Building Bridges - Border Crossing Musings
Educational Discoveries—if authentic—are intrinsically eternal. The questions we put in motion for ourselves, and then repurpose for our students may become a lifetime habit of inquiry. What do I know and how do I continuously build upon that foundation? I revise and reject incomplete information. I check my gut for bias. It begins with a willingness to conduct the laborious work of witness. See and testify. Listen and document. Inquire and expand. Every time I come to the U.S. – Mexico border, I realize that it is a sinister sort of magical realism. The border is a paradox—it exists and it does not exist, simultaneously. Migration is always discussed in terms of hydraulic metaphors—a wave, a tide, a flood, a flow of people coming or going. Like water in great force, this phenomenon cannot be stopped. Erosion is inevitable. As a single molecule of water begins in a cloud, rains down on a mountain, flows through rivers to the sea, evaporates to the sky and joins the cumulus moisture above to cycle through once again, so too is our shared human experience of educational inquiry through generations and time. It is my hope that this experience may prove to be a positive moment in your journey of understanding and unity across generations, privilege of mobility and borders real and imagined.