

children to understand their parents’ values, both through Christian education and

through other forms of education. If they value their own culture in addition to the

culture of their new country, then they might find balance and wholeness in their

lives (Excerpt from a narrative portrait of HTG, a Karen father).

The knowledge domains of education, religion, language, Karen history, and a cultural

anchoring in the land were clearly identified in the participants’ written and visual

narratives as cultural funds of knowledge. The act of articulating key aspects of their

cultural heritage was itself emancipatory. For a people who have cultivated the art of

silence and invisibility for their own survival, articulating the importance of their culture

and then legitimizing it by incorporating it into the plans for an afterschool program in

their host country endowed these knowledge domains with the power to transform

participants and their families into actors constructing their own hybrid culture. Several

themes emerged out of these domains: (1) the power of education to transform Karen lives;

(2) the cultural importance of maintaining the Karen Christian community as a source of

identity; and (3) the role that gardening serves to anchor Karen adults to the land, to a

physical sense of belonging, and to a future enlightened by self-determination. Each theme

Fig. 2 Visual and written narratives combined in poster form


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crossed several domains, and in the case of education and Christianity, one was embedded

in the other. For the purpose of narrowing in on the knowledge domains that most

particularly apply to science education, this section highlights findings correlated to

education and gardening. These cultural funds of knowledge can also be identified as

keystone cultural characteristics, sentinels of cultural identity that could be incorporated

into a cross-cultural science learning community to help build resilience for the Karen

community.

Gardening

Gardening for the Karen participants seemed to hold cultural meaning beyond the ability to

establish a self-sustaining lifestyle. The garden represented a bank of cultural knowledge

that tied participants to their lives in Karen State in Burma. Although gardens were

impossible to sustain in the limited space of the refugee camps, many narratives contained

references to gardens and livestock in Burma. One participant remembered all of the fruit

trees that were planted at his village in Burma, and the goat that provided milk for his

family. Another participant remembered that her family traveled with a water buffalo, but

they were too transient to sustain a garden. In referring to their lives in the United States,

although most participants did not speak at length about the importance of gardening, all of

them took between ten and twenty photos of their gardens and livestock during their

Photovoice sessions. One participant took the iPad directly out into her host’s garden to

take multiple photos of the plants and the chickens pecking around the yard, and then took

at least ten more at the community garden. The majority of the photos taken by all of the

couples focused on the plants and animals the families were cultivating, with photos of

immediate and extended family members represented slightly less.

Gardening linked individual autonomy with the Karen collective identity for the Karen

people in resettlement. Families divided their free time between working at home in their

gardens, working at the community garden, and visiting with one another. Food grown in

the Karen family gardens represented an independent lifestyle, the choice to invest time

and energy in long-term sustainable practices that gave them a margin of freedom from

dependence on the state, and an edge of cultural distinction. Whereas Americans in general

purchased processed food from the grocery store, the Karen people cultivated the food that

they ate. Gardening also contributed to the collective social narrative by defining the Karen

people as self-giving, more predisposed to sacrifice the gain of the individual for the good

of the community and even the nation. In the following narrative, gardening was presented

as a way to not only preserve the Karen cultural identity in the U.S., but also as a means of

restoring national health and self-determination to the people of Karen State in the future:

Yea, that’s why, yea, I think it is very important that, now because the war changed

very quick, for the Karen people it is very important that they have to think ahead

that in our country, in our motherland, it is not science but someday it should be a

science there we have to go back and teach them. If we don’t do that, maybe later

there is no food and they will be starved. So we would just like to preserve those.

Yea, it is very important for them to do now. And also they need to combine the way

they did, yea, the science, the nature that they learn from, yea, if they know how to

combine, I think maybe we will be always have the, just like have the food, always

have the food. Yea, I think very important in the United States. I worry a lot for my

kids, when they grow up in the United States. The reason why I worry a lot it mean

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all the stuff I buy from the Walmart or anywhere come far far away from China! (EK,interpreter and Karen father, interview)

Livestock and the plants in their gardens not only contributed to the collective cultural

identity, as seen above, but also represented the wealth of the community, distributed

through hospitality. An icon of their culture, hospitality for this Karen community meant

hosting community events and church events in their homes, serving food whenever a

visitor arrives at their house and sending fresh vegetables home with them, and taking the

time to visit friends and family whenever possible.

The community garden functioned as a community center, a social space like their

homes where Karen families from the city gathered with friends in the country. One

participant selected a photo of the community garden out of the batch of photos spread out

on the floor during the Photovoice focus group discussion. “Our Karen people,” she said

through the translator, “like to plant and have a garden, so when we were in Thailand, then

we come here and we’re doing the same thing that we did in Thailand. It helps me

remember my home, Karen State.” Participants planted Roselle, tomatoes, squash, bitter

melon, purple beans, pumpkin, and banana trees in the community garden using seeds from

Thailand whenever possible (Fig. 3). The chickens came from Cuba and Thailand, one of

the participants told me during a visit to the livestock section of the community garden,

where a few brightly plumed roosters lorded over a hundred less brightly plumed chickens.

This space was not only safe, it was familiar territory.

In its capacity as a community center, the community garden provided a space where

the participants constructed their blended Karen American culture as a social group. Karen

people gardened with their hands and with tools as they were available; one man waved to

me from a tractor he had borrowed from the adjoining farm. Modern farming tools were

not available in the rural regions of Burma. When I visited the Karen community garden

one Saturday morning with one of the participants, a small group of Karen adults wel-

comed me and offered me a bag of vegetables harvested that morning. Some men were

gathered around a fire supporting a large pot of boiling water. They were preparing to

slaughter a pig. One of the men approached me about finding a place to fix a crack across

Fig. 3 EK, one of the translators and a Karen father, stands in front of his house, a symbol of his life here,and next to a banana tree, which symbolizes his life in Burma


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the face of his iPad. Startled, I found myself caught in a time vortex between the culture of

their past and the culture of their present. The garden had a Karen name that translated into

“Neighbor’s Field” and was sustained by a water system funded by a local Episcopal

church. It was a safe physical place in which they produced social memories. Those

memories in turn anchored them in a climate of belonging rather than invisibility or fear

(Eastmond 2007). One participant expressed this thought during the focus group discus-

sion: “As a human on this planet, we need to belong to something. If we don’t have a home

or belong anywhere it seems like we don’t belong to this planet.”

Education

As a symbol of freedom and empowerment in several of the narratives, education was

linked closely to a collective Karen cultural identity. All of the participants spoke about

their education in Burma and Thailand, even if it was negligible. Although state-sanctioned

education was available in high-population areas such as the Irrawaddy Delta at the

southern tip of Burma, education in Karen State along the border of Thailand and in other

more rural districts was not universally available. One participant indicated that while he

grew up in Rangoon in the delta area of Burma, his wife grew up in a more rural area.

Because she traveled with her father to help support the family, she did not have the

opportunity to go to school at all. When she was 9 years old, she and her father moved to

Thailand to work in a pineapple plantation. Eventually, as a young woman, she attended a

Bible school in Thailand and met her husband there. He lived for 10 years in a refugee

camp in Thailand, Tae Min. After exhausting the limited education available in the camp

for languages (Burmese, Karen and English), geography, math and some natural history, he

escaped the confines of the camp at night to study theology at the Bible School. He served

as a pastor in the refugee camp and has continued in that capacity in resettlement. He and

his wife have developed a Christian education program for Karen children here in the U.S.

However, during the interview, she allowed him to speak for her, and insisted she did not

have enough education to talk about science or contribute to the afterschool program.

Education in Burma was linked tightly with religion to form the body of the collective

Karen identity. According to one narrative, Christian Karen people were persecuted and

killed in Burma because they were seen to be more educated. One of the participants spoke

at length about his mother, a Christian evangelist in Burma, whose movements were

restricted because she was perceived to be an educator by the Burmese military. His

mother was trying to cross from the white zone in Burma, a geographical area in which all

citizens were physically safe but lived under the tight control of the government, into the

mixed brown and black zone, an area in which some people lived safely under the pro-

tection of the army but had to support the army with food and supplies, and other people

were vulnerable to random attack.

My mother was from the white zone. If you grew up in the white zone, you are

Karen. But your ID say you are Burmese. She visit her parent and then she was

threatened you cannot go there, why you go over there? If you need here or you don’t

survive, why not live in the white zone? You will survive. You think you will die,

you will die in the white zone? Why don’t you go to the brown, black zone there? Go

to the Karen State there. My mother said I go just to preach. No, they said, I know

you are not only preaching, you go and teach the Karen people to be educated, right?

Then they threatened my mother a lot, like they fire on my mother come back, they

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kill my mother, and also they try to arrest my grandparent and then they put them

into prison because my mother was here. (EK, interview)

Although education for Karen people who practiced Buddhism was sanctioned by the

government, education for Christians was not. Buddhist education was not perceived to be

a threat to the government. EK continues:

But the Karen Buddhist, because the thing, they are Buddhist, this people are Karen

people, this is no their people, so they don’t like them either. But they like them

better than Christian because the same religion. That’s why they give them a little bit

more freedom. More freedom, I don’t say freedom, but like safer, like safer. (EK,Interview)

Although Christian education and state-sanctioned and funded education are distinct in the

United States, this did not hold true for Burma. Under the military regime, religion and

education were inextricably combined, even though the education might consist of non-

religious subjects such as English and the Burmese language. In a sense, the dual discourse

of Christianity and education provided a counter-narrative to the narrative of the Burmese

government. The military government sanctioned citizenship demarcated by Buddhism,

education conducted in the Burmese language, and membership in the Burmese ethnic

majority. By constructing a counter-narrative, Christian Karen people were able to create a

cultural identity distinct from that sanctioned by the government.

Yes, I was born in Burma, in the Karen State, that we try to fight for, but our state

name called Kaw Thoo Lay. Kaw Thoo Lay mean Land Without Evil. So we want

our country name Kaw Thoo Lay. But the Burmese hate that. They don’t want that.

Land Without Evil mean just like everybody all there are pure, just like the idea of

just like Christianity but uh the Burmese doesn’t want to do that because they want

this country to be a Buddhist country, one nation, one religious, one language, so

they hate it a lot, that they just like, just like, they fear us, they will become all

Christian. The most that they want to persecute on the Karen people because they

fear that all the Karen will become Christian because we don’t accept their Bud-

dhism. That’s why we don’t have a chance to call our country name like Kaw Thoo

Lay, Land Without Evil, but most people know it as the Karen State, just for only the

Burma, the Burmese people, they know it as the Karen State but they don’t know

Kaw Thoo Lay. (EK, interview)

In resettlement, participants recognized the individual freedoms that citizenship in the U.S.

gave them but held tightly to the Karen counter-narrative of loyalty to Karen State and

their Christian faith as expressed through traditional Karen services of worship and

community events. Evident throughout the narratives was a tension between the need to

belong to the Karen culture that existed in Burma before they left and a need to belong to

the culture in their new country. The social memory of the Karen families they left behind

in the Thai refugee camps was still a fresh and essential part of their cultural identity. Some

of the participants expressed a wish in their narratives to use any gains in education and

financial stability to help the Karen people still struggling to survive in Burma and

Thailand.

Moreover, their view of education had not changed dramatically; in resettlement as in

Burma, education was still strongly associated with individual and collective freedom.

Education in the United States provided a social infrastructure for liberation through

citizenship, job advancement, financial security, and the promise of vocational fulfillment


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and civil rights for Karen children according to several narratives. Participants identified

the task of learning the English language as the most profound barrier to achieving a level

of economic and social capital. Although English was identified by all of the participants

who attended school in Burma and Thailand as one of the subjects taught at the primary

school level, many of the adults experienced interrupted or no education due to the climate

of war. One of the participants identified an issue with teacher retention in the refugee

camps: “When American opened the way to uh feel to come to the U.S. so many people

come they look at the vocation to study more so they left the job and they find new way and

they came to the U.S.A., so the school left there, they most people they don’t have the I.D.

so they can’t come to American so after they grade ten, they have to uh teach the student.

So they have less education, yes.” Another participant said that he would eventually like to

return to school so that he could work somewhere other than the chicken processing plant,

but for now, he considered it his duty to his people to remain there so that he could

navigate the language and cultural barriers for his fellow Karen workers. During the

interviews, participants spoke limited English and communicated almost exclusively in

Sgaw-Karen with each other and with their children.

When asked directly about an afterschool science program for Karen children, all of the

participants endorsed the idea as a way to develop academic opportunities for their chil-

dren. In the focus group discussion, one woman selected a photo of her children lined up on

a couch. She spoke clearly in Sgaw-Karen, which was then translated: “We came to the U.

S. because of our kids. We want them to become a famous person and get education and

then later can lead our nation, Karen State.” The Karen woman who served as translator

stated clearly that the pursuit of higher education motivated her to tackle the challenges of

resettlement. The following is an excerpt from the narrative portrait constructed with her:

Our last stop on this day in March was the elementary school, where PSP has been

volunteering for the past year in the afterschool program. Many of the Karen families

send their children to the afterschool program to get help with their homework. In

January, PSP and I taught a class on the Karen New Year. PSP sang a simple national

song and wrote the words on the board in Sgaw-Karen. Most of the children speak

Karen at home, she told me, but they don’t know how to read or write it. I talked

about the history of the Karen Nation to the children, and the meaning behind the

national flag.

I asked PSP what she liked about living in the United States.

“Education,” she answered. “Education is the answer.”

“What do you see for your future?” I asked. Improving her English, she said, so that

she can pass the GED [General Educational Development].

What after that? Nursing school maybe.

“What about your children’s future?” I asked.

“I would like one to be a pastor,” she said.

Maybe J.

“What about N?” I asked, looking at her three-year-old in a pink coat and dress.

Maybe a teacher.

“What does citizenship in the U.S. mean to you?” I asked finally.

“Freedom,” she answered (Fig. 4).

In the Photovoice focus group discussion, one man selected a photo of a community

celebration, and commented, “Before, we lived in a rural area. We cannot see foreigner and

foreigner cannot see us. Now we are the same level with everybody even though we are

from the place where nobody knows. We are refugee. This photo represents all color:

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black, white, yellow, everything are the same. And me, American.” Another couple

selected a photo of me standing in their family garden. She said, “You are the first white

person who has visited my house. When we move here, we don’t have many people

visiting us before.”

In conclusion, the data collected through semi-structured interviews and participant

observation were obtained primarily in small and large group settings and tended to focus

on social narratives such as education and Christianity. These narratives seemed to anchor

individual families in social memories that tied them to their lives in Burma, memories that

were populated with meaning beyond the violence and destruction. Participants were able

to re-capture a collective cultural identity through the liberating discourses of education

and Christianity that set them apart from the dehumanizing identity imposed on them by

state authorities in Burma and Thailand. This collective identity seemed to carry more

weight in this first-generation refugee community than individual narratives. The visual

narratives collected through Photovoice focused almost exclusively on plants, livestock

and family. More than the written narratives, the photos provided insight into the cultural

and social capital of individual families.

Conserving a confluence of knowledge streams

In addition to contributing to our understanding of the funds of knowledge that served as

social capital for this community in displacement, this research tried to identify the funds

of knowledge that could be leveraged by this community in a cross-cultural science

learning community. The framework of social–cultural resilience allowed us to view this

community’s knowledge as a confluence of cultural, social and scientific streams that

enabled these parents to survive the trauma of violence and displacement in refugee camps,

and enabled them to begin to re-build resources for renewal and adaptation in resettlement.

This research also called into question the political viability of dis-embodying their

knowledge by separating it from their individual and collective narratives and subjecting it

Fig. 4 The Karen Americancouple who served as translatorsfor this project displaying theirAmerican passports


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to Western interpretation and categorization. It was important to try to avoid the pathogen

of reducing their knowledge to forms that would make them legible for the dominant

culture, allowing for greater assimilation and reification of their unique cultural and sci-

entific literacies. Therefore, the creation of a hybrid space within which Karen parents

could construct their own cultural identities through visual narratives and story-telling was

essential to this research.

The narrative constructed by Karen participants for their cultural identity in Burma and

in the camps acted as a counter-narrative to the collective identity imposed upon Karen

people in Burma. The narratives above indicate the demands that were being made of them

with regard to the government’s expectation of conformity to a cultural identity institu-

tionalized through centralized education and enforced by military action. By contrast, the

social narrative they have constructed here situates them as dynamic actors in the shaping

of their own futures and the futures of their children, agents for transformation rather than

victims of senseless violence and displacement. However, research emerging from the

Hmong community resettled here in the United States and from indigenous scholars

indicates that the construction of a counter-narrative in resistance to the pressure to

assimilate to the dominant culture could become a viable option for the future. The power

implicit in the Karen narrative of self-determination is not reconciled at this point with the

climate of invisibility that I have observed when Karen parents interact with school offi-

cials and teachers on school grounds. One of the benefits of this research could be to

integrate Karen parents with their embodied knowledge into the learning ecology of the

school through their participation in a learning community with their children. Within this

hybrid space, a climate of reciprocity of knowledge could create a more equitable platform

for producing culturally-based science knowledge.

Karen parents demonstrated through their narratives how pivotal the memory of their

experiences inBurma andThailand has become to their collective identity in resettlement; yet

their social and cultural narrativesmay change as they adapt to this new environment and look

for new ways to manage and redistribute their funds of knowledge. Although they have been

displaced from the mountains of Karen State in Burma, their memories still reside there, and

continue to inform how they shape a relationship with the land in rural southeast United

States. Placing their self-sustaining knowledge within the context of sustainability science

recognizes the primacy of this relationship to rebuilding community resilience. As demon-

strated above, the community garden functioned not just as a garden but as a community

center, where Karen families gathered for meals and shared labor every weekend. The

knowledge shared at the community garden connected them to a rich history apart from the

violence of military attacks and internment. Like the Karen Christian Church, it linked them

to the lifestyle they remembered in Burma, the self-sustaining lifestyle of their parents and

their grandparents. The act of cultivating food and caring for livestock anchors these parents

in the past and present as agents of self-determination. Karen knowledge of horticulture and

animal husbandry would be the most likely science knowledge that could anchor their

children in the cultural heritage of the parents within the context of a cross-cultural learning

community. In the same way that Hammond (2001) used the Mien knowledge of house-

building to construct a science learning space in which multiple cultural voices could be

heard, the design and cultivation of a school garden using seeds for purple beans, bitter melon

and Roselle, could serve as a representation of Karen embodied knowledge within the

institutional school setting. In this hybrid space constructed outside of Western knowledge

and organizational boundaries, a reciprocity of knowledge embodied in the lives of parents

could be cultivated. In partnership with science educators, this process could contribute

significantly to the parents’ and students’ accumulation of social and cultural capital.

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Of the six processes Turner and colleagues (2008) recommended for the rebuilding of

cultural resilience, the opportunity for self-determination through gardening seemed to

address several: by identifying gardening as a rich cultural resource that links their past and

present, this project focused on parents’ knowledge in a way that accentuated their

potential for shaping their future and the future of their children rather than accentuating

their loss. Articulating their knowledge of gardening situated these parents as co-designers

of the afterschool science program rather than as passive volunteers resigned to the

periphery. In addition, identifying parents’ interest in education satisfied two of the pro-

cesses for rebuilding cultural resilience. By creating space for their concerns in decision-

making at the institutional school level with regard to a potential afterschool science

program, this research project created space for better alternatives for decision-making in

the future. Karen adults identified education opportunities for themselves (in learning

English and getting their citizenship) and for their children as being transformative. In the

case of one young Karen woman who graduated from the local high school and was

beginning to navigate the admission process of the local community college, careers that

required higher education such as nursing and teaching that were not a possibility for her

parents or grandparents became accessible for her.

Although instruction in the Karen language and Karen history has also been identified

by the participants as essential to the survival of their culture, there was little evidence to

support the idea that they are keystone cultural characteristics. The Karen language and

history may be essential characteristics that Karen parents want to pass on to their children,

but they do not carry the same weight for rebuilding cultural resilience and do not seem to

be critical for sustaining Karen cultural identity. Even though national days such as the

Karen New Year are honored by families, more importance seems to be attached to faith-

based community gatherings. One possible explanation for this could be the lack of a need

for a strong nationalistic narrative as they try to integrate into the social infrastructure in

the U.S. In the same way, although the Karen language is undoubtedly the primary lan-

guage of Karen households in this community, these Karen parents have made little effort

to teach their children to read and write in that language. Their emphasis has been on

learning to read and write English more efficiently.

The cultural funds of knowledge identified through these visual and written narratives

revealed sentinels of the Karen cultural heritage that have sustained these Karen parents

through a time of great disturbance and change. Although a collective narrative focused

more on the Karen Christian Church and education, the most significant sentinel for

individual narratives has been gardening. Anchored in a cultural tradition of farming, these

Karen parents gained perspective and comfort in continuity and the potential of self-

determination rooted in the land. Therefore, a science education program that focuses on

Karen gardening practices would be the most appropriate way for Karen parents to

leverage their cultural knowledge and “author” a collaborative space in a cross-cultural

learning community for their children.

Cultural keystone characteristics of resilience

In the past decade, educators have responded to the influx of refugees into their country by

creating programs that integrate the cultural funds of knowledge of refugee communities

into cross-cultural learning communities. Refugee parents with more social and cultural

capital, and therefore more cultural resilience, than this first-generation Karen community


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have embraced opportunities to contribute to their children’s learning environment through

this model.

Emerging from visual and written narratives, the funds of knowledge collected through

these narratives have taken on a three-dimensional character that could contribute more

than objective knowledge to a learning community. Rather than a list of cultural facts about

the Karen people in general, these cultural funds of knowledge are embodied by living

people and their stories. To separate the knowledge from the storytellers would result in

dis-embodied, fragmented information that might seem superficial to Karen students and

impede the process of constructing science learning space based on a reciprocity of

knowledge building.

Situating this cultural knowledge within the design of an afterschool science learning

program would create space within the dominant culture of the classroom with permeable

borders of knowledge where the Karen parents could serve as stakeholders. In addition, this

learning community could provide a strong foundation for cross-cultural understanding by:

(1) establishing a baseline for Karen cultural knowledge that Karen parents themselves

have identified as critical to the rebuilding of social and cultural capital in resettlement; (2)

securing a line of communication between stakeholders at the school, the researcher, and

the Karen community that can be used to modify and improve ongoing projects with Karen

students such as the afterschool program; and (3) building a community of science learning

that extends beyond the traditional classroom into the families and communities of par-

ticipating students, thus maximizing the platform for advancement in science literacy.

Implications for advancing the model of science education for refugee students by

incorporating their home language and everyday knowledge into a hybrid space for science

learning are clear. Any future project with Karen students should focus initially on gar-

dening, which functions as a keystone cultural characteristic to build social and cultural

resilience for the Karen community. It also carries significant weight when balanced with

the value of education. It will be essential to situate science learning within familiar

frameworks such as the Karen knowledge about growing food and raising livestock so that

Karen students can participate in the co-construction of science knowledge using the

discourses of their family and community as well as the Western discourses of science

learning. In this way, the cultural identity that their parents have constructed through years

of sustaining a counter-narrative in Burma and Thailand will not be de-valued, but will be

one stream of knowledge among many that help to shape the hybrid cultural identity of

these Karen students.

Appendix 1: Focus group protocol as applied within a Photovoice project

Reference: Wang, Caroline C. (1999). Photovoice: A participatory action research strategy

applied to women’s health. Journal of Women’s Health, 8(2), 185–192.Photovoice is a participatory action research (PAR) method based on feminist theory

and innovative approaches to documentary photography. It has been used in the United

States and extensively in England as a tool to empower marginalized people to work for

change by representing their own realities through photography and presenting this in a

public forum to policymakers. The three main goals of Photovoice, as defined by C. Wang

are: to enable people (1) to record and reflect their personal and community strengths and

concerns, (2) to promote critical dialogue and knowledge about personal and community

issues through group discussions of photographs, and (3) to reach policymakers (p. 185).

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This method allows people who have a limited public voice to represent themselves to the

public. The Karen refugees with whom I work are limited by language and cultural barriers.

This project would allow them to define their own “creolized” cultural identity through visual

representation. Within the context of this project, these visual representations will not be

made available to the public or to policymakers except in an educational venue.

I will discuss the use of cameras and the ethics of using cameras to capture people’s

identities. We will review the consent forms and discuss how to protect people’s privacy,

recognizing that anyone has the right to refuse to have their photograph taken. Photovoice

also has developed the practice of returning photos to the community members, in this

case, the students and their families, when the project is completed. That will be an option

that participants can choose in this project.

The prompt for taking photographs will be: Take pictures of the things or people who aremost important to you as a Karen American person. After the first set of photographs havebeen developed, there are three stages that unfold in the focus group discussions: selecting

photographs that hold significant meaning; contextualizing the photographs, or story-

telling; and codifying issues or themes that emerge from the discussion. Questions to

prompt discussion during the focus group are:

What do you see in this picture?

What does this photograph make you think of?

Why is this photograph important to you?

What does this photograph say about you? About the Karen people?

Appendix 2: Narrative portrait of PSP

PSP has passed her citizenship test. After waiting 5 years to take it, she has passed. Three

weeks ago, when we sat in yet another doctor’s office trying to figure out what was making

her so ill, she worried that she would not be well in time to travel to Atlanta for the test.

Before PSP became ill, she gave me Karen language lessons Friday afternoons at 5.

Sometimes we would look through the citizenship kit and I would quiz her on the governor

of G___ or the state representatives. She always knew the answers. A surprising but

welcome diagnosis of H. Pylori followed the last doctor’s appointment. Now she is

beginning to heal. And she is a citizen of the United States.

Balm for the body and the soul

When I congratulated PSP on passing her test, I asked, “What does citizenship mean to

you?” She said that living in Thailand in the refugee camp was difficult: they were not

allowed to apply for citizenship in Thailand. Thailand does not have a rule like the U.S.

that allows people to apply for citizenship after 5 years. A fence circles the camp. If Karen

refugees are caught outside of the fence, they can be arrested and deported back to Burma.

If they return to Burma, they risk persecution, imprisonment and almost certain death. The

military government in Burma has been systematically eliminating ethnic minorities for the

past several decades. Yet the government of Thailand gave them two options: live in the

camps or return home.

PSP, her husband EK, and her mother came here from Thailand 5 years ago; at that time

she had two small boys, J and J. They had been in the refugee camp for over 20 years


123


before they came to J_____ P____, the organic farm in C____ that serves as a transition

place for refugee families.

If you ask PSP where she is from, she will tell you “Karen State.” Karen State is a long

sliver of land along the Thai–Burma border. EK has told me that one day the Karen people

will be an independent nation. They will be able to live in peace in their own country

without fear of military raids.

On this day in March, the air has a touch of spring. We walk outside to look at PSP’s

garden. She is feeling better and can walk on her own from the house to the barn. Last fall,

when friends and I shared an evening meal with PSP and her family, she showed us around

her garden with pride. Vibrant green plants clung to every surface and each other. Onions,

tomatoes, bright red peppers weaving around the tomato vines, great purple bean pods

hanging heavily from vine-covered trellises, giant curved yellow squashes, and bitter

melons populated the small garden. Several times over the fall when I came for my lesson,

rabbits were grazing in the yard alongside chickens.

EK keeps chickens, at the house and at their community’s garden down the road on

J____’s land. Once last fall when the youth group came for a meal after working on a

chicken coop with the Karen families, EK showed them how to make a trap out of branches

to catch garden invaders. He also demonstrated a chicken trick that the kids tried to copy:

he put a chicken to sleep by tucking its head under its wing, and shaking it up and down

while singing in Karen. Many times when I would arrive on Friday evenings for my

language lesson, I would see EK leaning on the fence outside talking to the chickens.

EK and a young Karen man whom I don’t recognize are out in the garden today turning

the soil for spring planting. PSP shows me where she will plant kale, and beans, purple and

green, long yellow squashes, and herbs with Karen names. I notice a tent pitched in the

backyard and we step inside; it is full of tiny plants in starter boxes. “This is my green-

house,” she said. J, her second-born, tugged on my arm. “I water all the plants,” he said

proudly.

I offered to drive up to the community garden with her. The kids wanted to come but

PSP waved them over to their father. “But my mother wants to come,” she said. Every time

I see PSP’s mother, she is smiling. She is a very slight woman. Once when it was very hot

in the summer, I saw her out in the yard rubbing a branch of something against a stone, and

then rubbing the residue on her cheeks. PSP’s family does not use air conditioning. It was

sometimes a struggle for me to focus on the language lesson. As we drove through J____

on the way to the garden, PSP greeted friends from J____. PSP has many friends, Karen

and American.

PsP remembers the house she and her family first stayed in when they came to J___

from the airport. She has told me that space in the refugee camp was tight, with bathrooms

and wells for drinking water placed very close together. Very few people were able to grow

their own food for lack of space, and the children were often sick. By contrast, J___ has

acres of forest and farmland, and the houses sit nestled at discrete distances. They are

painted bright colors. On one porch, several people are gathered in conversation. “This

reminds me of home,” PSP says. “Well, yes,” I responded, “except we don’t have jungle

here or bananas growing on the trees, and it’s freezing cold.” “Or waterfalls,” she says.

Once when I was visiting PSP, EK held up a banana and said that this fruit doesn’t taste

anything like the bananas they had at home. At home they could reach up and pluck a ripe

banana from the tree and the flavor was rich and full. The bananas they have here, he said,

are harvested before they are ripe and they die slowly on the trip to the grocery store.

PSP lived in a tiny apartment above the school at J___ at one point when their family

was trying to move back here from A___. She served as interpreter for the next group of

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Karen refugees who came to stay for a few months to learn the ways and language of this

country. “What is difficult about living here in America?” I asked her now. She answered

slowly that if a person does not know English, then it is difficult to live in America. She

began learning English as a small child. The schools in the refugee camps taught the

children three languages: English, Burmese, and Thai. Some Karen had lived in Thailand

for years and spoke only Thai. They were not residents of the refugee camps. PSP’s sister

had married a Thai Karen man. The difficulty with that, she explained, is that she doesn’t

get to speak or read in her own language.

When we finally reached the community garden, several Karen families were there

ahead of us. J___ donated this land to the Karen people. On Saturdays in the summer,

families come out with their children to work in the garden, eat together on the grass, and

socialize. Now the ground is turned over, waiting for spring seeds. Giant water coolers

stand above the ground to feed the irrigation system. In the fall when we were here, there

was a magnificent patch of blood red hot peppers along one side of the garden.

PSP’s mother set out purposefully along the path in-between plots. PSP pointed out the

plots that her mother has reserved for their family for the spring planting. We walked

through the garden to the far side, where a herd of goats lived in the summer and fall. PSP

had a goat that was expecting a baby. Now there were no goats here. “They have run off

into the woods,” she said. I wondered if maybe they were carried off into the woods by

bigger critters. The flock of chickens looked a bit thinned out too. In the fall, the chickens

were arrogant and gorgeous, a variety of orange-red roosters from Cuba, EK told us. Now

they didn’t seem so bold.

On the way back into town, we passed a Karen woman, distinctive in her long Karen

skirt and flip-flops, a child on each hand, walking up to a store in C___. The sign caught

my eye. It was written in Sgaw-Karen. “What is that?” I asked PSP. We pulled up and met

the owners, the Karen pastor’s son and his wife. It was a modest general store, with a cash

register propped on a box, and shelves stocked with packaged foods from Thailand. In the

corner, great bags of rice were stacked up like bales of hay. I wandered through the aisles,

marveling at what could be pressed into plastic and shipped from across the world. They

would be having a grand opening on Saturday, the pastor’s son said.

I had last seen the pastor’s son at J’s tenth birthday party. J is PSP’s first-born child. It is

the Karen tradition to call adults by their first-born child’s name; for example, PSP is really

called J-mo.

Our last stop on this day in March was the elementary school, where PSP has been

volunteering for the past year in the afterschool program. Many of the Karen families send

their children to the afterschool program to get help with their homework. In January, PSP

and I taught a class on the Karen New Year. PSP sang a simple national song and wrote the

words on the board in Sgaw-Karen. Most of the children speak Karen at home, she told me,

but they don’t know how to read or write it. I talked about the history of the Karen Nation

to the children, and the meaning behind the national flag.

I asked PSP what she liked about living in the United States. “Education,” she

answered. “Education is the answer.”

“What do you see for your future?” I asked. Improving her English, she said, so that she

can pass the GED.

What after that? Nursing school maybe.

“What about your children’s future?” I asked.

“I would like one to be a pastor,” she said.

Maybe J.

“What about N?” I asked, looking at her three-year-old in a pink coat and dress.


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Maybe a teacher.

“What does citizenship in the U.S. mean to you?” I asked finally.

“Freedom,” she answered.

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Cultural Resilience in Karen Refugee Parents

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