Asian Critical Race Theory and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Frameworks for Implementing Asian Ethnic Studies in PK-12 Education

Under the structures of white supremacy, the pandemic has unveiled the dehumanization of Asian folks in the US. For many of us who are members of Asian communities, these lived realities have existed since the arrival of Chinese laborers in the 1850s.^[i] We went from “dog eaters” to “bat eaters”;^[ii] we exist dually as model minorities and perpetual foreigners;^[iii] we’re seen as apolitical, non-combative, and submissive, yet also as the threatening yellow peril;^[iv] we’re fetishized yet desexualized;^[v] weaponized to perpetuate anti-Blackness;^[vi] and the list goes on.

This dehumanization over hundreds of years has allowed for continued violence against Asians in the US. Every level of this normalized violence must be disrupted—from microaggressions to mass murder.^[vii] Therefore, it is important to teach and learn about the strategic ways that Asian communities in the US continue to resist oppressive forces. By passing down sociopolitical wisdom and experiential knowledge,^[viii] we refuse to be included into a white supremacist and settler colonial school system. Anti-Asian violence is quite literally an issue of life or death, and we call for accountability on domestic terrorism.^[ix]

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Asian Americans were largely invisible from schools’ curricula,^[x] and representations were limited to deficit-based narratives.^[xi] Demands to address anti-Asian hate in schools during the pandemic gave rise to Asian American Studies state legislation in PK-12 public education in 2020. This change offers a space to critically engage learners in 1) seeing themselves represented in the curriculum from a strengths-based perspective, 2) becoming aware of interlocking systems of power, 3) identifying their positionalities within these systems of power, and 4) actively choosing to disrupt systems of power and build liberatory futures. 

As a collective of Asian PhD graduates and candidates in the fields of critical studies and teacher education, we value and continue to learn with and from Asian organizers, community educators, and artists to inform our teaching, research, and engagement in our communities. From these experiences, we recognize the use of Asian Critical Race Theory (AsianCrit)^[xx] and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (CSP)^[xxi] frameworks to facilitate the passing down of critical and navigational knowledge and practices in their/our communities’ spaces. Therefore, we recommend utilizing AsianCrit and CSP frameworks to guide curricula, instructional strategies, and educational policies. Below, we briefly describe these frameworks.

AsianCrit offers tenets that speak to the specific experiences of Asian American diasporic communities in the US and address the disruption of systems of oppression. It is inclusive of but not limited to the specific stereotypes and forms of racialization that are placed upon Asian Americans across intersectional identities, their/our migration stories and transnational contexts, and strategic organizing and commitment to social justice. Additionally, this lens recognizes entangled oppressions and liberations of all peoples. AsianCrit therefore critically acknowledges Indigenous histories and sovereignty. It also honors cross-racial solidarities and aims to disrupt anti-Blackness, cis-hetero patriarchy, imperialism, and settler colonialism.

We urge policy makers and educators to learn with and from Asian organizers, community educators, and artists who have and continue to teach and pass down critical and navigational knowledge and practices toward liberatory futures. It is important to note that these legacies have been and continue to be a fugitive practice^[xvi] in light of the ongoing attacks on Critical Race Theory and Ethnic Studies, and the threat they pose to colonialism and white supremacy. Further, for many Communities of Color,^[xvii] public schools are sites of harm, cultural erasure, and spirit murdering,^[xviii] as evidenced by the slow and arduous introduction of Asian Ethnic Studies in public schools. It is often in community spaces outside of school where Organizers, Community Educators, and Artists of Color cultivate young learners’ critical consciousness, honor their communities’ cultural wealth,^[xix] and engage them as leaders for social change.

As a collective of Asian PhD graduates and candidates in the fields of critical studies and teacher education, we value and continue to learn with and from Asian organizers, community educators, and artists to inform our teaching, research, and engagement in our communities. From these experiences, we recognize the use of Asian Critical Race Theory (AsianCrit)^[xx] and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (CSP)^[xxi] frameworks to facilitate the passing down of critical and navigational knowledge and practices in their/our communities’ spaces. Therefore, we recommend utilizing AsianCrit and CSP frameworks to guide curricula, instructional strategies, and educational policies. Below, we briefly describe these frameworks.

AsianCrit offers tenets that speak to the specific experiences of Asian American diasporic communities in the US and address the disruption of systems of oppression. It is inclusive of but not limited to the specific stereotypes and forms of racialization that are placed upon Asian Americans across intersectional identities, their/our migration stories and transnational contexts, and strategic organizing and commitment to social justice. Additionally, this lens recognizes entangled oppressions and liberations of all peoples. AsianCrit therefore critically acknowledges Indigenous histories and sovereignty. It also honors cross-racial solidarities and aims to disrupt anti-Blackness, cis-hetero patriarchy, imperialism, and settler colonialism.

Additionally, raising consciousness in Asian Ethnic Studies cannot be done in silos as we look to ongoing movement within spaces and practices of Communities of Color. CSP recognizes this need and offers expansive instructional strategies that center (1) the knowledges and practices of Communities of Color; (2) collaborations with students and communities; (3) commitments to being in good relationship with lands and waters, Indigenous communities who steward the lands and waters we are on, and one another; and (4) consistent and scaffolded opportunities to engage in self-reflexivity in order to disrupt internalized oppression and our complicity in any and all systems of oppression.^[xxii]

For the AsianCrit Collective, utilizing AsianCrit and CSP in teaching, research, and in community with each other and beyond includes the following examples:

Teaching

1. We invite creative storytelling within our reflective assignments. This includes photography, autobiographical mapping, music, collective altar building, and poetry.
2. We center discussion topics around the ways Asian folks are targeted by and perpetuate systems of oppression. Topics include model minority myth and anti-Blackness, perpetual foreigner trope and settler colonialism, legacies of queerness in our cultures, and intersectional experiences with gender and disability.
3. We intentionally build our classes around multimodal resources by assigning podcasts, Instagram videos, comics, music, videos, and zines alongside academic readings.

Research^[xxiii]

1. We prioritized ongoing consent (e.g., in participation, photos), accessibility (e.g., carpooling to and from the meeting space, food allergy and religious accommodations, ADA compliance), and safety (i.e., masks required and made available, option to pass on any activity).
2. We practiced communicating recognition and appreciation toward community partners through active listening and affirmations of their shared stories, personalized gratitude gift bags, and promotion of their work (e.g., art, photography, articles).
3. We ensured relatable and meaningful focus group discussion prompts to honor the complex identities and experiences our co-researchers hold (e.g., explicitly asking what they hope to come from the research project, meeting and building a relationship with them individually before the start of the project)

In community with one another and beyond

1. We support and tend to each other’s holistic well-being; for example, by sharing scholarly resources, community engagement opportunities, and job prospects in addition to personal life updates and dreams of establishing our own community space.
2. We recommend local Acupuncturists and Healers of Color to one another in the same breath as social science theories, over shared meals at Asian-owned restaurants.
3. We remind one another that our work involves sharing joy, at times discomfort, and collectively moving toward our own conceptions of liberation—that caring relationships span the personal and the professional.

We chose these pedagogies and practices with the intention to honor our relational responsibilities to one another, our students, and our community partners, and we hope they can offer others a way to reimagine future possibilities.

We conclude this commentary with calls to action informed by AsianCrit and CSP for policy makers and educators who support Asian and Asian American students and communities.

Moving forward, we demand the following from policy makers:

1. Improve data disaggregation and use. Asian and Asian American communities are often treated as a monolith, and this practice continues to fuel misconceptions and hyper-invisibility. One example is the way federal reports often present Asian families as having attained social and economic upward mobility while ignoring how Southeast Asian communities, especially those who are refugees or immigrants, often lack access to the same resources.^[xxiv] Disaggregating data by dividing “Asian” into ethnic and cultural groups allows us to see and address gaps within different communities when creating policies, especially when improving education for Asian students.^[xxv] 
2. Invest and build long-term, reciprocal partnerships with local community-based organizations that serve Asian communities, especially young people. By building partnerships with organizations that are leading the work, policy makers can learn with and from them to ensure that policies strengthen and address the needs of the local community.
3. Invite and compensate local community experts when drafting policies. There are many experts within our community who can provide unique and important insights. By inviting them to be a part of policy development from the beginning, we can ensure that policies will reflect the community they are meant to serve and protect.

At the same time, we invite educators to take action as follows:

1. Critically reflecting on their own intersecting identities and how their positionalities impact their work with Asian and Asian American students. Engaging in ongoing listening and learning assists with understanding the many different experiences within Asian diasporic communities.
2. Amplifying Asian and Asian American perspectives within learning spaces across all grade levels and contexts. Attending to intersecting identities when making decisions about representation (e.g., Asian folks with disabilities, queer and trans Asian folks) will center Asian folks’ lived experiences and worldviews. Remember that no one person can speak to the Asian experience.
3. Considering how knowledge and ways of knowing are culturally situated and creating space for expansive forms of learning (e.g., creative practices, storytelling, multigenerational learning, land-based learning). Educators should attune to and disrupt the ways that certain forms of knowledge production are privileged over others within learning spaces.
4. Directly addressing sociopolitical issues that affect Asian and Asian American students and holding space for youth to process and share their experiences, understandings, and emotional responses. By engaging students to critically analyze social injustices within historical and systemic contexts, educators can support their participation in social transformation and collective liberation work.

We are grateful and indebted to the Black, Indigenous, Latine, Pacific Islander, and Asian scholars and community organizers who have and continue to pave the way for Ethnic Studies and the liberation of all people. Our commentary is not intended to suggest that this is the only way to implement Asian Ethnic Studies effectively. Rather, we offer one way rooted in our values of community, collective care, the abolition of all systems of oppression, and liberatory futures for all. We hope to continue to be in dialogue and collaborative action with those committed to the same.

Endnotes

¹ We complicate “the first arrival” of Asians in the US. While Filipino laborers were brought to Chumash lands (Morro Bay, California) by Spaniards in the 1580s, we are intentionally differentiating between Asian existence on pre-colonial Turtle Island and Asian existence within the structures of a settler colonial US. While white supremacy and its consequential dehumanization of Asian folks precedes the formation of the US and its geopolitical boundaries, our commentary focuses on Asian folks within the US context. see: Valerie Ooka Pang and Li-Rong Lilly Cheng, eds., Struggling to be Heard: The Unmet Needs of Asian Pacific American Children (SUNY Press, 1998), https://sunypress.edu/Books/S/Struggling-To-Be-Heard2.; Ronald T. Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (New York, NY, USA: Penguin Books, 1990), https://worldcat.org/en/title/1080597694. 

² Hannah Tessler, Meera Choi, and Grace Kao. “The anxiety of being Asian American: Hate crimes and negative biases during the COVID-19 pandemic.” American Journal of Criminal Justice 45, no. 4 (2020): 636-646, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-020-09541-5. 

³ Jennifer C. Ng, Sharon S. Lee, and Yoon K. Pak. “Chapter 4 Contesting the Model Minority and Perpetual Foreigner Stereotypes: A Critical Review of Literature on Asian Americans in Education,” Review of Research in Education 31, no. 1 (2007): 95-130, https://doi.org/10.3102/0091732X07300046095. 

⁴ Yao Li and Harvey L. Nicholson. “When ‘Model Minorities’ Become ‘Yellow Peril’—Othering and the Racialization of Asian Americans in the COVID‐19 Pandemic,” Sociology Compass 15, no. 2 (2021): e12849–n/a, https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12849^.  

⁵ Rosalind S. Chou, Asian American Sexual Politics: The Construction of Race, Gender, and Sexuality (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2012), https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781442209251/Asian-American-Sexual-Politics-The-Construction-of-Race-Gender-and-Sexuality. 

⁶ Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt, “Colonized Loyalty: Asian American Anti-Blackness and Complicity” (2020), Faculty Publications, Published Version, Submission 78, https://digitalcommons.linfield.edu/englfac_pubs/78. 

⁷Tatiana Piper and Jackie Strohm, “Racial and Sexual Violence Pyramid”, 2019, Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape, https://pcar.org/sites/default/files/resource-pdfs/racial_sexual_violence_pyramid.pdf. 

⁸ Sonia Abigail Sánchez Carmen, Michael Domínguez, Andrew Cory Greene, Elizabeth Mendoza, Michelle Fine, Helen A. Neville, and Kris D. Gutiérrez, “Revisiting the Collective in Critical Consciousness: Diverse Sociopolitical Wisdoms and Ontological Healing in Sociopolitical Development,” The Urban Review 47, no. 5 (2015): 824–846, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-015-0338-5. 

⁹ Carolyn A. Fan, “Beyond #StopAAPIHate: Expanding the Definition of Violence Against Asian Americans,” American Journal of Public Health 112, no. 4 (2022): 604–6, https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2022.306740. 

¹⁰ Sohyun An, “Asian Americans in American History: An AsianCrit Perspective on Asian American Inclusion in State US History Curriculum Standards,” Theory & Research in Social Education 44, no. 2 (2016): 244-276, https://doi.org/10.1080/00933104.2016.1170646. 

¹¹ Eve Tuck, “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities,” Harvard Educational Review 79, no. 3 (2009): 409-428, https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.79.3.n0016675661t3n15. 

¹² Ileana Najarro, “States Are Mandating Asian American Studies. What Should the Curriculum Look like?” Education Week, October 28, 2022, https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/states-are-mandating-asian-american-studies-what-should-the-curriculum-look-like/2022/10. 

¹³ Isis Davis-Marks, “Illinois becomes first state to mandate teaching Asian American history,” Smithsonian Magazine, July 14, 2021, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/illinois-becomes-first-state-mandate-teaching-asian-american-history-public-schools-180978160/; Nicole Chavez, “New Jersey becomes second state to require Asian American history to be taught in schools,” CNN, January 18, 2022, https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/18/us/new-jersey-schools-asian-american-history/index.html.

¹⁴ Tat Bellamy-Walker, “Rhode Island becomes fourth state to require Asian American history in schools,” NBC News, September 7, 2022, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/rhode-island-becomes-fourth-state-require-asian-american-history-schoo-rcna46720. 

¹⁵ “Ethnic Studies for All: California’s New High School Requirement,” California 100, February 1, 2023, https://california100.org/ethnic-studies-for-all-californias-new-high-school-requirement/.

¹⁶ Jarvis R. Givens, “Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching” (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2021) , https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674983687. 

¹⁷ We capitalize this and similar phrases like Organizer, People, and Communities of Color to honor the ways Black, Indigenous, Asian, Latine, and Pacific Islander (the communities we are referring to when using this phrase) are capitalized. 

¹⁸ Michael J. Dumas, “‘Losing an Arm’: Schooling as a Site of Black Suffering.” Race, Ethnicity and Education 17, no. 1 (2014): 1–29, https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2013.850412.; K. Tsianina Lomawaima and Teresa L. McCarty, “To Remain an Indian”: Lessons in Democracy from a Century of Native American Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 2006), https://www.tcpress.com/to-remain-an-indian-9780807747162.; Robin West and Patricia L. Williams. “Murdering the Spirit: Racism, Rights, and Commerce.” Michigan Law Review 90, no. 6 (1992): 1771–96, https://doi.org/10.2307/1289447. 

¹⁹ Tara J. Yosso. “Whose Culture Has Capital? A Critical Race Theory Discussion of Community Cultural Wealth.” Race, Ethnicity and Education 8, no. 1 (2005): 69–91, https://doi.org/10.1080/1361332052000341006. 

²⁰ Jon S. Iftikar and Samuel D. Museus, “On the Utility of Asian Critical (AsianCrit) Theory in the Field of Education,” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 31, no. 10 (2018): 935–49, https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2018.1522008. ; Edward Curammeng, Tracy Lachica Buenavista, and Stephanie Cariaga, “Asian American Critical Race Theory: Origins, Directions, and Praxis,” Center for Critical Race Studies at UCLA, no. 9 (June 2017): 1-4, https://issuu.com/almaiflores/docs/ec_tlb_sc_asianam_crt. 

²¹ Django Paris. “Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy: A Needed Change in Stance, Terminology, and Practice.” Educational Researcher 41, no. 3 (2012): 93–97, https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X12441244. 

²² Django Paris, “Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies and Our Futures,” The Educational Forum (West Lafayette, Ind.) 85, no. 4 (2021): 364–76, https://doi.org/10.1080/00131725.2021.1957634. 

²³ In this project, we worked with Asian non-binary and women organizers, community educators, and artists in-person during the COVID pandemic. We wanted to learn about their values as social justice movement leaders, their experiences as folks positioned at multiple intersections of systems of oppression, and their hopes for liberatory futures. In focus group discussions, we prompted them to utilize creative storytelling methods to reflect on their histories of migration and place-making, their embodied experiences with Asian racialization, and their/our personal roles and responsibilities within social justice and solidarity work that strives toward liberation for our own and other communities.

²⁴ Christian Edlagan and Kavya Vaghul. “How data disaggregation matters for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders,” Washington Center for Equitable Growth, December 14, 2016,https://equitablegrowth.org/how-data-disaggregation-matters-for-asian-americans-and-pacific-islanders/.

²⁵ Anna Byon and Amanda Janice Roberson, “Everyone Deserves to Be Seen: Recommendations for Improved Federal Data on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI)” (2020),  https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/bitstream/handle/10919/100571/AsianAmericanPacificIslander.pdf?sequence=1.