Stacey J. Lee

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.

Additional complexities: social class, ethnicity, generation, and gender in Asian American student experiences

Despite the largely monolithic descriptions of Asian American students as high achieving model minorities, Asian Americans are a diverse group and their experiences are varied and complex. This article explores the ways that social class, ethnicity, generation, and gender shape the educational opportunities, experiences and achievement of Asian American students. It demonstrates that in order to better serve the unique needs of Asian American students we must examine the ways various identities, and the intersections of identities, inform the experiences of Asian Americans.

Learning “America” Hmong American High School Students

First- and second-generation Hmong American youth gather much of their information about America and “being American” from their experiences attending school. This ethnographic study explores the way Hmong American students at a public high school in Wisconsin interpret what it means to be Hmong in the United States. It examines the way the culture of Whiteness at the school shapes Hmong American students’experiences and their understandings about being American. The article addresses such questions as What is the school teaching Hmong students about America and being American? How do non-Hmong students and staff construct Hmong American students? How do Hmong American students respond to the culture of Whiteness?

“Family Is Here”: Learning in Community-Based After-School Programs

This article examines the culture of community-based after-school programs that serve low-income Hmong immigrant youth. By drawing on knowledge of Hmong culture, history, and family structure, and knowledge of mainstream American culture, the staff at the community centers are able to connect to children and adolescents in ways that schools do not. Despite the success that community centers have in connecting to Hmong immigrant youth, they are less successful in providing youth with literacy-rich activities that promote school success. The authors argue that through collaboration, schools and community based after-school programs may be able to bridge the academic and cultural barriers that marginalize low-income immigrant youth.

Introduction to the Special Issue: What Does It Mean to Do Ethical and Engaged Research With Immigrant Communities?

In recent years, the politics and ethics surrounding research have garnered increasing attention among scholars from diverse epistemological perspectives. Scholarly publications range from more mat...

Engaging the Transnational Lives of Immigrant Youth in Public Schooling: Toward a Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy for Newcomer Immigrant Youth

Drawing on ethnographic research in urban schools serving recently arrived immigrant students in New York City, this article considers the importance of drawing on transnational attachments in culturally sustaining pedagogy for newcomer immigrant students. The authors document how recently arrived immigrant youth narrated real and imagined transnational attachments as they described their past, current, and future lives in the United States and in home countries. Furthermore, they show how educators recognize and build on young people’s connections to homelands in their classrooms and in the teaching of academic content to promote the belonging and engagement of their students. Thus, the authors argue that by recognizing and engaging students’ transnational knowledge, experiences, and attachments, educators are engaging in a culturally sustaining pedagogy that prepares students for our changing globalized world.

Racialization, Schooling, and Becoming American: Asian American Experiences

Racial categories, inequalities, and hierarchies have shaped life in the United States since the formation of the country. For children and youth in the immigrant and second generations, schools are central sites of racialization. In this article, we focus on what the educational research suggests about the role of schooling in the racialization of ethnically diverse Asian immigrant and refugee groups in the United States. Specifically, we examine how schools have been implicated in the racialization of Asian Americans from immigrant families in the 20th and 21st centuries, as well as how Asian immigrant youth have used schooling to respond to the forces of racialization. Through policies of exclusion and segregation in schools, the state often positions Asian Americans as outside the realm of Americanness. Today, in addition to an ongoing image of Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners, we see racialization processes expressed in the religification of South Asian immigrant students and in the ideological Blackening of some Southeast Asian youth. At the same time, schools have often positioned Asian Americans as model minorities whose academic success is used to argue that US schools are meritocratic and to blame other students of color for their own academic challenges. Our review demonstrates that Asian immigrant students experience racialization in diverse and contradictory ways that intersect with other identities like class, religion, and ethnicity, making the notion of a single Asian American subject problematic. Although it may seem as though Asian Americans are not subjected to racism, due to the model minority stereotype and their relative racial privilege, our review of the literature clearly challenges this assumption. Rather than proof of the absence of racism, the model minority narrative arguably demotes Asian Americans to 2nd-class citizenship, which hinges on the approval of Whites.

R&D: Welcoming Immigrant Students with a High-Quality Education.

The Internationals Network for Public Schools has a reputation for engaging in culturally and linguistically responsive pedagogy with immigrant youth. The 19 schools in the internationals school network serve the unique academic and emotional needs of recently arrived immigrant youth who are English language learners. INPS schools are in New York, California, and the Washington, D.C., area. Students in the network come from over 100 countries, speak over 90 languages, have diverse educational backgrounds and about 90% are eligible for free or reduced-price meals. From the Internationals, we can learn what constitutes a high-quality education for immigrant students and what teachers can do to provide a high-quality education for immigrant youth.

Teaching Asian America: Diversity and the Problem of Community

Teaching Asian America: Diversity and the Problem of Community. Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, ed. New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1998. 266 pp.