44.073 - Beyond Black, Brown, and White: A Critical Symposium of Asian American Teacher Identity

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

Investigations into teachers of color predominantly focus on African American and Latinx educators (e.g., Foster, 1993; Irvine, 1989; Ochoa, 2007), with Asian Americans largely omitted from these conversations. This symposium brings to bear qualitative studies examining the experiences and identities of Asian American teachers. Using critical frameworks, this symposium seeks to uncover how Asian culture/ethnicity informs Asian American pre-service/in-service teacher identities, and how these identities impact and shape classroom dynamics. Across these studies, essentializing tropes of Otherness, foreignness, and the model minority stereotype surfaced in different ways to underpin Asian American educators’ teaching styles, selection/implementation of curricular materials, and philosophical conceptualizations of education.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Research on the Education of Asian and Pacific Americans

Chair

• Stacey J. Lee, University of Wisconsin - Madison

Papers

• A Different Shade of Brown: Investigating South Asian American Preservice Teacher Identities - Venkat Ramaprasad, The College of New Jersey; Noreen Naseem Rodriguez, Iowa State University

• "Caught Between Two Worlds": Asian American Elementary Teachers' Enactment of Asian American History - Noreen Naseem Rodriguez, Iowa State University

• Asian American Pacific Islander Male Mathematics Teacher Identity and the Myth of the Model Minority - Theodore Chao, The Ohio State University; Kari Kokka, University of Pittsburgh

• Understanding Identity and Practice of Asian American Educators - Juliet Lee, University of California - Los Angeles

Discussant

• A. Lin Goodwin, The University of Hong Kong