Bridging the Gap: How Walking, Healing, and Gardening Connect Universities with Migrants

Written by Tzu-Chi Ou

Image credit: Provided by Yun-Chi Lee, Tzu-Chi Ou, and Zi-Yu Agnes Hu 

In 2026, more than 800,000 migrant workers live in Taiwan. In the traditional pedagogical system of migration studies in Taiwan, we are trained to view migrants as labour units or policy challenges. The curriculum often focuses on macro-level theories or statistics. The current system left students intellectually informed but socially disconnected from the large migrant communities living alongside them. If we aim to build an inclusive society, we must ask, from the perspective of higher education, how we can truly connect universities with migrants.

As a professor specialising in migration studies, I initially thought this pedagogical vision would be effortless. I assumed that by offering courses on the subject, students would be eager to learn and naturally become more empathetic toward migrants. This is not what happened as expected. Students may perceive migrants very differently. Moreover, migration is an emotionally charged topic. Thus, the journey took several unexpected detours, such as reidentifying the learning objectives and brainstorming meaningful interventions. Through teaching experiments involving walking, healing, and gardening, I discovered that moving beyond the classroom requires more than just a syllabus—it requires a fundamental shift in how we encounter “the other.”

“Who” are the Migrants? The Challenges of Teaching Migration

Teaching migration is uniquely challenging when the classroom itself is a diverse, heterogeneous space. Over the past few years, I have taught “Migration 101,” a general education course, and “Migration and Globalisation,” a specialised elective module. Because both are taught in English, my students are split into two main categories, with about half being Taiwanese and the other half being international students. These international cohorts include degree-seekers from Southeast Asia, exchange students from Europe and North America, and “overseas Chinese” (qiaosheng) students who further navigate their own complex identities during their study.

I soon realised that these student groups hold different ideas and expectations about who a “migrant” is. Most of my local Taiwanese students from middle-class families and urban areas were clearly aware that Taiwan has long been an immigrant society. Interestingly, they tended to view migration from a distance—focusing on Central American migrants in the U.S. or Syrian refugees in Europe—while overlooking the migrants who are already woven into the fabric of their own daily lives.

Meanwhile, many international students were acutely aware of their “guest” and sometimes marginalised status on the campus. Language and cultural barriers often left them without a platform to articulate their feelings about living as foreigners in Taiwan. Furthermore, Southeast Asian students often described experiences of being treated as “racial others,” a starkly different reality compared to the experiences of their Western counterparts.

Creating Encounters and Mutual Worth

To address these tensions, I decided to build common ground by creating direct connections between my students and the migrant community. With support from the Serve the People Association (桃園市群眾服務協會) in Taoyuan, some students organised cultural exchanges with Indonesian and Filipino workers in shelters. Others designed handicrafts and outdoor activities for second-generation children at the Dandelion New Immigrant Association (蒲公英新移民服務協會).

In these moments, a strange phenomenon occurred: local students met in their hometown Southeast Asian migrant workers who were “strangers” to them, while Southeast Asian students met “familiar faces” in a strange land. Through these encounters, I sought to foster “mutual worth”—a state in which a student learns something valuable about themselves by connecting with another person. This goes beyond theory; it is about being open-minded and providing mutual help. Over five years, I developed three specific experiments to facilitate these breakthroughs.

Experiment 1: Student-Designed Walking Tours

Early on, my students and I attended walking tours hosted by associations and organisations like the Brilliant Time Bookstore and 1095. My students and I explored assembled migrant spaces as epitomes, such as “Little Indonesia” and “Little Manila” in Taipei and ASEAN Square  (第一廣場) in Taichung. While these tours were eye-opening, I noticed the students remained passive listeners. I wondered: What if the students designed the tours themselves?

In 2022, we collaborated with the community organisation Mingalar Par to study the history and food culture of Myanmar Street in Zhonghe in New Taipei City. The experience culminated in a workshop where students designed tours from scratch. The results were creative; one group even built a miniature paper Indonesian restaurant to attract participants to their route.

However, I realised that a design on paper is still an “armchair strategist.” To bring it to actual life, I invited students from the previous semester to return as actual tour guides for the new cohort. This opportunity transformed them into active learners. They prepared maps, brochures, and detailed scripts on the culinary culture of Taipei Main Station’s underground area. By translating classroom knowledge into an interactive experience for their peers, they finally took the initiative to create narratives through active participation.

Experiment 2: Art Therapy for Knowing Yourself

Image credit: Art therapy workshop. Photo provided by Yun-Chi Lee, Tzu-Chi Ou, and Zi-Yu Agnes Hu.

Therapy and healing are not usually associated with migration studies, but this became one of my most beneficial experiments. While many students found meeting migrants rewarding—one British-Taiwanese student even video-called her mother to discuss her migration struggles after visiting a shelter—others had a much harder time.

I once received a blunt, anonymous evaluation: “This course was pretty much useless. All it did was make us feel guilty about foreign migrant workers.” It hurt to read. I was shocked that my teaching might be causing such deep frustration and guilt. This feedback made me realise that learning about migration is an emotionally charged process that can trigger defensiveness. To address this, I introduced art therapy workshops led by a professional therapist, Wen.

Before meeting migrants, students used clay to model their anticipation and anxiety. After the visits, we held a second session to digest the experience. One student noted, “The art therapy helped me to clarify these paths and remember each of these connections.” By working with art materials, they were able to express the “disturbing differences” they felt and transform guilt into a structured reflection on their identity.

Image credit: Photo provided by Yun-Chi Lee, Tzu-Chi Ou, and Zi-Yu Agnes Hu.

Experiment 3: The Immigrating Garden Project

My most recent project was inspired by the Hanoi-based Vietnamese conceptual artist Tuan Mami, who builds an “immigrating garden” using seeds donated by Vietnamese marriage migrants and migrant workers in Taiwan. These plants are not only a medium of social relationships but also a metaphor of migration. Every plant in the garden carries its own story of travel. By creating a communal garden, the artist also builds a community around the gardening.

For my students, food is an easy entry point, but they often paused their response at the level of commenting, “It tastes good.” Thus, I further requested that they critically examine the food ingredients as metaphors for material mobility and sociocultural adaptation. In Spring 2025, we adopted the good intention from Tuan Mami’s project and built a small-scale immigrating garden at the university campus in Taipei. Working with Ms Dinh Thi Thu, a Vietnamese marriage migrant, we introduced edible herbs commonly used in Southeast Asia to the campus, such as fish mint, wild betel leaf, and makrut lime. Most of us were novices at gardening, but the practical routine of ploughing soil and pruning branches became the most evocative part of embodying self-to-immigrant bodily stories through the course implementation.

At the end of the course semester, our students’ final projects, such as “Food, Spices, and Memories,” used these plants from the university’s immigrating garden to connect scents with migrant life stories. In our 2025 exhibition, the students displayed dried herbs and invited participants to immerse themselves in migrants’ memories of food and their hometowns through their five senses. In spring 2026, the students created herb narrative cards based on interviews about the plants in the garden. The garden gradually becomes a living archive where students do not just study migration—they tend to it.

Image credit: Photo provided by Yun-Chi Lee, Tzu-Chi Ou, and Zi-Yu Agnes Hu.

Conclusion: Cultivating an Inclusive Future

To create a truly inclusive society, higher education must actively bridge the gap between academia and the real world. This requires us to be brave enough to step out of the classroom and into the streets, shelters, and gardens. By fostering “mutual worth” through hands-on, emotionally aware experiments, we challenge our biases. Whether through a walking tour, a piece of clay, or a sprig of fish mint, these connections remind us that the story of migration is not someone else’s story—it is a shared journey we are all part of.

Acknowledgement

This paper was first presented at the 2025 Asia NGO Forum. I am grateful to Taiwan Aid and One-Forty for the invitation. This work was made possible by University Social Responsibility (USR) funding from National Chengchi University (NCCU) and support from the Serve the People Association.

Tzu-Chi Ou is an Associate Professor at the International College of Innovation at NCCU, Taiwan. With a PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University (2018), her work focuses on the intersection of migration, intimacy, and place-making. Having previously served as a postdoctoral fellow at Academia Sinica, she now dedicates her research to understanding the reproductive rights of Southeast Asian migrant workers in Taiwan. Beyond her scholarship—which has appeared in Pacific Affairs and positions: Asia critique—she leads community-engaged projects that bring together international students and migrant communities to foster deeper cultural understanding.

This article was published as part of the special issue on Plural Education within Taiwan and Beyond.