Freedom Dreamers: Voices from Southeast Asian American Educators

• In Event: Reclaiming Selves, Histories, Language, and Culture Through Relational Processes of (Re)membering

Abstract

Southeast Asian American (SEAA) pre-service and in-service educators’ stories can provide insights for teacher education programs (TEPs), teaching methods, and pedagogy in the U.S., and curriculum and professional learning (PL) for all educators. Weaving together their lived experiences as children of refugees/immigrants and educators in Wisconsin and Minnesota PK-12, higher education, and community-based education settings, our book project shares critical stories on how Southeast Asian Americans re-member ways to love being Southeast Asian Americans and centering joy in predominantly-white educational spaces (Dillard, 2008; Love, 2019).
Predominantly white institutions (PWIs) have a lack of students of Color enrolled in TEPs. Since 2014, over 50% in U.S. public schools are students of Color (U.S. Department of Education, 2014), but there continues to be a shortage of teachers of Color where only 18% of teachers are teachers of Color. This racial disparity of teachers of Color may be explained by the lack of people of Color pursuing the field of education as a profession. The American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (2015) states that during the 2009-2010 school year, more than 80% of the bachelor’s degrees in education were awarded to non-Latine/x white teacher candidates. The racial disparity between public school teachers and their students prompts the need to create and collect narratives by SEAA educators for recruiting and supporting teacher candidates of Color.
Although the literature about Asian Americans and U.S. educational spaces are growing, few studies focus on the specific experiences and needs of Asian American educators, particularly SEAA (i.e., teacher candidates and in-service educators). This book project is a collaborative research that works for and with communities, addressing their experiences with the commitment to justice that improves the lives of the community and society.
Focusing on critical reflectivity and intersectionality of identities, this book project employs autoethnographic methods, a research methodology of describing and analyzing personal stories to understand cultural phenomena (Ellis et al, 2011; Ellis, 2004; Endo, 2021; Holman Jones, 2005). As the writers draft, revise and finalize their stories, the co-PIs collaboratively edit and organize these narratives to restory and reveal the sociocultural contexts and power dynamics in education (Kumashiro, 2003; Mao et al, 2016). Autoethnographic methods in this project exemplify counter-invisibility work that can strengthen and transform Teacher Education programs (Smolerak et. al, 2023; Vang et. al, 2023).
This collaboration between the co-PIs, professors in teacher-prep programs, and the contributors, educators connected to the co-PI’s respective programs, is a strong scholarly and practical example of institutional investment in improving and creating better teacher education pathways and retention. The Project allows Contributors to analyze how they engage in their work as educators by re-membering their history, identities, and cultures through producing and compiling written narratives. Contributors’ narratives are centered and humanized by engaging in this reflexivity process. These first-person narratives provide archival, program evaluations, and scholarly knowledge about teacher education pathways.

Authors

• Nga-Wing Anjela Wong

• Choua P. Xiong, University of Wisconsin - Oshkosh