Chinese American Students Interrogating Racial Discourse With Children’s Literature in a Community-Based Book Club

• In Event: Disrupting the Single Story: Transformative Children’s Literature for Social Justice

Abstract

Asian American is the fastest-growing minority group in the United States (Budiman & Ruiz, 2021). However, they are still invisible in the K-12 school curriculum (Pang & Nelson, 2006) and United States history curriculum (An, 2016), with just twice addressed upon the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 and Japanese incarceration during WWII (Noboa, 2012). This minimization of Asian Americans' involvement in the United States alienates Asian American children in education (Yi, 2020). Furthermore, with the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic, Chinese/Asian Americans were once again painted as yellow peril and suffered from serious racial stigmatization and violence. Their visibility and victimization have been completely dismissed and normalized by the rising death toll in the United States (Saito & Li, 2022). However, Chinese immigrant families’ inability and lack of resources to provide their children with appropriate racially just education and the race talk dilemma also worsen the situation (Pauker et al., 2015).

Considering the invisibility of Asian Americans in schools’ curriculum and the urgent need of supporting children to learn race and racism, this community-based study provides Chinese American students with culturally relevant picturebooks and relevant multimedia resources which depict contemporary and historical narratives of Asian immigrants and racialized experience of Asians during the COVID-19 pandemic. Building on AsianCrit (Museus, 2014) and Culturally Situated Reader Response Theory (Brooks & Browne, 2012), this study investigates how second-generation Chinese American students interrogate racialized historical narratives of early Asian immigrants and disrupt the dominant discourse of Anti-Asian racism during and post COVID-19 pandemic in the United States through reading and discussing a text set. Specifically, this study explores how second-generation Chinese immigrant students negotiate their ethnic-racial identities and develop emerging activist stance through critical conversations around culture, race, and power in a community-based book club.

The yearlong single site, collective case study was a part of a larger critical ethnographic case study which has been conducted since 2019. The research site is a community-based nonprofit book club that is affiliated with a local Chinese Heritage School located in a southern city in the United States. For the study, four students of Chinese descent were selected as participants according to the following criteria: 1) American-born children of Chinese-born first-generation parents; 2) have attended the book club for at least one semester before the study. The data collection was between October 2020 and February 2021. This study drew from the following data sources: 1) five book club meeting recordings; 2) two semistructured interviews with each student; 3) one semistructured interview with each parent; 4) researcher’s field notes; 5) students’ reading reflections; 6) students’ artifacts including self-made picture books about their life and their family, drawings, photographs, and self-portraits.

As part of a larger critical ethnographic case study, this study takes a CRT and AsianCrit lens to address the broad research question of how educators, researchers, and policymakers understand and meet the unique equity and justice-oriented educational needs of diverse students in the post-pandemic social contexts.

Authors

• Wenyu Guo, University of South Florida

• Yuechen Sun, University of South Carolina