Flipping the Script: Asian American and Migrant High School Students as Teachers of Teachers Reshaping Social Studies Teacher Education

This study centers the experiences of Asian American and migrant high school youth who participated in a Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR)-informed summer camp, attending to how young people drew on and extended their lived experiences and transnational funds of knowledge through their own inquiries. Findings show that youth engaged as creators of expansive transnational knowledge, researchers across borders, and, at times, teachers of teachers as they shared their work with pre-service educators. Through investigating histories connected to their families and communities and presenting their research, youth created opportunities to surface histories long absent from formal schooling. In doing so, they opened up spaces for future teachers to grapple with curricular silences and reimagine social studies learning in ways grounded in students’ familial, communal, diasporic, and cross-border knowledge. This work extends scholarship in social studies teacher education by foregrounding Asian and Asian American youth as knowledge creators and intellectual partners, challenging white-centric, Eurocentric, monolingual, and assimilationist paradigms. Ultimately, it calls on teacher education to recognize youth as co-constructors of knowledge and as teachers of teachers, flipping the script on who is positioned to teach and learn, and to build more just, equitable, and transformative educational futures with and alongside them.