Asian Diaspora Teacher Education Curriculum: A Co/Autoethnography of Two Chinese Diaspora Women Faculty

• In Event: Dismantling Colonization: Reclaiming Asian Diaspora Experience as Curriculum Knowledge

Abstract

Diaspora and Third World feminism’s approach to space, place, and curriculum (He, 2021; Mohanty, 2003) empowered us, the authors of this research, to take generative possibilities for understanding our roles, experiences, and agencies as Chinese diaspora women faculty in education in the United States.
Our international, transnational, and counter-national experiences inspire us to adopt the diaspora curriculum framework (He, 2021) and the co/autobiographical method to undertake critical analysis of space and place in our teacher education experiences. Combining place and personal experiences through co/autoethnography, we connect “the local and global, the real and symbolic, the individual and the collective, and our reflective selves with the external world” (Somerville, 2014, p. 80).
Of interest are the following questions:
1. How do teacher education curriculum act on and with the “others”, including the authors, that inhabit them? 2. How do the authors employ their diaspora experiences and expertise across different places to (re)think, (re)imagine, and transgress the borders imposed on them and how do they negotiate a “sense of place” in teacher education curriculum/working environment?
In keeping with autoethnography, data consisted of our stories of teacher education curricular experiences as learners and teachers. According to He (2021), a diaspora curriculum “thrives with diverse paradigms, perspectives, and possibilities, and demands multiple understandings toward commonplaces (teachers, learners, subject matters, and milieu) in diverse contexts” (p.1). We come from small towns and studied teacher education in universities in major cities in China. After moving to the U.S. for graduate school in a public research university in the Midwest, we found academic positions in two different Midwestern teaching institutions with rural-focused teacher education programs, and now at research universities with urban teacher education
programs. None of these places we inhabit are in a vacuum; rather, they continue to influence us as “discursive, interpretive, lived, affective, and imagined practices” (Helfenbein, 2021, p.4). Further, these places are not “something physical and external to the social context and to social action” (Soja, 1980, p. 210). The spaces and places we transgress and our intersectional identities, lived experiences, and liberating agency in creating new curriculum spaces are the focal point of our critical research.
Our research contributes toward expanding the use of autoethnography and adopting “self as method” (Xiang & Wu, 2020). In doing so, we focus on the existence of our diasporas and how we create multiple dimensions of belonging while challenging hegemony in teacher education curriculum.

Authors

• Katrina Liu, University of Nevada - Las Vegas

• Min Yu, Wayne State University