“Public School Is an Arm of the State”: Early-Career AAPI (Asian American and Pacific Islander) Teachers Interrogating Justice Possibilities

• In Event: Educating While Racially Marginalized: The Teaching Profession as a Site for Care and Activism

Abstract

Objectives
bell hooks (2003) describes the U.S. educational system as a place where academic success requires assimilation to the beliefs and values of the dominant white culture, and as a place where racism is inherent and internalized. The cumulative nature of confronting racism and enacting justice commitments in schools can take its toll, and research on the experiences of racially marginalized teachers with justice commitments speaks to the challenges of negotiating a predominantly white profession and trying to enact commitments that are ideologically at odds with dominant culture (Pizarro & Kohli, 2020). This interview study of four K-5 early-career racially marginalized teachers examines their efforts to (re)humanize themselves and their students and reflect on their understandings and enactments of justice commitments within the context of their profession.

Theoretical Framework
“(Re)humanizing” Racially Marginalized Teachers
In order to explore this, I am drawing on Langer-Osuna and Nasir’s (2016) conceptualization of the (re)humanizing the “other” in education research, where they describe Black scholars’ historical (re)humanizing efforts as the work of de-flattening identities of Black children in schooling contexts. Extending this definition to racially marginalized teachers, I am conceptualizing (re)humanizing as attending to the well-being of racially marginalized teachers, making space for their full and complete humanity, and actively re-positioning them as agentic, valid, and valued narrators of their own lived experiences. In this paper, I am exploring the (re)humanizing efforts of racially marginalized teachers and how those (re)humanizing efforts interact with their justice commitments.

Methods and Data
Drawing from a larger corpus of data including multiple interviews with 14 early-career racially marginalized elementary teachers, the participants in this interview study are four early-career Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) elementary teachers who expressed commitments towards justice and work in school districts across the Bay Area. The data for this study was collected during the 2022-23 school year and included two semi-structured interviews with each teacher participant. For the eight total interviews, analytic memos were written, noting any emerging themes. These themes became initial deductive codes, which were iterated upon to develop a coding scheme for the interview transcripts.

Findings
Findings reveal how teacher participants engaged in practices like narrowing professional sites of activism, building critical caring communities, and attending to self-care in their reconsiderations of what it means to teach for social justice and enact justice commitments within the profession. These practices weave together their efforts towards (re)humanizing and social justice, shifting their conceptions of teaching for justice in ways that make it more possible to sustain, thrive, and be whole in the teaching profession.

Significance
Dominant conceptualizations of social justice teaching–doing the work of caring, supporting, and advocating for students with marginalized identities–seldom consider the preservation and wholeness of teachers, particularly those at the racial and ideological margins of the profession. Centering the humanity of AAPI and other racially marginalized teachers signals an important and needed shift in scholarship.

Author

• Faith Kwon, Stanford University