“We got you!”: AAPI Girls Show Solidarity in an Afterschool Book Club

• In Event: At the Intersections: Leveraging the Strengths of Girls of Color in Schools and Communities

Abstract

Paper/ presentation summary:

This chapter recognizes the strengths of the AAPI girls as they contribute to book club conversations. I draw upon (citation deleted for blind review)’s model of Positive Youth Development (PYD) for adolescent Girls of Color as a central frame. The PYD competency of confidence, an internal sense of overall positive self-worth and self efficacy, is a central focus of the AAPI adolescent girls in the afterschool bookclub. The girls demonstrate AAPI competent literacies in a myriad of ways that include writing, song, dance, henna tattooing, and rich discussions about culture and identity. They also show love and care toward one another as they engage in critical conversations about their racialized and gendered experiences both in and outside of school. They make connections to the literature we read and share family stories and experiences. Finally, during the act of storytelling the AAPI girls show a sisterhood that demonstrates confidence as they consistently layer their stories and reaffirm each other’s narratives with their own.
This chapter is theoretically grounded in Asian Critical Race Theory (AsianCrit). The 7 tenets of AsianCrit (Iftikar & Museus, 2018, p. 940-941) are interrelated and will be used in this study to make sense of how white supremacy shapes experiences of AAPI girls. There is little research that attends to the cultural nuances of AAPI girlhood and their identities in relation to young adult literature. I consider Dr. Grace Player’s call to continue to develop literacy methods that “[Make AAPI girls’ stories] visible in a world that has chosen to invisiblize them” (Player, 2021, p.15). I examine how AAPI girls reflect upon and conceptualize their identities as we read together and engage in “critical conversations” in an afterschool book club (Schieble, Vetter, Monét Martin, 2020). As a biracial Filipina educator I facilitated the AAPI book club, and the educational afterschool space the AAPI girls and I inhabited was one without the “white gaze” (Morrison, 1987).

Author

• Tasha Adrienne Lindo, University of Iowa