Bic Ngo

Complicating the Image of Model Minority Success: A Review of Southeast Asian American Education

Similar to other Asian American students, Southeast Asian American students are often stereotyped by the popular press as hardworking and high-achieving model minorities. On the other hand, Southeast Asian American youth are also depicted as low-achieving high school dropouts involved in gangs. The realities of academic performance and persistence among Southeast Asian American students are far more complex than either image suggests. This article explores the various explanations for the struggles, successes, and educational experiences of Southeast Asian students. To highlight differences across ethnic groups, we review the literature on each Southeast Asian ethnic group separately and examine the successes and continuing struggles facing first- and second-generation Vietnamese American, Cambodian American, Hmong American, and Lao American students in the United States.

Learning from the margins: the education of Southeast and South Asian Americans in context

This article explicates the diversity within the Asian American community by focusing on Southeast and South Asian American students. Focusing on these two groups is important given their recent migration (relative to other groups) and tenuous position within Asian American research, discourse, and representation. In particular, this article contends that the image of Asian American success masks the contexts—economic, social, and cultural challenges—that mark the educational experiences of many Southeast Asian and South Asian American students. It explores (1) issues of cultural capital; (2) negotiations of identity, gender and generation; and (3) experiences of racism. By highlighting the social and cultural contexts of the education of Southeast and South Asian students, it reveals the many ways students are learning from the margins and the price of ‘success’ that is often diminished by the image of Asian American achievement.

Beyond "culture clash" understandings of immigrant experiences

This article addresses the ways in which the experiences of immigrant youth and families in U.S. schools and society have been conceptualized primarily as conflicts between immigrant cultures and dominant U.S. culture. Exemplified by the discourse of culture clash or of immigrants being torn between two worlds, this prevalent understanding structures the experiences, cultures, and identities of immigrants as unchanging and fixed in time. This article illustrates the ways that culture and identity are constructed within the double movement of discourse and representation. It offers examples of how dominant representations create simplistic understandings of the identities of immigrant youth, as well as the ways youth are constructing new identities.

Ambivalent urban, immigrant identities: the incompleteness of Lao American student identities

In this article, the author elucidates the identity work of Lao American urban, immigrant students, highlighting ambivalent identities that do not fit into notions of bicultural or binary identities. It examines the various discourses and practices that inform and shape the experiences and identities of urban, Lao American high school students. It explores the ways that immigrant youth identities are continuously shaped by dominant discourses while at the same time are responses that modify, resist or echo these discourses. It shows that youth are creating incomplete, contradictory – ambivalent – urban, immigrant identities and are changing what it means to be ‘urban’ and ‘immigrant’ youth. By highlighting the ambivalent nature of immigrant identities, this article complicates binary notions of urban, immigrant identities as good/bad and unsettles the ancestral country/United States oppositional framing of the experiences of immigrant students.

Doing “Diversity” at Dynamic High: Problems and Possibilities of Multicultural Education in Practice

In this article, I examine how students, teachers and staff understood and addressed cultural difference at an urban, public high school in the United States. My research reveals that the school’s multicultural practices contradictorily sustained and exacerbated problems and made teachers resistant to multicultural education. Simultaneously, my research elucidates the ways in which pedagogy that focuses on tensions and conflicts that arise from cultural differences offer important possibilities for multicultural education.

Culture Consciousness Among Hmong Immigrant Leaders: Beyond the Dichotomy of Cultural Essentialism and Cultural Hybridity

This article illustrates the culture consciousness of Hmong immigrant community leaders as they made sense of the educational experiences of Hmong American children and families. It draws on the work of scholars who have theorized “critical” essentialism to suggest that Hmong leaders are critically aware of the role and import of dominant culture in shaping the contours of Hmong children’s education. The analysis brings attention to “culture consciousness”—a lens for analyzing immigrant education that highlights the deployment of culture as social critique and political strategy. This research complicates the essentialist versus anti-essentialist binary for analyzing culture and disrupts the tendency to portray immigrant parents and adults as entrenched in a reified culture.

Designing Culturally Responsive Organized After-School Activities

Organized after-school activities promote positive youth development across a range of outcomes. To be most effective, organized activities need to meet high-quality standards. The eight features of quality developed by the National Research Council’s Committee on Community-Level Programs for Youth have helped guide the field in this regard. However, these standards have largely been defined in terms of universal developmental needs, and do not adequately speak to the growing ethnic and racial diversity within the United States, which is further complicated by issues of power and social class differences. Given U.S. population shifts and after-school funding priorities, the time has come to consider new ways to provide organized after-school activities that are responsive to youth’s culture and everyday lives. The goal of this article is to explore how we can help ensure that after-school activities are culturally responsive and address the specific needs of the youth who participate in these activities. Based on theory and empirical evidence, we provide proposed practices of cultural responsiveness for each of the eight features of quality for program structure and staff. The article concludes with future directions for research and strategies to implement culturally responsive practices and harness resources.

Discourses About Gender Among Hmong American Policymakers: Conflicting Views About Gender, Culture, and Hmong Youth

In this article, we draw on research with Hmong American community members to contribute to a more complex understanding of Hmong culture. Specifically, in a critical discourse analysis of interviews with 3 influential Hmong American politicians, we highlight the divergent perspectives on early marriage, Hmong gender norms, and the struggles of Hmong parents and youth. We conclude with a discussion of language and identity, and point to the detrimental influence of dominant discourse on Hmong Americans.

Naming Their World in a Culturally Responsive Space Experiences of Hmong Adolescents in an After-School Theatre Program

This article draws on ethnographic research of a youth theatre program within a Hmong arts organization to explore the ways in which a culturally responsive program nurtured critical consciousness among Hmong immigrant youth. Hmong youth “named” struggles with stereotypes and acculturation expectations, and constructed positive ethnic identities as Hmong Americans in the theatre program. The study contributes to the after-school youth development scholarship by explicating the ways arts programs within co-ethnic, community-based organizations may afford immigrant youth with a means to rescript life stories, confront injustices perpetrated against them, and feel a sense of agency.

Identity Work: Enactment of Racial-Ethnic Identity in Everyday Life

ABSTRACT In this theoretical analysis, we discuss the attributional and enactment approaches to identity and present a new ethnic-racial identity enactment model derived from extant theory and research. We highlight modes of identity work that provide (1) self-concept and self-esteem protection; (2) achievement and success during everyday encounters; (3) a sense of belonging and attachment to one’s ascriptive group; and (4) the relation between internalized oppression and internalized racism in everyday exchanges. We discuss the integration of self-concept mechanisms with mindsets and intentions specific to ethnic-racial identity dynamics. The article ends by highlighting a research procedure that fuses the attributional and enactment approaches to identity research.