Mapping Consequential Geographies: Examining the Model Minority Racial Project in Mathematics Education (Poster 1)

• In Event: Everything Everywhere All at Once: Asian Math Ed Edition

Abstract

Overview

There is growing literature on the racialization of Asian Americans in education and specifically in relation to the Model Minority Myth (e.g., Yi et al., 2020). Critical education researchers have examined the complexities of Asian Americans’ experiences in educational institutions. This interdisciplinary body of literature contends that majoritarian discourses positioning Asian Americans as the model minority have played a key part in upholding the racial logics of antiblackness, settler colonialism, White supremacy, neoliberalism, and U.S. imperialism. This research has also found that, far from passively receiving racializing processes, Asian Americans are and have been active agents who contest, reproduce, and reinterpret them. However, with few exceptions (e.g., Author et al., in press; Kokka & Chao, 2020; Shah, 2019), the literature has not significantly examined Asianization in mathematics education. This paper draws from AsianCrit (e.g., Iftikar & Museus, 2018) and social movement theory (Fujiwara & Roshanravan, 2018) to consider Asian American mathematics teachers as active agents in racialization processes, who challenge and/or reproduce their racial positioning.

Methods

The racialized spaces of schools are well documented (Subini et al., 2018) and critical race spatial analysis (Morrison et al., 2018) allow a transdisciplinary connection in the study of space, race, and schools using geographical inquiry to explore racialized outcomes and resistance while highlighting the voices of People of Color in data collection and analysis (Soja, 2010; Solozano & Velas, 2018). We draw on the scholarly and lived experiences of Asian American mathematics teachers identified in the field for their engagement in racial justice within and outside of the mathematics classroom. Using critical phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty & Smith, 1962), we used education journey mapping as an iterative process to capture their cartographic narrative of the teachers from their experiences as a student to a teacher now.

Preliminary Findings

Preliminary findings reveal ways in which the mathematics teachers name the Model Minority as a threat within mathematics education and how the constructed Model Minority math student is used against non-white, white, and even against Asian American students. Each teacher discussed how their racial positioning shifts in relation to space and place: inside or outside math classrooms; different tracked pathways, and beyond school walls. Interviews revealed the awareness of the Model Minority stereotype operating as a form of political threat against Asian Americans in mathematics education as it effectively casts the legacies of radical resistance and activism that exist within the community as “not really” Asian American as those legacies do not match the constructed model of submissiveness, compliance, and always successful. Findings reveal socio-spatial relations between schools, residential districts, school choice, location of families’ homes as well as families’s race and immigration history.

Significance

This study highlights the emerging direction in research on Asian Americans in mathematics education by focusing on Asian American agency and relational racialization. In addition, space, when used as a theoretical tool in this way, enables collaborative research with teachers to analyze the intersectional production of and relations between educational and other environments.

Authors

• Cathery Yeh, University of Texas at Austin

• Lawrence Teng, University of Texas at Austin

• William Hanjin Bae, University of Texas at Austin