The Truths About Asian American Women Preservice Teachers: Ecstatic Resistance, Joy, and Care

• In Event: Preservice Teachers of Color Telling Truths: Engaging Multimodal Pedagogies and Methodologies to Document Educational Realities

Abstract

This paper is a conversation between three Asian American (AsAm) woman educators—two first year teachers and their former professor. We trace our multimodal work within an elective course, Introduction to Critical Pedagogies, in a teacher education program, to explore what happens when AsAm women’s multimodal literacies are harnessed toward preservice teachers’ praxis. Through this work, we shed light on the community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005) that AsAm women bring as both the carriers of ancestral and community knowledges and ways of knowing and as members of hybridized BIPOC communities.
As Author 2 wrote in her final project for the class, “We are, and have been, survivors, resistors, and fighters.” Asian American feminists (Roshanravan, 2018; Wu, 2018) and AsianCrit scholars (Chang, 1993; Museus & Iftikar, 2014) lament that these truths are too often invisiblized in discourses about AsAm women because of false monoliths built by a racist-sexist-imperialist American imagination. Dominant understandings of AsAm women are shaped by the intersections of racism–including the model minority stereotype and the forever foreigner trope (Lee, 2005)– sexism, and histories imperialist violence. Through a WOC feminist, including an AsAm Feminist, lens, we understand AsAm women as powerful inheritors of joyful and resistant practices of learning and teaching for intergenerational survival. So too, by using a WOC perspective on multiple literacies (Author 1 et al., A), we understand the dynamic nature of AsAm woman knowledge making and sharing.
This work is a multivocal inquiry that centers WOC voice, relationships, and community-rooted analysis. WOC issues are best understood through WOC methods of knowledge-building (Evans-Winters, 2019). We collectively construct what Evans-Winters (2019) calls a “mosaic”, a piecing together of our perspective, voices, modes, and genre of meaning making in dialogue with one another. Further, we take on a “partnership stance,” centering collaboration in order to develop transformational agency amongst the authors (Filipiak & Caraballo, 2019). Through a series of five recorded 1 hour “pláticas” (Fierros & Delgado Bernal, 2016), we study artifacts of the authors’ multimodal work for the critical pedagogies class, as well as the (re)membering (Dillard, 2012) of the work within and beyond the course, using our storying and remembering as central to establishing understandings through processes organic to our raced-cultured-gendered means of knowledge making (Author 1 et al., B).
Results highlight that AsAm women bring and develop raced-gendered practices of care and joy as resistance to whiteness within educational spaces, undoing the ideological harm born of whiteness in teacher education (Kohli, 2021). Furthermore, these impact and shape their teaching practices. This is work that can help shape the ways teacher education is designed, pushing back on white-normative models, and, instead, understanding the centering of WOC, and in this case, specifically AsAm woman, knowledges, including care-based, joy-centric, and resistant practices of learning, teaching, and building community. Further, this highlights the importance of AsAm women teachers, as they bring unique knowledges that can support all students who deserve spaces where they co-build their own joyful, caring, and resistant learning spaces.

Authors

• Grace D. Player, University of Connecticut
  Presenting Author

• Erica Abela, University of Connecticut
  Presenting Author

• Tamashi Hettiarachchi, West Hartford Public Schools
  Presenting Author