Re-Writing Civic Tales: A Practitioner Restorying of Dominant Sociopolitical Narratives about Asian American Girls and Women

• 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

Dominant public discourses frame Asian Americans girls and women as docile and apolitical civic figures (Player, 2021). However, our civic identities are seldom priorities across schools and society. To challenge these prevailing perspectives and omissions, this paper draws on the practitioner study (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) of a virtual out-of-school inquiry community in which a group of Indonesian American girls and I (an Indian American migrant woman) explored our places in democratic life. In this group, we inquired into our civic identities and aspirations through multiliterate meaning-making (e.g., discussions, art-making). Drawing on data from virtual community sessions (Summer-Fall 2021), this paper explores the following question: How, in a virtual inquiry community, did eight Asian American girls and one Asian American woman conceptualize and assert civic identities? The paper will highlight how, through our meaning-making, we asserted ourselves as consequential civic actors and resisted the reductive mainstream “storying” (Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016) of our civic identities in and beyond education.

This paper is conceptually anchored by critical sociocultural literacy studies, a lens foregrounding the multiple modes through which people make meaning in conditions of power asymmetry (Luke, 2000; NLG, 1996). It builds, next, on AsianCrit (Iftikar & Museus, 2018), a framework rendering explicit the unequal citizenship experienced by multiply marginalized Asian Americans in conditions of intersectional oppressions (e.g., White supremacy, heteropatriarchy, empire). These two perspectives provide an interrelated framework with which to examine our civic meaning-making as particularly situated actors.

This paper draws on data from audio-visual inquiry session recordings; youth and facilitator-made artifacts; and field-notes. To analyze this data, I initially coded my data drawing on my conceptual framework. Drawing on AsianCrit, for example, my initial codes focused on how girls and I drew on our lived experiences as intersectionally marginalized Asian Americans to explore and assert our civic identities (sample codes: “highlighting racialized experiences”; “navigating Orientalism”). Next, drawing on critical literacy perspectives, I coded how we mobilized diverse forms of meaning-making to critically analyze civic life (sample codes: “speaking,” “writing,” “art-making”) in response to diverse curricular invitations. I crystallized my findings through memo writing in later analytic rounds.

This paper will highlight two main findings. The first is how the girls and I critically accounted for intergenerational legacies of civic survival in our families, and thus took critical, (re)constructive stances towards Asian civic histories that are buried by mainstream U.S. accounts. The second was how we used our expansive meaning-making practices (e.g., writing, drawing) to assert critical civic identities that destabilized hegemonic understandings of us as apolitical actors.

In centering the democratic voices of Asian American girls and women, this paper will help the education field restory our significance as civic actors in conditions of White supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and empire. In providing directions for how the field can better honor our civic promise and contributions, finally, this paper will extend the AERA 2025 theme of promoting democratic renewal and repair through education.

Author

• Ankhi Guha Thakurta, Boston College