From Margins to Center: Developing Cultural Citizenship Education Through the Teaching of Asian American History

Abstract

Citizenship education is considered a primary purpose for social studies education. However, in elementary classrooms, it is often limited to the memorization of mainstream civic knowledge and learning about a handful of American heroes. This qualitative study of three Asian American educators uses Asian Critical Race Theory to explore how the teachers drew from their own cultural and linguistic experiences to inform pedagogies of cultural citizenship education that interrogated what it means to be a citizen. By (re)defining the terms Asian American and American (citizen), the teachers enacted cultural citizenship education through the use of counternarratives and children’s literature that disrupted normative conceptualizations of citizen. Their work demonstrates how educators can present more inclusive depictions of civic identity, membership, and agency to young learners.

Keywords:

• Asian critical race theory
• citizenship education
• critical race theory
• cultural citizenship
• elementary education
• teachers of color

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank the participants in this study for sharing their stories and classrooms. Thank you to Cinthia Salinas, Stefanie Wong, Esther Kim, Anna Falkner, and Neil Shanks for their valuable feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript, and thanks to Amanda Vickery and Juliet Lee for their endless support and guidance.

Notes

1. As this study’s teacher participants did not identify as Hawai’ian or Pacific Islander, nor did the teachers’ instruction of historical content include the Pacific Islands, I prefer “Asian American” for its specificity within this study’s context rather than terms such as Asian Pacific Islander, Asian Pacific American, or Asian American Pacific Islander.

2. Drawing from the work of critical race legal scholar Neil Gotanda, I consciously leave white lowercase while capitalizing Black. Despite its use as the dialectical opposite of Black, white has historically and contemporarily summarized racial domination and “is better left in lower case, rather than privileged with a capital letter. ‘Black,’ on the other hand, has deep political and social meaning as a liberating term, and, therefore, deserves capitalization” (Gotanda, 1991, p. 4). Therefore white will only be capitalized in this paper when used in direct citation, and Black will be used in lowercase only in direct citation.

3. The Immigration Act of 1917 restricted the entry of individuals from the “Asiatic Barred Zone,” effectively extending Chinese exclusion laws to all other Asians, with the exception of teachers, merchants, and students. However, the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907–1908 exempted specific classes of Japanese immigration that remained unaffected by changes in U.S. immigration law until the Immigration Act of 1924. As Guam and the Philippines were under U.S. jurisdiction at the time, they were not included in either immigration act (Azuma, 2005; Palumbo-Liu, 1999).

4. All names are pseudonyms.

5. Recognizing that few teachers receive Asian American historical content in schools and/or teacher preparation programs, the workshop attendance component was designed to provide participants with district-approved teaching materials about Asian American history. The NISD workshop centered on book studies of particular pieces of Asian American children’s literature provided by the district and the subsequent development of lesson plans in preparation for Asian Pacific Heritage Month in May. NISD’s elementary social studies department asked me to provide an initial overview of Asian American populations and Asian American history for 30 minutes followed by an hour and a half of collaborative lesson planning time for attendees. During that lesson planning time, I was present as a content expert and provided feedback and suggestions to all attendees. Participants in my study, including the three teachers described here, composed one-fifth of the total workshop attendees and worked with non-study participants to design lessons for NISD. However, none of the study participants in this paper taught their group-designed lessons.

6. Krishnan and I attended the same small school in Texas as adolescents. We were in different grades and did not formally meet until we were both teachers in NISD and recognized each other at a professional development workshop. Prior to this study, Krishnan collaborated with me on a bilingual education project with preservice teachers in the fall of 2014 that did not address any aspects of Asian American identity or history. However, he did express an interest in future collaboration, leading to his recruitment for this study. I did not know Elyse or Virginia prior to their participation in this study.