Vietnamese American Educators Navigating Racial and Political Conflicts in Vietnamese DLBE Program

• In Event: From Margins to Models: Sustaining Heritage & Dual Language Education in Less Commonly Taught Languages

Abstract

Objectives
This exploratory case study (Yin, 2009) focuses on the collective experiences of Vietnamese American bilingual educators working in the first and only Vietnamese DLBE program in Massachusetts. The presentation aims to examine the racialized experiences and unique challenges Vietnamese American bilingual educators faced while teaching in a single-strand program in a racially segregated urban school setting located in an anti-bilingual state recovering from a 15-year ban on bilingual education.

Theoretical framework
Using the AsianCrit framework (Iftikar & Museus, 2018) and Critical Refugee Studies (Le Espiritu et al., 2022), this presentation centers Vietnamese American educators’ racialized experiences that counter historical invisibility and marginalization of Asian Americans in U.S. racial society and erase refugee experiences as the byproduct of U.S. imperialism. It offers a collective counter-story of Vietnamese American bilingual educators and brings into the center the complexity of the refugee standpoint that has long been ignored in Asian American studies.

Methods
Data sources included 60-min teacher interviews with 16 Vietnamese American bilingual educators working in the Vietnamese DLBE program. To obtain a holistic view of the racial climate in the school community, I also interviewed 5 Black educators and 3 white educators. All interviews were audio-recorded and conducted bilingually. The interview data was transcribed, translated, and analyzed thematically through an iterative process that includes three cycles of coding: (1) establishing codes, (2) ordering codes, and (3) identifying themes and gathering examples from triangulation of data.

Results
The findings reveal that Vietnamese American educators working faced multiple challenges in their work towards sustaining Vietnamese culture and language in the Vietnamese DLBE program. The challenges include:
(i) navigating a hostile racial climate filled with racism and linguicism enacted by fellow teachers and administrators and reinforced through district policies;
(ii) resisting anti-Asian racist narratives that frame Vietnamese American bilingual teachers as perpetual foreigners and Vietnamese American students as model minorities with hypervisible compliance to school rules and invisible struggles
(iii) navigating political conflict and ideological differences among generations of Vietnamese American bilingual educators who came in multiple immigration waves and had different understanding of Vietnamese histories and Vietnamese American histories, especially about the Vietnam/American war
(iv) reckoning with the dilemma of the Vietnamese DLBE program: even though the program is the product of community advocacy and enactment of students’ education and linguistic rights, it is framed as a “gifted and talented program” or “special program” that affirms Asian academic supremacy and contributes to solidifying Asian-Black divides.

Scholarly significance of the study or work
This presentation illuminates the racialized struggles of Vietnamese American bilingual educators and the complex reality of Vietnamese DLBE programming in an urban context. Knowing these unique challenges will help teacher educators, district leaders, and administrators prioritize the needs to foster Vietnamese American bilingual teachers’ critical consciousness of racial equity and linguistic justice and build a stronger support system for these educators to help them resist anti-Asian racism, reclaim their Vietnamese American sociopolitical identity, and collectively work towards thick racial solidarity.

Author

• Alisha Nguyen, Lesley University