Negotiating Racial Positioning and Educational Reforms in Immigrant Community Spaces

• In Event: Promising Scholarship in Education: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

Commonly accepted understandings of education view it as a vehicle of social mobility for hard-working individuals who want it badly enough, regardless of race and class. Asian Americans, often seen as successful “model minorities,” are lionized as proof of the uplifting power of education. Critical educational researchers have long challenged this assumption and asked how education, in a racialized, classed, and gendered social context, complicates immigrants’ quests for social mobility. While educational researchers are increasingly recognizing Asian Americans’ heterogeneous experiences, opportunities, and racialization within schools, the role of out-of-school educational contexts is less understood. Nevertheless, community-based spaces can offer K-12 practitioners, policymakers, and researchers insight into how immigrant communities assert agency over their children’s education, counter the assimilative processes young people encounter in schools, and socialize youth into their cultural communities.

This poster presentation shares the results of a multi-sited critical ethnography that examined how community-based spaces in one Korean American community both challenged and reinforced race- and class-based inequality in education. Based on 15 months of fieldwork in a heritage language school and private test-prep center (called hagwon in Korean), this study employs a theoretical lens that combines critical theories of racialization and neoliberalism to understand how the positioning of Asian Americans as “model minorities” furthers the neoliberal push for productive, profitable, and self-governed subjects (and vice versa). The study also draws on the community cultural wealth model of cultural capital (Yosso, 2005) to examine how community-based spaces share valuable knowledges and resources with youth of color. The data include 55 semi-structured interviews with youth, parents, and staff; over 300 hours of observations; family background questionnaires; demographic data; and document analysis. This project was supported by the AERA Minority Dissertation Fellowship.

Author

• Eujin Park, University of Wisconsin - Madison