Research for Social Justice: Oral Histories of Chinese Immigrants' Experience of Language, Culture, Identity, and Power in the Southern United States

• In Event: 75.042 - MTCC Roundtable Session 34
  In Roundtable Session: 75.042-2 - Research for Social Justice: Multimodal Narratives of Struggles of Ethnic-Minority, Immigrant, Migrant, and Refugee Students in China, Indonesia, and the United States

Abstract

The researcher explored language, culture, and identity development of Chinese immigrant children as their families and communities struggled to facilitate their academic success while maintaining their cultural and language heritages within diversities among minorities and other ethnic groups in Southern U. S. schools, neighborhoods, and communities. The researcher created detailed profiles of five Chinese immigrant families and their children and a portrait of their schools, neighborhoods, and communities. The researcher critically analyzed the ways in which language, culture, identity, and power had impacted Chinese immigrant students’ school success, and examined the Chinese community's efforts towards and influences on students' education such as community-based heritage language schools and, more broadly the struggles of Chinese immigrants in the U. S. South. The study employed a cross-cultural narrative inquiry method which involved archive research, policy document analyses, newspaper clippings, document collection, participant observation, in-depth interviews, and informal conversations at Chinese restaurants, fish markets, tea stores, grocery stores, Chinese language schools, and community centers.

The researcher found that Chinese community heritage schools are not only an academic entity of language maintenance, but also fulfill the community's desire to foster the Chinese immigrant students' linguistic and cultural identities. The community-based schools provide heritage culture and language programs that assist Chinese students' success in public schools. This research project is part of a long-term program of research on language, culture, identity, and power in relation to bilingual/bicultural/biracial education, multilingual/multicultural/multiracial education, and cross-cultural curriculum studies and teacher education in Hong Kong, China, Canada, and the U. S. A.

This study opens new areas of inquiry for the comparative approach to implications of language, culture, identity, and power for the education of immigrant and minority students in international contexts. This line of inquiry links with significant documentary study (e.g., Nee, Victor G., & Bary Nee, 1972), oral history research (Zhao, 2002), memoir (Choy, 1999/2005), ethnographic and narrative work done with immigrant families and children (e.g., Carger, 1996, 2009; Li, 2002, 2006; Loewen, 1971/1988; Ngo, 2012; Soto, 1997; Valdés, 1996). This research illuminates silenced stories of Chinese immigrant families and their children who are often neglected in educational policy making in terms of funding programs, services, and educational resources (e.g., Li, 2008). This work contests relative absence of Asian Americans from discourse in educational policy and practice despite their growing presence in schools and societies (e.g., Park, Goodman, & Lee, 2001, 2003). It queries monocultures of the mind (a term created by Vandana Shiva in 1993) that ignores or obscures the ethnic and cultural diversity within Asian Americans in mainstream scholarship and masks struggles and difficulties Asian American students face in the mainstream societies and schools (e.g., Lee, 1996; Lee & Zhou, 2004). The study illuminates that Asian Americans do not fit in the mainstream dominant discourse nor do they fit in marginalized minority discourse. They live in-between languages, cultures, identities, and powers in transcultural contexts (He, 2003, 2010).

Author

• Ming Fang He, Georgia Southern University