Heritage Months as Multiracial Literacy Projects: Asian American Elementary Teachers’ Approaches to AANHPI Heritage Month

• In Event: Asian American Educators and Families Rewriting Educational Narratives

Abstract

Renewed attention on anti-Asian violence has sparked a growing campaign to integrate Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) studies and holidays in K-12 schools, enacting on the logic that education is a site of reconstruction, representation, and reparations. Meanwhile, little is known about the ways teachers already engage with this logic via AANHPI Heritage Month in today’s multiracial schools. This qualitative study explores the ways that the racial identity of Asian American elementary teachers functioned as both motivation and a resource, and the pluralistic and localizing stance they exhibited in this work. We propose framing these observances of AANHPI Heritage Month as a multiracial literacy project. Implications for a multiracial future of intersectional justice are discussed.

Authors

• Xinghua Toby Wu, New York University

• Lydia Manchery, New York University