This article advances spatial theorization of Asian American (AsAm) racialization by foregrounding the mutually constitutive nature of the social and spatial in schooling. While critical scholarship has illuminated how race and space intersect, the spatial dimensions of AsAm racialization remain undertheorized. Building on AsianCrit and Critical Race Spatial Analysis, we propose a Spatial AsianCrit framework that conceptualizes racialization as a sociospatial process produced through material, discursive, and lived relations. Drawing on Soja's trialectics of spatiality, including Firstspace (material), Secondspace (imagined), and Thirdspace (lived/reimagined), Spatial AsianCrit situates AsAm racial formation within layered spatial configurations. We illustrate the framework's theoretical and methodological potential to inform research design, analysis, and praxis through two case examples that examine space, place, and AsAm racialization and resistance. These cases reveal spatial logics and power structures contouring AsAm youth and community experiences while opening pathways for transformative educational practice.
The high school to college transition can be an exciting but challenging period for many youth, including the diverse Asian American youth, a group that is rarely researched. In this study, we amplify the voices of six Asian American college students as they discuss belonging during the transition from high school to college. Drawing from both AsianCrit and Asian Diaspora Experience frameworks, we focus our analysis and discussion on the focal youths' definitions of belonging, how transitions they face lead them to seek various spaces of belonging, and the strategies they use to create community, with attention to the role that their identities play across these areas. The focal Asian American youths employ diverse identity-based, network-based, and activity-based strategies, demonstrating agency and resilience in seeking belonging. This study contributes to the literature on belongingness among Asian American college students by examining factors that shape their sense of community and belonging prior to and during the transition to college, as well as considering how identity connects with both community and belonging. We offer implications and recommendations for researchers and secondary/post-secondary education professionals to support Asian American youth in developing a stronger sense of both identity and community during this transition.
This article argues that End-of-Course (EOC) exams, though framed as neutral measures of academic mastery, function as institutionalized violence against historically marginalized students. Drawing upon legal precedent, educational theory, and multi-faith theological reflection, the author exposes how these assessments reinforce Eurocentric benchmarks, codify access to opportunity, and act as gateways to the school-to-prison pipeline. By examining the emotional, academic, and legal consequences of EOCs in under-resourced schools, particularly those serving Black, Brown, and Indigenous youth, this article identifies a pattern of harm embedded in policy and profit. The analysis integrates practitioner experience, including firsthand narratives from the author's school, with critical frameworks such as epistemic injustice, culturally relevant pedagogy, and critical race theory. Ultimately, the manuscript positions EOCs not as flawed tools but as active agents in a system that criminalizes difference, devalues cultural knowledge, and produces trauma under the guise of rigor. It calls for a systemic shift toward culturally sustaining, justice-oriented assessment models rooted in equity and human dignity.
Asian American (AsAm) youth are a highly under-studied group (Chang, 2017; Hsieh & Kim, 2020). As a racial group, AsAms are often seen as academically and economically successful, and narratives about how they are "practically white" abound. While the success of AsAm youth is foregrounded, this obscures the very real struggles of AsAm youth (Chatterji & Yin, 2022) who have some of the highest mental health issues and suicide rates in the country (Shih et al., 2019). Caught in the intersecting oppressions of race and gender, AsAm girls must navigate their marginalization on multiple fronts. This marginalization can put AsAm girls at higher risk for stress and mental health issues (Tummala-Narra & Yang, 2019). Yet, AsAm girls exhibit great resiliency and imagination. To this end, this study focuses on the experiences of AsAm high school girls as they negotiate their multiple identities through the use of AsAm young adult literature. One of the major themes around silence and speaking out provides implications for teachers and parents in helping AsAm girls navigate their worlds.
This introduction to the special issue positions Asian American youth as theorists, intellectuals, and knowledge producers whose analyses are constitutive of, rather than supplementary to, educational research. Against the backdrop of intensifying anti-Asian racism, demographic growth, and ongoing curriculum censorship, Asian American youth continue to transform grief into grassroots mobilization and connect anti-Asian hostility to the longer histories and ongoing violence of imperialism, gendered racialization, and disposability. However, educational research persists in rendering them as either passive model minorities or perpetual foreigners, erasing their agency and transformative capacity. Drawing on Asian American studies and Asian American critical race theory, this introduction identifies four gaps that the articles in the special issue collectively address: methodological extraction that denies youth intellectual authority; geographic provincialism that universalizes coastal experiences while minimizing regional specificity; superficial intersectional analysis that treats race as an isolated variable rather than a constitutive force; and spatial frameworks that position schools and communities as neutral backdrops rather than active producers of racialization. The five articles focus on participatory mapping, youth participatory action research, college transition studies, civic engagement, and after-school book clubs. They model theoretical and methodological approaches that shift power and authority from adult researchers to youth whose expertise derives from lived experiences. Situating academic scholarship in dialogue with youth social and cultural movements, this special issue argues that educational research should be accountable to organizing work that precedes and exceeds academic priorities, and should follow youth visionary leadership rather than claiming to lead them.
Education is an experience marked by time. As a human endeavor, it is framed by the finitude that characterizes life and the time individuals and communities devote to it. In this theoretical article, we turn to Gadamer's hermeneutic notion of the beautiful as an event of understanding that is both shaped by time and timeless to deconstruct how education, its evidence, and its measurement are interpreted and enacted. Gadamer argues that understanding manifests with the evidentiary quality of the experience of the beautiful, that is, as an experience that is worthwhile for its own sake. In refolding aesthetics into meaning and experience, beauty rekindles the movement of understanding as one of interconnectedness with a world past, present, and yet to be, and holds the potential to counteract the instrumentalization of education. Accordingly, the beautiful challenges the separation that the perception of the passing of time creates, and the illusion of stillness that evidence and measurement create when dissociated from the continuous flow of time. Beauty restores the role of evidence as one of experience, the role of measurement as one of interconnectedness, and, in doing so, the purpose of education as one of humanness, plurality, and freedom.
This paper examines elementary teachers' lived experiences in a predominantly Black elementary school as they navigate culturally relevant mathematics (CRM). Drawing on Bhabha's (1994) concept of hybridity alongside insights from critical race theory (CRT) and culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP), we examine the diverse forms and levels of hybrid agency that teachers exercise within the complex systemic contexts of mathematics education. Our study reveals patterns in how teachers' perspectives and experiences with race relate to their mathematics teaching and the ways they negotiate cultural responsiveness alongside curricular expectations and mandates. Instead, teachers must negotiate their practices and relationships while being situated in complex racial and power structures. However, some engagement fell short, as teachers took little consideration of racialized systems and relations within mathematics education. These findings demonstrate the urgency of supporting teachers in fostering race-conscious engagement within their CRM practices. The study suggests that teacher education should position CRM as a sociopolitical practice, which requires disrupting normative practices of anti-Blackness and whiteness in mathematics education.
Research on youth civic engagement has often framed immigrant and racially minoritized youth through deficit lenses, overlooking their contributions and lived practices. This study centers Korean immigrant youth to complicate dominant narratives of civic participation. Drawing on Critical Race Theory, AsianCrit, and frameworks of cultural, lived, and transnational citizenship, the study examines how civic engagement is shaped by intersecting structures of race, immigration, and schooling. Using counter-storytelling with nine Korean immigrant college students on the U.S. West Coast, the study finds that civic engagement spans diverse sites and develops from initially instrumental participation into more critical and sustained forms, particularly in college contexts. These findings highlight how their experiences disrupt normative civic frames and reveal alternative ways of belonging, responsibility, and leadership, while also demonstrating how civic engagement is shaped by racialized conditions.
Answering calls from recent literature reviews of scholarship at the juncture of rural education and queerness to move beyond deficit narratives and take up more complex theorizations of space and place, this article considers the complexities of K-12 teachers' queer educational advocacy in relation to both rurality and region. Drawing from a two-year study that combined practitioner inquiry and ethnography, the article focuses on teachers in rural Southern schools, examining how they described the dynamics of being from or not from the community where they taught mattered for their queer advocacy. Our findings suggest the intertwined importance of both the epistemic and relational as part of teachers' activist placemaking. In order to make these arguments, we draw from theorists challenging the notion that space and place are neutral backdrops and who instead suggest they are ongoing practices and thus open to being made and remade in ways that are more just and affirming for queer people and practices.
This article troubles the intersections, functions, and manifestations of order-words "social" and "with" as these relate to one social studies teacher's pedagogy amid antagonistic polarization and politicization of teaching social studies. We engage with what it means to teach with-ness in the social of social studies, inspired by its relationship-creating underpinnings. Our article explores ontological and epistemological intersections between social's interconnected with-ness against other, more exclusionary conceptualizations; how these manifest in social studies pedagogy; and how we create a more expansive and collective definition of "we" that transcends disciplinary, institutional, and material boundaries; promotes speculation, action, and possibility; and adheres to the interconnectedness with/in/beyond social studies classrooms.
Informed by Third Space theory and Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR), this study was co-constructed with and by high school-aged Asian American and migrant youth who participated in a summer camp program focused on Asian American histories. The findings show that the camp became a powerful and transformative Third Space, an informal and liminal learning environment beyond the walls of school, where youth reclaimed their experiences, reimagined their histories, and affirmed their sense of belonging. The study calls for the co-creation of more Third Spaces with youth through YPAR and other youth-centered, youth-driven approaches where young people can speak their truths, affirm who they are, critically rework their histories, and build connection and solidarity with one another, while being positioned as co-constructors of knowledge, co-researchers, and powerful partners in the collective work of educational equity and justice.
In this article, the coauthors use the metaphor of breaking to search inward. Drawing on Black Crit and Black geographies as conceptual frameworks and critical race counterstorytelling methodologies they illuminate the ways that their pedagogical and curricular praxes locate, imagine, and create new possibilities in their pre-service Social Studies classrooms. In doing so, the authors introduce a conceptualization of what they have termed Black Hip Hop Social Studies Geographies. Black Hip Hop Social Studies Geographies are symbolic in that they symbolize a break from traditional Social Studies education and advance a praxis rooted in critical analyses of anti-Blackness, imagination of alternatives, and pedagogical and curricular ways to create new Social Studies realities for teachers and students. The authors conclude the article with implications for P-20 Social Studies education and research.
This article examines how GenAI reshapes academic writing when encountered from uneven institutional, linguistic, and gendered positions. Drawing on a six-month duoethnography, we trace our Writing-With ChatGPT as two Vietnamese doctoral students in contrasting settings: a public university in Belgium and a doctoral program at a public university in Vietnam, while employed as a lecturer at a private university in the same region. Our data corpus includes co-written dialogues, ChatGPT transcripts, reflective journals, and voice memos in Vietnamese and English, which we analyze through the lens of Writing-With as a relational, recursive stance. We map our experiences across four entangled dimensions of what we call institutional positioning (not a geographic location): (1) infrastructural conditions (bandwidth, devices, platform access), (2) institutional policy (permissiveness, assessment regimes, enforcement), (3) discursive legitimacy (expectations for "standard" academic English, journal norms), and (4) geopolitical positioning (citizenship, mobility, visa regimes). Against this backdrop, we read our scenes through a spiral of seven moments, including pausing, disrupting, surrendering, doubting, reintroducing, accepting, and continuing, that emerged from our Writing-With process. Our analysis shows that ChatGPT's algorithmic "smoothing" of prose is experienced as amplification for one author and erasure for the other, that gendered role socialization shapes comfort with GenAI and what counts as responsible experimentation, and that institutional ambiguity around GenAI usage redistributes ethical risk unevenly. We argue for understanding ChatGPT as a partial, situated interlocutor whose affordances and harms are co-produced with infrastructural arrangements and disciplinary standards.
In our current hyper-polarized socio-political environment and amidst renewed aggrandized cultural battles playing out across the U.S. most notably in school districts, it is crucial that student teachers are exposed to critical ways of knowing. The urgency becomes evident when examining how student teachers, from a very young age, are socialized into thinking, feeling, believing, and viewing the world and others. In this paper, the authors discuss the intersections of our socially positioned identities (white, cisgender, able bodied, heterosexual, men professors of teacher education), the current national, state, and local socio-political climate (e.g., deeply conservative political power, book bans, anti-CRT and anti-LGBTQ+ legislation), and how we teach critical and contemporary issues in education. In doing so, we reflect on and discuss our own onto-epistemological journeys and how we apply them to teaching.
Despite rhetoric about the influence of first-generation faculty (FGF)-who were the first in their families to graduate from college-on the success of students from marginalized backgrounds, little systematic empirical research has explored their intention to serve in this capacity. This qualitative narrative inquiry employs a culturally informed approach to institutional agent theory to investigate why and how 19 FGF from diverse backgrounds aim to play a supportive role for first-generation students and others historically marginalized in the academy. Seeking to bring FGF into the discourse about their purported role on college campuses and to humanize their efforts as institutional agents, I ask, What, if anything, motivates FGF to serve as institutional agents? How do these motivations shape FGF service as institutional agents? I find that FGF are inspired by three motivational components of what I call empathetic relationality-(1) empathetic response to students' lived experience, (2) the student support insights garnered from their own experiences, and (3) the demonstrated value of their experiential insights-which shapes the motivated action FGF take as institutional agents. Ultimately, FGF service as institutional agents is not merely activated by first-generation status in the abstract but instead by the specific lived experience of marginalization and facilitative support-in the context of being first-generation and navigating exclusion in the academy-that motivates and shapes how they serve. I argue that empathetic relationality that relies on enduring marginalization by first-generation status binds FGF to their student counterparts, which has timely implications for equity in higher education, where instrumental attention to FGF proliferates. Contrary to the transactional value placed on FGF, I conclude that development of equitable institutional structures and practices that meaningfully diminish or eradicate obstacles associated with first-generation status would enhance equity for students and FGF alike.
This paper suggests that G.W.F. Hegel's Logical works can function as a deep 19th-century precursor to Bloom's taxonomy of cognitive processes in education. In its most basic form, the Hegelian taxonomy distinguishes between three types of thought-forms, in an ascending order of complexity and liveliness: (1) simple representations, (2) abstractions, and (3) concepts, which are organized strings of representations and abstractions. Since for Hegel thoughts are in constant motion, each family of thought-forms also generates its own characteristic kind of movement. These distinctions are distilled, made to parallel Bloom's framework, and made to bear on educational thought. By reading Hegel's logic as an educational typology, this paper makes a potentially fruitful link between Hegel and the loose tradition of "progressive" educational thought: Hegel's philosophy is put into dialogue with the educational philosophies of A.N. Whitehead and Carl Rogers. The framing question, through which the dialogue is made possible, is the question of meaninglessness in education: while Rogersian educational philosophy suggests that meaninglessness is a subjective phenomenon, Hegelian educational philosophy claims that there are types of ideas that are "objectively meaningless." It is the strange notion of objective meaninglessness-and the corresponding notion of objective meaningfulness-that this paper sets to trace.
