Countering Erasure: Vietnamese American Bilingual Children Learning Wars, Armed Conflicts, and Genocide Through Multilingual Literacies

• In Event: Unforgetting Multiple Histories and Imagining Multiple Futures of Asian(American) Im/migrant Literacies

Abstract

Objectives
In the current U.S. sociopolitical climate, rising nationalist and white supremacist ideologies have led to extreme censorship of curriculum that fosters racial consciousness and centers the epistemologies of communities of Color (Burmester & Howard, 2022; Giroux, 2023). Teaching controversial topics such as wars, conflicts, and genocide, especially in elementary classrooms, is considered “risky business” (New et al., 2005) and often avoided to protect “(white) childhood innocence” (Nguyen, 2021). Grounded in a culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris, 2012), this practitioner action research engages Vietnamese American bilingual students in critically learning about different historical accounts of the Vietnam/American War through multilingual literacies. This study provides a counter-narrative of Vietnamese American children as active social agents with critical consciousness and stresses the urgent need to implement historically and linguistically responsive methods to teach bilingual students in dual language bilingual education (DLBE) classrooms.

Theoretical Framework
This presentation is grounded in culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris, 2012) that not only recognizes and affirms students’ community wealth of knowledge but also seeks to sustain pluralism in the ontologies and epistemologies of communities of Color. Specifically, this presentation focuses on how teaching community histories from a pluralistic perspective can help foster students’ critical consciousness and sustain historical understanding that unites Vietnamese diasporic communities around the world.

Methods
As part of a longitudinal participatory action research on the Vietnamese DLBE program, this presentation draws on practitioner action research (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009), through which the researcher-practitioner engages in systematic inquiry in their classroom. As a bilingual teacher, I worked closely with 17 Vietnamese American fourth-graders, the first cohort of bilingual learners in the program. During an 8-week module on Vietnamese American immigration, I collected and analyzed multiple sources of data, including student bilingual writings and posters, audio recordings of small group discussions, and field notes and reflective memos. By integrating qualitative data analysis with grounded theory techniques (Charmaz, 2014), themes were identified around students’ emerging critical consciousness and their historical understanding through multimodal multilingual literacies.

Results
The findings revealed that (i) Vietnamese American bilingual students are active social agents who used their full cultural and linguistic repertoires to ask critical questions about historical truth and grapple with contradictory accounts of state-sanctioned narratives and diasporic collective memories of the Vietnam/American War; (ii) the students’ multimodal presentations of Vietnam disrupted the sanitized image of the country from a Western tourist perspective by presenting Vietnam as the transnational space filled with political tensions and conflicts, and (iii) the students’ historical inquiry enacted as a social catalyst to ignite conversations among different generations of Vietnamese American teachers that led to mutual understanding and solidarity.

Scholarly or scientific significance
This study contributes to our collective understanding of culturally sustaining multilingual pedagogy that supports not only bilingual students' heritage language practices but also opens a critical space for them to disrupt monolithic understanding of community histories and confront silences and erasures in state-sanctioned historical discourses in both home and host countries.

Author

• Alisha Nguyen, Lesley University