Forty Years and Still Finding One Another

For 40 years, The International Educator (TIE) has helped bring together a community of international educators, creating space for people across countries, cultures, and school communities to share their experiences, ideas, and expertise. 

We now have more ways to connect than ever. Staying connected is another matter. We can join a meeting from another continent, find a colleague who shares our professional interests, and access more educational resources than we could ever use. Yet the ease of communication does not guarantee that we feel connected. Connection asks something more of us than access. It asks us to make the effort to explain, to listen, to share, and to remain curious about experiences that are not our own. 

There is something I never quite get used to about my work as the Content Editor of TIE: the moment a story arrives and I realize that someone, somewhere in the world, has decided that an experience worth reflecting on might also be worth sharing. I am humbled by that decision. It takes work to turn experience into something useful to others. It takes generosity to share a resource without knowing who will use it or how far it might travel. And it takes a particular kind of courage to write honestly about the parts of our work that are complicated, uncomfortable, or seemingly unfinished. 

This is one of the things I value most about TIE. Every submission is an invitation into someone else's world. Sometimes that invitation comes in the form of a carefully developed framework, a practical resource, or a description of a teaching approach that another school might adopt. Sometimes it comes as a personal story, one that requires its author to reveal uncertainty, reconsider a past decision, or acknowledge the distance between intention and impact.

And you do not have to be a writer to have a voice, or a published author to have a story worth sharing. We want educators to feel that their voices and experiences are welcome here, as they always have been. International education encompasses too many perspectives, contexts, and lived experiences for any one voice to tell its whole story. It is not one experience. It is thousands of experiences shaped by different histories, languages, cultures, school communities, and understandings of what education can be. Our common ground does not erase those differences. It gives us a reason to be interested in them.

We cannot always know what happens after a story is published. We do not see every conversation it starts or every practice it changes. But we can create the conditions for those things to happen. We can make space for educators to contribute to a professional conversation that extends beyond their own schools and immediate circumstances.

As Content Editor, I am fortunate to sit in a position where these stories and ideas pass through my hands. I get to witness the breadth of what educators are thinking about, the care they bring to their work, and the willingness of so many to contribute something that might help a colleague they will never meet. I do not take that lightly. TIE cannot create connection on behalf of a profession. It can, however, provide a place for it to begin, a place where educators can share what they know, question what they have assumed, and make their experiences available to others.

For 40 years, TIE has been doing just that. I hope we keep writing the stories that make someone pause, sharing the resources that help a colleague move forward, and contributing even when our work is imperfect and our thinking is still evolving. Most of all, I hope we continue to recognize the people on the other side of all this sharing: educators doing the work, often far from the people and places that once made them feel known.

We cannot eliminate the distance between us. We can do something about what crosses it. A story. A resource. An idea offered freely. An experience shared with honesty. A moment of recognition from someone we may never meet. Again and again, these small acts make a larger conversation possible. As we celebrate 40 years of TIE, I feel incredibly fortunate to be part of that exchange, to witness the generosity behind it, and to see how much we have to offer one another.

Forty years is a remarkable history. But there are voices we have not heard yet, connections waiting to be made, and educators who have no idea how much a story from someone halfway around the world might mean to them.

I hope we keep finding one another.