Critical Literacy, Racial Justice, and Intersectional Praxes With Asian Communities

• In Event: Critical Literacy for Racial Justice: Cultivating Equity Through Intersectionality

Abstract

This paper discusses intersectional applications of critical literacy toward explicitly advancing racial justice within schooling. The paper focuses on teaching and teacher education with Asian/Asian American populations and is concerned with the AERA Presidential Program’s Key Questions #2 and #6 regarding teaching and learning processes to foster equity, and core intersectional ideas about race, privilege, and reimagination of schooling.

This conceptual paper draws from 15 years of participatory action research (PAR) projects on classroom praxis with K-12 students and teachers in North Carolina, New York, California, and China, and explores key considerations that emerged when applying critical literacy pedagogies that have largely been informed by research with Black, white, and Latinx populations. The paper also emphasizes the particular importance of intersectionality when working with Asian American communities, given the myriad groups that are subsumed under the monolithic Asian American racialized category (i.e. 45-plus nationalities on the US Census), the vastly disparate levels of privilege, capital, and power across these many groups, and the inequities in essentializing findings and implications with one group (i.e. majoritized groups like those of East Asian heritage) to all Asian-heritage communities (Author, 2017; Willis et al., 2021).

The paper’s conceptual framework is built on critical approaches to literacy that have informed one another over the past 25 years within critical pedagogy, TESOL, sociolinguistics, and asset-based pedagogies (Freire & Macedo, 1987; Paris & Alim, 2014). A binding concept within this framework is Luke’s two notions of the critical as an analytic task and embodied form of alterity, with both notions utilizing an epistemological othering and “going outside of one’s self” to more dynamically understand oppression and justice (Author, 2019; Luke, 2004). In addition to this conceptualization of critical literacy pedagogy, the paper uses a second foundation within diasporic contexts of decolonizing and postcolonial scholarship, which interrogates the legacies of imperialism, colonization, capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, while also being mindful of the hybridities (e.g., mestizaje, third space) and social movements of resistance that emerged from such legacies (Césaire, 1972; Lowe, 1996; Mohanty, 2003; Said, 1994). In bringing together these foundations on critical literacy and Asian diaspora, intersectionality as an “analytic sensibility” is crucial in order to more equitably navigate the varied overlapping influences and systems of oppression at play (Cho et al., 2013), beyond discrete and/or immobile considerations of gender, class, and race that do not grasp the full picture of what occurs in schooling.

This paper has implications for critical literacy praxis to more explicitly and effectively address issues of racial justice, while maintaining an intersectional approach that can locate and disrupt other areas of schooling inequities. In these times of marked violence towards Asian peoples amidst the ongoing oppression of Black lives and the pitting of people of color against one another (Onishi, 2020), this paper contributes to a more dynamic discussion of what can be done in classrooms with students/teachers of Asian heritage beyond static models of culture, literacy, and equity.

Author

• Benji Chang