Fostering Critical Consciousness Within Asian American and Pacific Islander Community College Students Through Critical Asset-Based Curriculum

• In Event: AERA Graduate Student Research in Progress Roundtable Session One
  In Roundtable Session: Belonging, Critical Consciousness, and Compassion in Higher Education (Table 1)

Abstract

The recent surge of anti-AAPI sentiment and hate crimes since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic call attention to the persistent and longstanding structural anti-AAPI racism which has a profound effect on the experiences of AAPI students in the American education system. The scarcity of literature on AAPI students contributes to the perpetuation of the widespread structural erasure, misrepresentation, and discriminatory practices toward the 48 subpopulations under the broad AAPI category under the imperialistic notions of the good minority or the simple savages. Grounded in critical asset-based pedagogies, this study examines the experiences of first-year AAPI community college students and the effects of civic engagement projects on their critical consciousness. This action research case study analyzes student documents, focus groups, and interviews with AAPI students. It contributes to the scholarship on resisting the structural erasure and misrepresentation of AAPI students and (re)imagining instructional and programmatic practices to serve AAPI students from transactional to transformative ways by developing and testing an intervention that: a) raise their critical consciousness to identify, resist, and act against structural and social inequities; b) center them as transformative agents of a more just and liberatory world and holders/producers of intergenerational knowledge; and c) generate nuanced data about the lived experiences of AAPI students, especially those enrolled at Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSI) and Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander Serving Institutions (AANAPISI).

Author

• Katlin Choi, San Diego Mesa College
  Presenting Author