Selves, Texts, Landscapes: Indonesian American Girls Inscribe Civic Trajectories in a Critical Civic Education Community

• In Event: What Is the "Truth" About Asian Americans? Interrogating Representations of Asian Americans in Literacies Research

Abstract

Objectives
This paper examines how eight middle and high-school aged Indonesian American girls from a large northeastern city drew on their identities, literate repertoires, and lived experiences to take up learning invitations in the context of a virtual critical civic education community. I, an Indian American migrant scholar-practitioner, used practitioner methods (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) to create a virtual afterschool community in which youth explored their identities as multi-scalar civic actors (e.g., urban, national global) through text-based engagement (e.g., literary, nonfiction), discussions, multimodal reflections, and self-propelled inquiries into democratic inequalities. This research is part of a larger dissertation study and can inform the design of literacy-based critical civic education programs that honor urban Asian American girls as significant socio-political actors.

Perspectives
This paper builds first on critical sociocultural approaches to literacy, which foreground the multiple modes through which people make meaning from social locations shaped by hierarchies of power (Luke, 2000; NLG, 1996). It draws next on transnational girlhoods, a lens shaped by transnational feminist perspectives that centers minoritized girls as significant social actors facing local-global oppressions (Vanner, 2019). Finally, it builds on critical pedagogical frameworks (e.g., Freire, 2007) which illuminate the inherently political nature of education, and seek to create curricular and pedagogical conditions in which educators can work alongside youth from historically marginalized communities to dismantle social hierarchies.

Methods and Data
From May 2021-December 2021, I used practitioner research methods to conduct virtual afterschool literacy circles with participating youth. Using coding, field notes, and analytic memo-writing (Miles et al., 2014), I analyzed virtual Zoom session recordings to explore how participants engaged with the critical civic program that I designed. In alignment with my conceptual framework, I paid attention to how they drew on their identities, experiences, and literacies to take up specific curricular invitations (e.g., discussions, text-based analysis) individually and in community. I finally used appropriate frameworks to analyze their responses to multimodal activities (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2001).

Results and Significance
Initial analysis illustrates how, in the context of the critical civic learning community, girls drew on their intersectional identities and literacies to 1) unsettle nation-bound conceptions of American civic girlhood; 2) interpret real-world (in)justices through literary analysis; and 3) analyze links between civic and spatial inequalities in their cities. This research is important because low-income urban Asian American youth – and girls in particular – constitute a vast and heterogenous population across the country. As these young people navigate unique socio-material oppressions in the nation’s urban centers (e.g., housing precarities, poor educational access) as well as anti-Asian hatred, they are also staking civic claims to the multiple communities in which they are embedded through diverse literate practices. However, they are seldom represented in literacy research as emergent sociopolitical actors (with a few notable exceptions, such as Player, 2022) or centered as promising learners in critical civic education initiatives. This paper strives to rectify their under-representation in literacy scholarship, and to help urban educators recognize and nurture their potential as consequential civic actors.

Author

• Ankhi Guha Thakurta, Boston College
  Presenting Author