Researching From Buried Experiences: Collaborative Inquiry With Asian American Youth

Abstract

This article reports on an out-of-school practitioner researcher study, the Community Researchers Project, involving predominately Indonesian youth who were members of a Catholic parish in a diverse multilingual neighborhood of our city. The lives and learning of many of the youth in the Indonesian immigrant community were, to a large extent, invisible in the research literature or homogenized through broader generalizations regarding Asian Americans, such as the myth of the "model minority." Through analysis of several representative student inquiries, we argue that practitioner research can be an effective methodological vehicle for unearthing "buried" personal and collective histories that impact students.

Those Who Know and Are Known: Students Using Ethnography to Interrogate Language and Literacy Ideologies

“…This study's findings also highlight the potential of welcoming students into more participatory forms of language and literacy learning (Campano et al, 2015;Egan-Robertson & Bloome, 1998), which, in the spirit of Hymesian ethnography, are explicitly counterhegemonic. They work to unsettle and disrupt norms about language and literacy that would position some resources as devalued.…”

“…Students use the tools of critical inquiry to interrogate deficit discourses about themselves, rewrite official narratives through their activism, and promote social change in their schools and communities. At St. Dominic Savio, Campano et al (2015) described working with Indonesian youths in Philadelphia in conducting community research and unearthing buried experiences often masked by modelminority narratives. Campano et al (2016) outlined the reworking of traditional university institutional review to include members of the community at St. Dominic Savio, welcoming them to serve as an additional layer of guidance and revision and to ensure that projects proceeded with the needs of the community foremost in mind.…”

"Beyond the Barriers": Listening to Immigrant Youth to Transform Higher Education

“…Further, Cunningham (2008) estimates that about 25,000 Indonesians have undocumented status, as compared to a total of 70,096 documented Indonesian Americans (U.S. Census Bureau, 2012), and thus, a large proportion are excluded from reported data. As a result, the experiences of Indonesian Americans are largely erased from the narrative about Asian Americans (Campano, Ngo, & Player, 2015), as reflected by Evey's comments. The reports from David, Evey, and Aria reveal the importance of listening and learning from students about the complexity of Asian experiences and how to create safer, more understanding educational spaces for them.…”

Dialogic teaching and multilingual counterpublics

“…The Community Researchers Project was originally conceived at the request of parents at St. Frances Cabrini, who wanted to support their children in the curricular push for analyzing nonfiction that was part of new school standards (Campano, Ngo, & Player, 2015). Leaders from the various cultural communities at the parish met to co-design the project and to select the books to be used; more texts were added once the youth's inquiries were underway so they would have nonfiction resources to complement their investigations.…”

“…This meant that their focus at times diverted from our own expectations. For example, instead of explicitly exploring immigration as we had initially assumed, youth talked about and researched medical issues because their own families struggled with access to adequate care (Campano, Ngo, & Player, 2015). In the family ESOL class, the issues raised during the Class News routine became a mechanism for co-constructing curriculum.…”