Asian American Studies across the Disciplines: Ethnic Studies-Political Science-Liberal Studies Partnerships in the Time of AB 1460 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Being Grounded with an Ethnic Studies Legacy: ASPIRE SFSU
2021
ONE EVENING IN 1991, my mother told my older brother that if he wanted to go out he had to take me with him. I was in the eighth grade, and my brother was a sophomore in high school. Our mother dropped us off at University of California, Riverside (UCR), and we went into a meeting for high school students hosted by the UCR Asian Pacific Student Programs (APSP). We all sat in a circle, Roland Coloma, who was the APSP Coordinator, asked us to introduce ourselves. Everyone represented Asian Student Clubs from different high schools from Riverside Unified School District (RUSD). The theme of the meeting was Filipino American history, and we watched a movie focused on Filipinos in Louisiana. I was captivated. My intuition told me that I was in the right place as a hunger to want to know and learn more about my history began. APSP, like many race-centered student programming prior to federal minority-serving funding, was created in 1989 from student protests and coalition building intende...
Toward a Radical Asian American Studies Pedagogy
Journal of Asian American Studies, 2023
As schools, school districts, and states begin to institutionalize Ethnic Studies in policy and practice, we examine the ways in which Asian American Studies (AAS), a subfield of Ethnic Studies, has informed solidarity and social movements at the K-12 level. This conceptual paper engages the following questions: Whose stories do we center in Asian American Studies? What is Asian American Studies pedagogy? How has Asian American Studies informed the movement for K-12 Ethnic Studies? We expand on Ethnic Studies pedagogies (Tintiangco-Cubales et al. 2015) to offer a praxis that centers the experiences of Asian American and Pacific Islanders (AA and PI) to examine power relations, community building, resistance, and social justice. We theorize an Asian American Studies pedagogy that relies on AA and PI voices while simultaneously valuing relational racialization (Molina, HoSang, Gutiérrez, 2019) as a vehicle for developing “deep solidarities” (Fujino, 2018). We conceptualize a Radical Asian American Studies pedagogy rooted in solidarity and social movements.
New Directions for Higher Education, 2019
During the most recent 5-year funding cycles of the U.S. Department of Education' s Asian American Native American Pacific Islander Serving Institution (AANAPISI) program in 2015 and 2016, a total of eleven 2-year colleges and ten 4-year universities across the mainland United States and Pacific Territories received awards-the largest total number of institutions ever to gain AANAPISI funding at one time. For settings such as Boston, San Francisco-Oakland, Sacramento, and Irvine that have both 2-year and 4-year funded AANAPISIs with shared student and community profiles, the unique opportunity to leverage AANAPISI resources efficiently and effectively through institutional collaborations and alignments is historic and time-sensitive. Moreover, collaborative possibilities between AANAPISI and non-AANAPISI 2-year and 4-year institutions operating elsewhere within shared geographic settings also deserve greater attention from administrative and faculty leaders, whether in terms of student transfer pathways, curriculum innovation, or faculty/staff development. The following case offers one successful example to consider. Prior to winning a 5-year AANAPISI grant in 2016, Bunker Hill Community College (BHCC) received a 3-year National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant in 2014 to support changes in curriculum, pedagogy, and student assessment that were responsive to Asian Americans in the Boston area. Aligned with its institutional development process as an AANAPISI through a close partnership with the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Massachusetts Boston (UMB)-the region' s public AANAPISI research university-the NEH project was intended to
Toward an Ethnic Studies Pedagogy: Implications for K-12 Schools from the Research
The Urban Review, 2015
In direct contrast to Arizona's criminalization of Ethnic Studies in Arizona, the San Francisco Unified School District's Board of Education unanimously adopted a resolution to support Ethnic Studies in their schools. As schools across the country begin to place Ethnic Studies courses on their master schedules, the lack of preparation and education to support effective Ethnic Studies teaching has emerged as a problem. Therefore, the central questions addressed in this paper are: What is Ethnic Studies pedagogy? and What are its implications for hiring and preparing K-12 teachers? This is a conceptual article that builds upon existing research studies to investigate the pedagogy of effective K-12 teachers of Ethnic Studies. From this literature, we identify several patterns in their pedagogy:
In direct contrast to Arizona's criminalization of Ethnic Studies in Arizona, the San Francisco Unified School District's Board of Education unanimously adopted a resolution to support Ethnic Studies in their schools. As schools across the country begin to place Ethnic Studies courses on their master schedules, the lack of preparation and education to support effective Ethnic Studies teaching has emerged as a problem. Therefore, the central questions addressed in this paper are: What is Ethnic Studies pedagogy? and What are its implications for hiring and preparing K-12 teachers? This is a conceptual article that builds upon existing research studies to investigate the pedagogy of effective K-12 teachers of Ethnic Studies. From this literature, we identify several patterns in their pedagogy:
Under Review
Inspired by the various movements for racial empowerment and anti-colonialist liberation at the time, Asian American Studies as part of Ethnic Studies first emerged as an established interdisciplinary field during the late 1960s when student-led movements across the nation demanded that colleges and universities incorporate the histories and perspectives of racially-marginalized groups into Eurocentric curricula. These movements were also fueled by greater political awareness of local-to-global issues outside the university—from poverty and gentrification in local Asian American neighborhoods to protests against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War (Umemoto,1989). Although Asian American student organizations were proliferating across the nation, the movement achieved one of its greatest milestones when a student movement led by the Black Students Union (BSU) and the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) attempted to redefine the basic tenets of higher education in a five-month struggle at San Francisco State College in 1968 (Chung and Chang, 1998). Spearheading a series of non-violent strikes and protest demonstrations, the TWLF and BSU demanded a specific set of reform programs in order to establish ethnic studies, open admissions, equal educational opportunity, and the right of self-representation among Third World people. Despite not meeting all of its demands, the movement led to greater racial and coalitional consciousness among students and the establishment of the first School of Ethnic Studies in the nation (Omatsu, 1994; Umemoto, 1989). Despite student efforts to turn the spotlight on local neighborhoods, Wei (1993) states that sustained Asian American community-academic partnerships were not common during this time period except in neighborhoods situated close to a campus. With a few exceptions, those that did establish some working relationship often focused on inviting community members to teach classes and serve on boards or sending students into the community as interns or researchers; however, these efforts at best neglected to create a symbiotic relationship between community and academia and at worst, dissolved into resentment or conflicts as a result of one-sided relationships. Since the 1960s, Asian American Studies has undergone a series of internal transformations, distancing itself from its initial political roots in radical student and community activism and moving towards greater professionalization of the discipline in the academy. Wei (1993) attributes this transition to the intellectual, cultural and political disconnect between residents/ activists and academics; post-1960s racial backlash against ethnic studies and communities; the privatization of universities that has re-centered the discipline around individual professionalism; and the low visibility and credibility of community research in general in universities. Over time, Asian American Studies has incorporated new perspectives from the arts and humanities and has begun to engage more fully with challenging questions regarding gender/ intersectionality, queer theory, and race relations with other minority groups. In addition to these internal changes, a number of major transformations taking hold around this time period have complicated the path toward ethnic solidarity and social change by widening the gap and interest groups within racial and ethnic communities as well as creating formidable structural barriers to protest and mobility. The first is the elimination of blatantly discriminatory statutes and legalized segregation during the Civil Rights era, which opened the doors to mobility among middle-class blacks and new immigrants but also, heightened class inequality within racial minority groups, removing a common basis for racial solidarity. Second, the Civil Rights Movement coincided with or preceded numerous other identity, cultural and liberation movements from the feminist movement to black power to queer pride, which triggered heated dialogue about gender, sexuality, and nationalism that continues today. Third, the enactment of the 1965 Immigration Act opened the doors to new immigrants from Asia and the Americas, but the class, gender and legal status of incoming groups have been much more 1 Navigating Ethnic Hierarchies
AAPI Nexus, 2024
This practitioner essay highlights the work of three women of color scholars involved in the implementation of Assembly Bill 1460 (AB 1460), the recent state law mandating Ethnic Studies as a General Education requirement in the California State University system. We are guided by the political and embodied legacies of AB 1460 and arrive here, standing on the shoulders of student activists to document the ongoing activist work of Ethnic Studies. We come to this work and to this essay from an intentionally transdisciplinary place to reflect on implementing AB 1460 on our campus, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Together, we discuss our praxis in building an interdisciplinary curriculum and amplifying the presence of Asian American Studies in the university, approving cross-listed course proposals, and securing resources to support Ethnic Studies faculty. In this process, we hold space for the emotional and femme of color labor, as well as the tensions and possibilities, that revealed themselves during the implementation of AB 1460.