Browsing by Subject "racial identity"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Anti-Asian Racism and the Critical Identity Development of Asian American College Students During COVID-19
    (2024-05) Boey, Leslie
    Asian Americans have long been targeted and blamed for problems in social, political, and educational realms. During the COVID-19 pandemic, this racial bigotry contributed to hostile environments for Asian American college students. While previous research has discussed the negative impacts of racism on this population, my study explores how Asian American students understood themselves in relation to racism. Specifically, I investigate how racial identity is shaped by social relationships, college environments, and sociopolitical contexts. With an anti-oppressive approach in mind, I used narrative inquiry guided by Museus and Iftikar’s (2013) Asian Critical Theory to center students’ lived experiences and voices throughout this research. Twelve Asian American college students from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities participated in two interviews, which were used as primary data sources for this study. The findings are presented in two components—written student narratives and thematic results—that portray the diversity and commonalities among participants’ racial identity journeys during the early 2020s. These stories and thematic findings demonstrate Asian American college students’ intimate experiences of race and identity that are interconnected with multiple dimensions of oppression in students’ lives. This study reveals that Asian American college students negotiated their racial identities through dimensions of language, hypervisibility, race-based education, social relationships, and cross-racial dynamics. The findings of this research affirm the need to deeply recognize Asian Americans’ racial experiences, especially as it pertains to identity labels, racial violence, and tensions with the model minority myth. From these findings, I recommend that researchers, professionals, students, and non-academics alike embrace the power of storytelling in their lives and work to make Asian Americans visible in the conversation on race.
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    In-Service Teachers’ Conceptions of Racial Identity
    (2017-07) Ahlgren, Erica
    There is a large discrepancy between the racial identities of current teachers and the students they teach. In the United States, white middle-class women constitute 90% of the teaching population (Picower, 2009), while students of color comprise approximately one third of the population, with an expected increase to approximately two thirds by the year 2050 (Howard, 2003). This discrepancy in racial identities often leads to deficit views and colorblindness within classrooms, resulting in the continued replication of dominant forms of power. Therefore, it is crucial to examine racial identities of teachers in hopes to build and expand on the current understandings of the role that race and racial identity have within classroom spaces. With an ethnographic study, I examined how teachers conceptualize their racial identity.  How are teachers’ racial identities and their students’ racial identities represented in practice? How do teachers conceptualize their racial identities and their students’ racial identities within their practice? The research was conducted at an urban middle school with five white, female in-service teachers. The study centered around a book club series using perspectives from critical race theory. Influences on racial identity were identified from power domains using theories of pedagogy of the oppressed (Freire, 1993) and intersectionality (Hill-Collins & Bilge, 2016). Methods of qualitative analysis and an iteration of critical discourse analysis (Gee, 2014) were used to highlight findings. Findings demonstrated that teachers constructed their identities in a dual or hybrid space between oppressed (constrained power) and oppressor (empowered). By illuminating domains of power (interpersonal, disciplinary, cultural and structural) I was able to examine how these domains inform racial identities, where they overlap and how intersections of multiple domains influence participants’ conceptions. Additionally, participants named oppressive systems that influenced the complexities of their conceptions of racial identities. Participants valued the intricacies of students’ dynamic identities and conducted practices that embraced an urgency towards learning in order to combat academic underachievement. This dissertation makes a contribution to understanding the intersections that educators are between and within. This study has further implications for how teachers continue to practice with pedagogies and mindsets that validate and value the identities of both students and teachers, while simultaneously teaching within schools where dominant forms of knowledge and understandings are often valued.
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    Pushing Boundaries: Young People’s Experiences Developing and Expressing Intersecting Identities
    (2021-07) Hyson, Audrey
    While discussion of intersectional identities has entered popular media, very few scholarly works on young peoples’ experiences with gender, sexual, and racial identities have been published in the past decade (Bettie, 2014; Lee, 2009; Pascoe, 2007). This dissertation responds to that gap and presents findings from a two-part qualitative study about identities and education. This dissertation focuses on the ways young people navigate boundaries that family members and classmates maintain around racial, gender, and sexual identities. The data discussed and presented in this dissertation comes mainly from nine life story interviews (see Atkinson, 1998) with adults from the Lindy Hop community who were asked to think back on how their families, educational experiences, friends, and social media impacted their identity formation. Additional data was collected from one student participant who shared her stories through a social media diary, a photovoice activity, and two rounds of interviews. The interviews reveal that young people encounter boundaries around their gender, sexual, and racial identity possibilities maintained by family members, community members, or classmates. The participants navigated these boundaries by pushing against them, moving beyond them, or strategically silencing aspects of their identities in different spaces. The findings suggest that young people make conscious decisions about how to engage with identity possibilities and enact agency in ways that are reflective of boundaries and privileges around their intersecting identities. The stories of these ten participants help to fill a gap in research on how young people engage with identity possibilities enacted by family, schooling, and social media as they construct their racial, gender, and sexual identities.