Navigating the Strategic Terrain: Asian American Teachers’ Everyday Tactics for Futuring K-12 Asian American Studies

• In Event: Teachers of Color Learning, Resisting, and Designing for Equitable Futures

Abstract

This presentation aims to illuminate how Asian American K-12 teachers of Asian American Studies engage in “futuring for education and education research” by navigating and transforming institutional constraints. Specifically, we explore the innovative “tactics” these educators employ to foster equitable and thriving futures for learners amidst complex sociopolitical challenges.

Our analysis employs de Certeau’s (1984) concepts of “strategies” and “tactics.” Dominant educational systems (e.g., curriculum mandates, administrative policies, ingrained biases) are strategies that seek to control a “proper place” for teaching and learning. Conversely, teachers’ everyday, creative actions are tactics—“arts of the weak”—that reappropriate and subvert these institutional structures.

This qualitative study employed a narrative inquiry approach (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) through semi-structured interviews to elicit rich, situated accounts of Asian American teachers’ experiences within K-12 education. Our data consist of five in-depth interviews with teachers who teach Asian American Studies in diverse West Coast contexts. These interviews provided detailed narratives on their involvement in Asian American studies, the resources they leverage, and the challenges they confront. Transcripts were analyzed using an iterative coding process (Strauss & Corbin, 1997), beginning with open coding to identify initial categories related to institutional actions and teacher responses. Subsequent axial and selective coding stages refined these categories, mapping them specifically onto de Certeau’s theoretical constructs of strategies and tactics, and uncovering their dynamic interplay.

Our preliminary findings reveal how teachers creatively adapt to “strategic” limitations. For instance, facing a lack of culturally relevant textbooks or district bans on certain terms, teachers employ tactics such as leveraging existing AP literature lists to introduce diverse texts, building multi-level curricula from scratch grounded in family and oral histories, or finding “loopholes” in language to introduce critical concepts. They actively cultivate informal resource-sharing networks and, as one teacher exemplified, initiate public cultural events on campus after formal proposals were rejected, significantly expanding student and community participation. Small acts of resistance occur “under the radar,” yet are deeply impactful, enabling them to foster spaces where students feel “seen,” “proud,” and empowered to understand their identities and histories. Findings further highlight profound institutional resistance, including administrative gatekeeping, unfunded mandates, and direct challenges like teacher displacement and content censorship.

This work directly aligns with the AERA 2026 theme, contributing to “unforgetting histories” of educational innovation by teachers of color. It actively disrupts the white gaze in teacher education by centering the unique experiences and culturally sustaining practices of Asian American teachers. This offers empirically grounded pathways for collaborative future-making, revealing how educators innovate for equitable futures. Analyzing their tactical maneuvers in Asian American Studies provides a compelling lens for consequential research contributing to just education futures.

Authors

• Jennifer Higgs, University of California - Davis

• Esther June Kim, College of William & Mary

• Noreen Naseem Rodriguez, Michigan State University

• Sohyun An, Kennesaw State University

• Michael Brown, University of Michigan