“We Are Here to Stay”: A Community of Inquiry with Youth of Asian Descent and Teachers

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Sunday 1:30 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 2-3
  In Roundtable Session: Coming Home: Stories of Building Spaces for Asian Americans in Language and Literacies Education (Table 8)

Abstract

Objective & Purposes:
Since the 2020 uprisings for Black lives, the rise of anti-Asian discrimination, rhetoric, and hate crimes during the COVID-19 pandemic, and more recently the proposed construction of a sports arena adjacent to Philadelphia’s Chinatown, there has been an increased mobilization of community organizing and activism throughout Philadelphia. Youth and teachers, positioned in varying institutional and neighborhood contexts, are engaging with these socio-political issues that directly impact their communities and schools. As a Chinese-Vietnamese American educator, researcher, and community organizer, I sought to cultivate a space that brought together youth and teachers of Asian descent connected to the Philadelphia Chinatown community. This research study aims to explore questions such as: (1) How do youth and teachers draw on literacies to make meaning of and engage with these issues? (2) Through critical literacy and critical media literacy approaches to pedagogy, how are youth and teachers participating in community-engaged education?

Theoretical Frameworks:
Drawing on decolonial theory, critical literacy, and critical media literacy frameworks, this research study uses practitioner and community-engaged research methodologies. As traditions of thought, these theories challenge the sociopolitical systems we inhabit, including who is positioned as having knowledge and what counts as knowledge; the ways power perpetuates the texts, language, institutionalized structures; and the shift towards viewing students as active producers of knowledge (wa Thiong'o, 2014; Ghiso & Campano, 2013; Mignolo, 201). These frameworks welcome the possibility of reimagined futures that work toward decolonizing our minds and relationships, all toward individual and collective resistance (Mendez, 2019).

Methodological Orientation:
Participatory research, practitioner research, and community based research are the methodological approaches that will guide this study. As methods, they seek to democratize the research process and to disrupt the boundaries that typically exist in research relationships between teachers, students, institutions, and the community and frames the participants as taking on active roles in the process as they inquire into the sociopolitical problems from their perspectives and locations (Author 1, et al, 2022; Lyiscott et al, 2021; Irrizary, 2011; Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009; Waff, 2009; Cook-Sather, 2002; Finn, 1994; Park, 1993).

Data Sources:
This project will draw on data collected from the (1) introductory questionnaires, (2) individual interviews, (3) transcripts of the inquiry group meetings, (4) audio-video and/or written journal entries, (5) literacy artifacts, (6) fieldnotes, (7) researcher memos. The data analysis process will be recursive, iterative, and participatory (Ghiso & Campano, 2013; Cahill, 2007), which includes the precoding, coding, and analysis for salient themes.

Scholarly Significance:
This research study hopes to illuminate how youth and teachers build coalitions across differences, employing their literate repertoires to learn about and engage with social contestation and competing visions of flourishing for their communities, their education, and their city. In alignment with this year’s AERA theme, this study centers an intergenerational group with youth and teachers of Asian descent, and hopes to cultivate spaces that highlight how we as a community engage in sociopolitical issues in our city, schools, and lives.

Author

• Claire Wan, University of Pennsylvania