“You guys don’t matter enough”: Asianization and solidarity disrupted in teacher education

• In Event: 30420 - Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 10: Race and Education, K-12 Challenges

Abstract

To echo this year’s conference theme, education scholars have long identified the need to “reimagine” teacher education to foster a more racially diverse educator workforce that is better equipped to teach students of color. This paper examines the experiences of Asian American teacher candidates (TCs) at West Coast Teacher Preparation (WCTP), a program that centers social justice and regularly admits racially diverse cohorts. Drawing upon interview and focus group data with 13 TCs across two years, we engage Iftikar and Museus’ (2019) Asian Critical Race Theory (AsianCrit) to investigate (1) how Asian American TCs experienced WCTP, (2) how those experiences influenced their understandings about teaching for social justice, and (3) how their experiences reflect broader racializing discourses about Asian Americans. Our preliminary analysis indicates that Asian American teacher candidates felt the program did not meaningfully incorporate Asian American communities and their perspectives in its framework on teaching for social justice. Participants’ responses suggest that racializing discourses that frame Asian Americans as “model minorities” shaped their experiences of invisibility in the program. Finally, participants left the program with unresolved questions about the specificities of practicing racial solidarity as Asian Americans. The programmatic erasure described by our participants impeded Asian American TCs from developing deeper understandings of their own racial identities and forestalled opportunities to build solidarity with other racialized TCs in their cohort and with their students. These challenges illuminate the institution’s struggle to understand how and why Asian Americans are integral to the greater project of social justice in education.

Authors

• Eujin Park, Stanford University

• Faith Kwon, Stanford University