Internationally Trained Teachers: Filipinos Working with Children with Disabilities in the U.S.: A Multiple Case Study

The United States (U.S.) is a major destination for teacher migration, with teachers being hired to fill shortages in math, science, and special education. In fact, the nation’s shortage of special education teachers has hit critical levels, further exacerbated by high levels of attrition. For these reasons, some school districts hire teachers from outside the United States on J-1 visas, including the Philippines. To ascertain the experiences of special education teachers from the Philippines working in the U.S. on J-1 visas, a multiple case study was conducted. The study was anchored in the transnationalism tenet of AsianCrit, allowing participants to reflect on their classroom and cultural experiences in the U.S. Participants were each analyzed as individual cases before a cross-case analysis examined similarities among cases. The analyses composed of three types of coding: open coding, searching for excerpts from the data that answered the research questions; axial coding, or examining the relationships among codes and assigning them to categories and themes; and selective coding, or tying the themes to the literature. Among the themes that emerged from the analyses were “knowledge of special education” and “different languages” for the in-class experiences and “cultural diversity” and “finances” for the lived experiences outside the classroom. The current study filled a gap in the existing body of research. No known previous study has ascertained both the experiences of internationally trained special education teachers working outside their home countries and their perspectives of those experiences through the lens of their home culture. Implications for practice and recommendations for future research included cultural awareness for both the participants themselves and people that they work with, and further expansion upon relevant topics.