Understanding Culturally Sustaining Practices Through the Lens of Chinese Immigrant Families in the United States

ABSTRACT

Discourse during the COVID-19 pandemic re-exposed racist tropes about Asian Americans, with verbal and physical attacks on people of AAPI heritage. There is much to learn about the people and cultures within the AAPI designation, yet only recently has research acknowledged this. Schools can be fertile spaces for improving knowledge and dispelling myths. First, a nuanced analysis of school experiences of AAPI families is needed. Using culturally sustaining pedagogy, we developed a qualitative online survey to investigate Chinese immigrant parents’ perceptions of their U.S.-born children’s public school experiences. Parents voiced an urgent need for an enhanced understanding of AAPI cultures in schools. They expressed hope that their children would have space to sustain their culture and utilize their full linguistic repertoires in schools. We propose methods for leveraging parents’ expertise as cultural insiders, enhancing culturally sustaining practices in classrooms, and developing multilingual ecologies in U.S. public schools via translanguaging pedagogy.

KEYWORDS:

• Culturally sustaining pedagogy
• diversified curricula
• K-12 public schools
• mainland Chinese immigrants
• parents
• translanguaging

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the interviewees who shared their children’s name stories with us.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors

Notes on contributors

Shuling Yang

Shuling Yang is an Assistant Professor of literacy in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at East Tennessee State University. Her research interests include early literacy, biliteracy and teacher preparation. She works with multilingual families to promote literacy development. Now she is working with classroom teachers to develop elementary students’ understanding and appreciation of diversity in the rural Appalachian area.

Natalia A. Ward

Natalia A. Ward is an is an Associate Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the East Tennessee State University. Her focus is on preparing teachers to work with multilingual students and to effectively teach literacy. Previously, she taught English as a Second Language and English as a Foreign Language in the United States and Russia. Her research interests include equitable literacy education and assessment for multilingual learners, online synchronous and asynchronous teaching and learning, and education policy enactment in local contexts.

Emily Hayden

Emily Hayden is an Associate Professor of Literacy in the School of Education at Iowa State University. Before moving into higher education, she taught for 17 years in K-12 classrooms. Her research work includes exploration of factors that promote equitable and efficacious reading instruction and literacy development. She focuses on preparing better teaching in literacy across disciplines, better preparation of ALL students and ongoing professional development of teachers.