Unpacking racial identities: the salience of ethnicity in Southeast Asian-American youth’s schooling experience

Abstract

This article reconceptualizes white teachers’ notion of their Asian-American students’ racial identity. Forty urban Southeast Asian-American (SEAA) students and seven of their white European-American teachers were examined to determine how the students responded to the white teachers’ assumptions about their identity. This study provides an overview of the U.S. historical and political contexts that shape the positionality of Southeast Asian-American youth in the black–white racial discourse. It found that despite the fact that the teachers lumped the SEAA students into one category, the students highlighted the salience of ethnicity in their lives. One implication of this study is for teacher education programs to train new teacher candidates to move beyond simple racial categorization or race-blind approaches. Instead, teachers should be taught to acknowledge the importance of ethnicity to their students; to examine their own positionalities; and to incorporate more culturally relevant pedagogies into their instructional practices.

Keywords:

• Racial identity
• ethnicity
• teacher identities
• Southeast Asian
• adolescent refugees
• culturally relevant pedagogy

Notes

1. Khmer and Cambodian are used interchangeably in this article. Khmer is the more common term used by community members to describe people of Khmer ancestry, and their language and culture.

2. All names in this chapter are pseudonyms.

3. Legacies of War, a non-profit education advocacy organization, has a week-long curriculum on the Secret War on Laos for middle and high school teachers available at their website (www.legaciesofwar.org).