Am I a Qualified Literacy Researcher and Educator? A Counterstory of a Professional Journey of One Asian Male Literacy Scholar in the United States

• In Event: 43.018 - Changing the Dominant Narrative: A Call for Using Storytelling as Language and Literacy Theory, Research Methodology, and Practice

Abstract

While there is a growing interest in why international faculty are increasing in education fields, there are few studies investigating how international faculty perceive their professional experiences in terms of teaching, scholarship, and service. Further, most literature on scholars of color focused on Afro-American (e.g., Johnson & Bryan, 2017), Asian-American (e.g., Liu, 2009), or Latina/o scholars (Guanipa, Santa Cruz, & Chao, 2003) who were born in the US. International faculty’s experiences have been examined in few specific areas such as second language acquisition (e.g., Li, 2006) or multi-cultural education (e.g., Shrake, 2006) but not literacy or language arts. International faculty members are known to experience inequitable marginalization and face different types of racism and marginalization (e.g., Lee, 2002). Further, their job satisfaction is reported to be significantly lower than that of their White counterparts (Zhan and Gao, 2011). However, little is known about how these patterns manifest in the field of literacy and language arts.
In this presentation, I offer up AsianCrit and CRT’s counterstorytelling as methodological tools to expose linguistic, cultural and nationality-based stereotypes and how they influence my teaching and research. AsianCrit is a branch of CRT extended to Asians in education. As such, I use a counter-storytelling method to explore how I faced deficit, racialized discourse about people of Color as part of my literate identities as an individual, a student, a teacher, a faculty member, and a researcher in literacy over time. For the purpose of this session, I will focus specifically on my experiences as a foreign-born faculty member. Foreign-born faculty usually refers to faculty members who earned their undergraduate degrees in their home country. This is because they may experience different educational, social, professional, and cultural discourses distinctive from those who earned their undergraduate degrees in the US. Such stories are rarely reported and yet need to be made more visible in order to inform and extend discussions among scholars and students—and the public—about the pervasive experiences of alienation, contradiction, and tension faced by many Asian and international scholars whose experiences must be understood as richly and distinctly informed rather than ill-informed or under-skilled. I hope that my counter-story contributes to the field’s overall understanding of what counts as literacy as well as existing labels and stereotypes within the field of literacy and literacy instruction.

Author

• Bong Gee Jang, Syracuse University