Immigrant Scholars or Scholars From Immigrant/Refugee Backgrounds

• In Event: Breaking the Silence: Amplifying Asian/Asian American Voices in Bilingual Education

Abstract

Asian Americans are the fastest-growing racialized communities in the United States (Greenwood, 2023). Currently, there are 19.9 million Asian Americans living in the United States (U.S. Census, 2019), but not much scholarly attention is being paid to the experiences of Asian Americans in regard to bilingualism and education. Given the rise of anti-Asian hate and the attack on ethnic studies in recent years (Coloma et al., 2021; Foster et al., 2021), it is more important than ever to turn our attention and center on the complex and dynamic lived experiences of Asian Americans vis-a-vis education and bilingualism.

With this in mind, the experiences of Southeast Asian (Vietnam, Cambodian, and Laos) refugees receive little attention within the context of Asian Americans vis-a-vis bilingual education. In this presentation we aim to leverage our lived experiences as a bilingual queer Vietnamese refugee scholar and mother, and a receptive-bilingual immigrant educator to amplify/promote the narratives of Asian Americans, specifically Southeast Asian Americans which have been relegated to ghost stories (Espiritu, 2014), invisible even within the context of bilingual education. This leads us to reflect on the following questions: Why does the diversity of immigrant stories matter, as it relates to the diversity of the Asian diaspora? How does language assimilation impact Asian identity in the U.S.? How can understanding refugee-immigrant experiences influence a culturally sustaining lens for Asian bilingual education?

Using a collaborative self-study, we examine our backgrounds as racialized bilingual refugee/immigrant scholar/educators, and our experience with language and education in the United States. Khanh was born in Vietnam and lived in a refugee camp in Thailand, before arriving in San Francisco in 1992. Khanh was put in a subtractive ESL program in elementary school, where his dynamic language practices were seen as deficit. Thus, Khanh struggled with bilingual literacy. Helen’s story of immigration crosses three continents, starting in Burma, to Italy, where she was born, and eventually to the U.S.. Despite a linguistically rich family background, following policy and “best practices” in education at the time, Helen was placed in full English mainstream settings to eliminate the use of other languages. Therefore, linguistic identity became a defining sense of outsiderness.

Next, we discuss how we leverage our lived experiences and challenge existing power dynamics and promote social justice in bilingual education. We do this by anchoring our teaching in translanguaging theory, AsianCrit, and Critical Refugee theory (Li & García 2014; Museus & Iftikar, 2013; Nguyen, 2019; Espiritu, 2014). Additionally, we seek to transform K-12 education through culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris, 2012) and a humanizing approach (Freire, 1987; Todres et al., 2009) to language education. Even though we come from diverse refugee and immigrant backgrounds, we share a common experience with living on the margins with our language practices. Now we come together to call for solidarity and create a space where our identities as Asian Americans and bilingualism can coexist and be centered within the framework of bilingualism and dual language education.

Authors

• Khánh Lê, Queens College - CUNY

• Helen Chan Hill, Pasadena Unified School District