Am I a Qualified Literacy Researcher and Educator? A Counter-Story of a Professional Journey of One Asian Male Literacy Scholar in the United States

Abstract

Although there has been a significant increase in the number of minority faculty members in higher education, little is known about potential barriers and challenges we face during their early career development. In this counter-story article, I share my own professional experiences regarding the choices I made and obstacles I faced in developing my own career including both teaching and research. Compared with mainstream early career scholars, I realized that there are certain areas or methods that I was expected to teach or research. I hope that my counter-story presented in this article can contribute to understanding the conflicts and labels that international faculty may face and reframing them as potential assets that we can develop and bring into meaningful literacy practice.

Keywords

critical race theory cross-cultural crosslinguistic discrimination immigrant education intersections of literacies international faculty

Introduction

I took a deep breath several times, but I started to sweat, my heart pounding. Finally, the phone rang, and a middle-aged lady’s voice was heard over the phone.

Interviewer:

Hello, Bong Gee! Is this the correct way to pronounce your name? Thank you for your time for interviewing with our university. We are thrilled to have a chance to interview you!

Me:

Hello, Dr. XXX. Yes, thank you for checking in with me. It is my honor to have a chance to talk to you.

Once I briefly explained why I applied for the position and my current research agenda, I could come down a bit with a sigh of relief. However, the next question was something that I did not expect to be asked.

Interviewer:

Our institution’s primary mission is to train preservice teachers using different field-based curriculums. With that in mind, we’re a little bit concerned that you have no actual teaching experience in American K-12 schools. Wouldn’t this make it difficult for you to relate to the concerns of our undergraduates and, for that matter, the practicing teachers you will teach?

Me:

Um . . . well, um, um . . .

For about 20 seconds, I could not start responding to the question. I wish I could have been born and educated in the United States, not in South Korea. I kept asking myself one question: Am I a qualified literacy researcher and educator?

Me:

I, um, I am aware of this issue, um . . . and I always try to interact with American preservice and in-service teachers, um, as much as I can. For example, um, I have taught and closely interacted with undergraduate teacher candidates as part of my doctoral training for about 4 years. Um . . . I have also worked closely with classroom teachers via multiple research projects. As a former secondary school language teacher in Korea and current doctoral student in literacy here in the United States, I have constantly tried to support my undergraduate students’ development as reflective practitioners as they learn to become conscious of their own experiences, knowledge, and beliefs related to literacy. Also, my students would benefit from my unique cultural and linguistic backgrounds to extend their understandings of diversity and social justice in literacy education. I believe that I am capable of supporting preservice and in-service teachers’ professional development.

Phew! My response obviously did not sound fluent, but I tried my best to explain why I am qualified to teach and research literacy. The follow-up question was even more challenging.

Interviewer:

Okay, I am happy to hear that you have closely worked with classroom teachers. As you know, reading instruction obviously cannot be separated from spoken English. As a speaker of English as a second language, can you share with us your feelings about addressing issues like the teaching of phonics and phonemic awareness?

Me:

Um . . . well, I do have some minor pronunciation issues as a non-native speaker . . . um, but I don’t think this will be a problem that prevents me from supervising students. When I first worked as a graduate clinician at the university reading center, some children had difficulties in understanding my pronunciations of r and l sounds, so I used audiotape as an alternative to pronouncing those sounds when testing the students and this worked very well. Later, when supervising a master’s student practicum, I actually advised my students to use audiotapes since some young readers are really sensitive to different sounds and dialects.

Interviewer:

Oh, okay. We are so impressed by your research skills, especially your knowledge about quantitative research and statistical analysis. Are you capable of teaching a quantitative method course for our graduate students? If you are, can you briefly describe how you would teach that course?

These questions are certainly different from those posed to native-speaker candidates. More importantly, they imply the underlying assumption that there is a certain set of required skills, knowledge, and experiences for effective literacy instruction and research. It might be necessary to check whether I have required qualifications to teach and research literacy in U.S. universities, but sometimes these questions made me think of my international background as a barrier or a disadvantage, not as an asset (Villalpando & Delgado Bernal, 2002), in becoming an effective and successful literacy teacher educator and scholar in the United States. Interestingly, these perceived linguistic and cultural barriers were often offset by the strengths I was assumed to have as an Asian male scholar in quantitative research design, statistical analysis, and technological savviness (e.g., using multiple digital tools for both off-line and online teaching). This counter-story illustrates how the perceived foreignness of an Asian minority worked as a barrier to obscure the portrayal of me as a model minority (Chang, 1993) who has an outstanding ability in specific areas such as math and technology.

As in the job interview above, many literacy-teaching positions in the United States seek candidates who can teach literacy methods courses for both preservice and in-service teachers in either elementary or secondary education programs. Most of those positions focus on either teaching language arts method courses for preservice teachers or clinical training for literacy specialists, specifically in early literacy assessment and intervention, which has been traditionally called “reading clinic.” In addition, they require job applicants to have at least 3 years of teaching experience in U.S. K-12 schools (some universities accept candidates’ “equivalent professional experiences”). Most international doctoral students like me, who came to the United States after finishing their undergraduate degree, do not have actual classroom teaching experiences in U.S. K-12 settings. Of course, some of them, like me, are licensed former classroom teachers in their home countries. However, in most cases it is not easy for us to get teaching licensures in the United States—usually they would have to go back to undergraduate schools to take required courses. My experience as a former language arts teacher in a foreign country was not valued and was even perceived as problematic, given my inexperience in U.S. school settings. This perceived foreignness (Chang, 1993) generated a “disqualified” image of me as a candidate for a literacy faculty position.

A recent federal report (U.S. Department of Education, 2014) identified a significant increase in the number of minority faculty members in higher education. Using the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), D. Kim, Twombly, and Wolf-Wendel (2012) calculated that 11.5% of all the new tenure-track faculty hired at U.S. colleges in 2009 were foreign-born scholars, and the number surpassed that of domestic minority groups such as Asian Americans (10.5%), African Americans (0.5%), and Latina/o Americans (0.4%). This trend is evident not only in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, where there is a lack of U.S. citizens with advanced degrees (Hoffer, Hess, Welch, & Williams, 2007), but also in many social science fields that have been perceived traditionally as U.S.-dominated fields.

Literacy, for example, has traditionally been considered to consist of language arts and reading, thus a part of mother-tongue education that only native-speaking faculty can teach and research. However, this narrow conceptualization of literacy as language arts and reading has come to include multiple and globalized literacies over the past several decades (e.g., Shiel & Eivers, 2009). The increased number of international scholars in the literacy field has fostered literacy research from global perspectives (e.g., J. Collins & Slembrouck, 2007; Lam & Warriner, 2012; Li, 2010). The recent establishment of Area 12: International Research on Literacy Teaching and Learning in the Literacy Research Association also reflects this trend.

Although there is a growing interest in why the number of international faculty member is increasing in education fields, there are few studies investigating how international faculty perceive their professional experiences in terms of teaching, scholarship, and service. Furthermore, most literature on scholars of color focused on African American (e.g., Johnson & Bryan, 2016), Asian American (e.g., Han, 2012; Liu, 2009), or Latina/o scholars (Guanipa, Santa Cruz, & Chao, 2003) who were born in the United States. International faculty members’ experiences have been examined in a few specific areas, such as second-language acquisition (e.g., Li, 2006) or multicultural education (e.g., Shrake, 2006), but not literacy or language arts. International faculty members are known to experience inequitable marginalization (e.g., Turner, Gonzalez, & Wood, 2008) and face different types of racism (e.g., Lee, 2002; Stanley, 2006). Furthermore, their job satisfaction is reported to be significantly lower than that of their White counterparts (Zhan & Gao, 2011). However, little is known about how these patterns manifest in the field of literacy and language arts.

In this article, I use a counter-storytelling method to explore how I faced deficit, racialized discourse about people of color as part of my literate identities as an individual, a student, a teacher, a faculty member, and a researcher in literacy over time. For the purpose of this study, I will focus specifically on my experiences as a foreign-born, international faculty member. Although any faculty member who was born outside of the United States may be considered “international,” regardless of his or her citizenship status or duration of stay in the United States, I narrow down the scope of international faculty to foreign-born faculty who earned their undergraduate degrees in their home country (D. Kim et al., 2012). This is because we may experience different educational, social, professional, and cultural discourses distinctive from those who earned their undergraduate degrees in the United States. Such stories are rarely reported and yet need to be made more visible to inform and extend discussions among scholars and students—and the public—about the pervasive experiences of alienation, contradiction, and tension faced by many Asian and other international scholars whose experiences must be understood as richly and distinctly informed rather than ill-informed or underskilled.

My counter-story in this article also points to the ways dominant norms and perceptions constrain the choices of people even in academe—to the detriment of and potential loss to our field. I hope that my counter-story contributes to the field’s overall understanding of what counts as literacy as well as countering White-dominant ideologies by overcoming existing labels and stereotypes within the field of literacy and literacy instruction.

Theoretical Frameworks

This counter-story is based on two major frameworks: critical race theory (CRT) and Asian critical race theory (AsianCrit).

CRT

Delgado and Stefancic (2001) described the CRT movement as “a collection of activists and scholars engaged in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power” (p. 2). CRT was originally developed mainly by legal scholars in the 1970s and was widely adopted and applied to different disciplines, such as sociology, history, and gender studies. In education, CRT “challenges the traditional claims that the educational system and its institutions make toward objectivity, meritocracy, color-blindness, race neutrality, and equal opportunity” (Solórzano & Yosso, 2001a, p. 472). CRT scholars acknowledge that “the histories, experiences, cultures, and languages of [people] of color have been devalued, misinterpreted, or omitted within formal educational settings” (Delgado Bernal, 2002, p. 105). Furthermore, CRT provides a theoretical lens to explore what counts as valid and legitimate knowledge in educational settings and how these epistemological perspectives influence the lives of people of color. Based on this earlier work, Solórzano and Yosso (2002b) delineated this framework and defined CRT in education as “a framework or set of basic insights, perspectives, methods, and pedagogy that seeks to identify, analyze, and transform those structural and cultural aspects of education that maintain subordinate and dominant racial positions in and out of the classroom” (p. 25).

CRT and culture

Considering that CRT challenges Eurocentric perspectives based on White privilege and values minority groups’ cultures, languages, and points of view, it is sometimes confused with other concepts, such as multiculturalism. However, Ladson-Billings and Tate (1995), who introduced this conceptualization of CRT to education for the first time, critiqued the traditional multicultural paradigm as follows:

Today, the term is used interchangeably with the ever-expanding “diversity,” a term used to explain all types of “difference”—racial, ethnic, cultural, linguistic, ability, gender, sexual orientation . . . Less often discussed are the growing tensions that exist between and among various groups that gather under the umbrella of multiculturalism—that is, the interests of groups can be competing or their perspectives can be at odds. We assert that the ever-expanding multicultural paradigm follows the traditions of liberalism—allowing a proliferation of difference. Unfortunately, the tensions between and among these differences are rarely interrogated, presuming a “unity of difference”—that is, that all difference is both analogous and equivalent. (pp. 61-62)

This critical perspective toward multiculturalism is important in understanding the ultimate goal of CRT. In contrast to multiculturalism, which recognizes and values the diversity of gender, race, class, and cultural backgrounds, CRT seeks to extend the framework through the integration of social justice tenets by challenging the dominant ideology and power that exist in multiple educational contexts and empowering marginalized minority groups (Ladson-Billings, 2013). In addition, CRT should be distinguished from another culture-related concept, acculturation, which is defined as “the dual process of cultural and psychological change that takes place as a result of contact between two or more cultural groups and their individual members” (Berry, 2005, p. 698). Although acculturation explores the interactive processes between heritage and receiving cultures, CRT further examines which culture maintains a subordinate and which a dominant position in the process. This is why I believe CRT is a better framework for this article compared with other related theories explaining cross-cultural experiences.

Intersectionality

Although one of the major goals of CRT in education is to oppose or eliminate racism, it also explores it “at the intersection with other forms of subordination” (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002b). This is why intersectionality is a core concept associated with CRT. Delgado and Stefancic (2017) defined intersectionality as “the examination of race, sex, class, national origin, and sexual orientation and how their combinations play out in various settings” (p. 58). In this regard, this notion can be employed as a conceptual lens to understand “how membership in multiple identity groups can affect how people are perceived, are treated, and experience college and university environments” (Museus & Griffin, 2011, p. 7). In this counter-story, I will share how my multiple social memberships (e.g., race, sex, national origin, language, and family history) have intersected each other to shape my unique identities of a literacy learner, a teacher, and a scholar.

AsianCrit

Early discussions of racism and CRT focused primarily on the Black–White racial paradigm based on a racial hierarchy in which White is at the top and African American is at the bottom. However, Marable (1992) contributed to extending “the discussion of race and racism from [the] Black-White discourse to one that includes multiple faces, voices, and experiences” (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002b, p. 24) by defining racism as “a system of ignorance, exploitation, and power used to oppress African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, Pacific Americans, American Indians and other people on the basis of ethnicity, culture, mannerisms, and color” (Marable, 1992, p. 5). In this regard, Chang’s (1993) theorization of AsianCrit pointed out that CRT is not sufficient to address the unique racialized issues that Asian Americans face. He assumed that racial oppressions among different minority groups should be understood based on their unique cultural and historical contexts and proposed a particular lens to understand Asian Americans’ racial marginalization.

Chang (1993) described two major concepts that inform AsianCrit: nativism (i.e., nativistic racism) and model minority. Nativism is defined as “intense opposition to an internal minority on the grounds of its foreign (i.e., ‘un-American’) connections” (p. 1253). Although nativism can happen to any minority group, he further explained, “it is this sense of foreignness that distinguishes the particular type of racism aimed at Asian Americans” (p. 1258). Han (2014) defined foreignness as “xenophobia regarding ‘accent, use of language, tone of voice, [and] different surnames [as] bicultural markers of difference’” (Fore, 2011, p. 460, as cited in Han, 2014, p. 130). According to Saito (1997), the concept of foreignness, “based more on what is perceived as not-American than on the realities of another nationality or culture, conflates the national and the international” (p. 80). Therefore, Asian Americans’ foreignness is often linked to disloyalty and an outsider image. In this regard, N. Kim (2007) argued that Asian Americans’ experiences should be understood in terms of “the intersection of race and [foreignness]” (p. 131).

Interestingly, the history of discrimination and racial issues Asian Americans face is obscured by their portrayal as a model minority. It was Petersen (1966) who developed and used the term model minority for the first time. Chang (1993) explained that he used the term model in two senses: “first, as a way of praising the superior performance of Japanese Americans; and second, as a way of suggesting that other ethnic groups should emulate the Japanese American example” (p. 1259). Chang clearly stated that it is a myth that Asian Americans are a model minority. Furthermore, this label has been used as “a tool of oppression which works a dual harm by (1) denying the existence of present-day discrimination against Asian Americans and the present-day effects of past discrimination, and (2) legitimizing the oppression of other racial minorities and poor whites” (p. 1260).

Previous Research

Understanding International Faculty in Higher Education

International faculty members’ unique professional journeys in the academy have been substantially examined in previous research using different theoretical lenses and research methods. One pattern identified from extensive previous research is that international faculty members’ professional experiences have been interpreted through an acculturation process (e.g., J. M. Collins, 2008; Foote, Li, Monk, & Theobald, 2008; Ismail & Groccia, 2017; Zhan & Gao, 2011). Acculturation is often defined as “changes that take place as a result of contact with culturally dissimilar people, groups, and social influences” (Schwartz, Unger, Zamboanga, & Szapocznik, 2010, p. 237). In these studies, some cultural and linguistic challenges that international faculty face regarding their professional work were described as a culture shock or a lack of language competence. In addition, some large-scale quantitative research based on this approach (e.g., D. Kim et al., 2012) revealed that international faculty have lower job satisfaction and morale than their U.S.-born colleagues, regardless of their high productivity.

Although some of these studies report various difficulties that international faculty members undertake in shaping and navigating their professional identities, it should be carefully noted that a clear directionality from heritage culture to target culture is embedded in the acculturation framework (Berry, 2005; Gibson, 2001). Incidentally, the more similarities that exist between the heritage and the target culture, the easier it is for an individual to adapt to the target culture and language. Johnsrud and Sadao (2002) critiqued this limitation of the acculturation framework, proposing “biculturalism,” saying it

is not acculturation; rather, individuals learn how to maintain their dominant ethnic culture while increasing an awareness of another cultural set of values and norms. They must strike a balance that enables them to recognize which lens to employ when confronting a particular situation. (p. 191)

I would argue that this biculturalism framework still does not explain clearly how individuals learn to maintain their dominant ethnic culture when Whiteness overarches society. I believe that CRT fills the gap between acculturation and biculturalism by proposing White-dominant convergence as an overarching principle to analyze how the White-dominant power, privilege, and supremacy have been maintained over time and have marginalized people of color.

Asian Scholars in Education

The Asian population in higher education has long been assumed to be successful in their academic achievement and professional careers. This belief has been reinforced historically without clear evidence and often is called a model minority myth (Chang, 1993). The model minority myth has contributed to masking and obscuring important issues and concerns that Asians or Asian Americans face in multiple educational settings (Poon et al., 2016).

Most studies regarding Asian scholars in education focus on female faculty (e.g., Han, 2014; Li, 2006; Liang, 2006; Mayuzumi, 2015) by reporting how the intersection of their race (Asian) and sex (female) influences their professional experiences and perceptions. However, relatively little is known about how Asian or Asian American male faculty in the literacy field face these stereotypes and bias in their professional and personal lives. For example, Liang (2006) showed how Asian female faculty members’ knowledge and credibility are challenged by their U.S. students due to their accented English and different instructional styles. Shrake’s (2006) story provided her own experience of “struggling with the model minority stereotype [as an Asian] and lotus blossom image [as an Asian woman]” imposed on her. Recently, based on the CRT and AsianCrit frameworks, Han (2014) applied the counter-storytelling method to analyze her own experiences teaching literacy methods courses for White preservice teachers. These studies suggest that there is a certain racial stereotype of Asian faculty in higher education that may be considered a deficit discourse. Furthermore, this racial stereotype intersects with other stereotypes of gender and nationality.

Method

This study employs counter-storytelling (Solórzano & Yosso, 2001a, 2002a, 2002b), a CRT method used to explore how people of color experience race and racism. This method is defined as “a method of telling the stories of those people whose experiences are not often told (i.e., those on the margins of society)” (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002b, p. 32). These stories counter master narratives, which are “an account that justifies the world as it is” (Delgado, 1995, p. 68). Master narratives are often based on the deficit discourse that “people of color are biologically, cognitively, and culturally inferior to Whites” (Tate, 1997, p. 199). Counter-narratives resist the “consistent language of biological and cultural deficit” (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002b, p. 30) demonstrated in the master narratives. According to Solórzano and Yosso (2002b), the counter-storytelling method contributes to the following four objectives: (a) to build community among marginalized groups, (b) to challenge established beliefs or norms, (c) to provide a new lens to understand the reality and possibilities of marginalized groups, and (d) to create positive influences on different marginalized groups by connecting story and reality.

This article presents my autobiographical counter-narrative, “an individual’s experiences with various forms of racism and sexism” (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002b, p. 32). An autobiographical counter-story is proposed as one of three ways to deliver counter-narratives; the others are other people’s narratives and composite narratives (Cook, 2013; Solórzano & Yosso, 2002b). Ladson-Billings and Tate (1995) suggested that “the use of stories or first-person accounts” (p. 52) can contribute to “challenging claims of neutrality, objectivity, color-blindness, and meritocracy” (p. 56). These autobiographical counter-stories are delivered as a form of “autobiographical reflections of the author, juxtaposed with their critical race analysis . . . and within the context of a larger sociopolitical critique” (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002b, p. 32). Considering that the purpose of this article is to examine how I faced deficit, racialized discourse about people of color (Solórzano & Yosso, 2001b) as part of my literate identities as an Asian male faculty member, I believe that the autobiographical counter-story is the most appropriate way to communicate my findings.

Who Am I?

I was born and raised in South Korea and my first language is Korean. I came to the United States to pursue a PhD in literacy after finishing my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Korean language arts. I had formerly worked as a secondary language arts teacher in South Korea for 3 years; I received my PhD in reading education from a research-intensive institution in the southeastern United States. Currently, I am a tenure-track assistant professor of literacy at a 4-year college located in a mid-Atlantic state. Before coming to my current institution, I worked as an assistant professor at a regional institution located in another state in the same region. At the institution I was previously employed, I taught content literacy and quantitative research methods courses, and currently, I teach elementary literacy methods courses, content literacy, and literacy assessment courses.

Data Sources

Following the guidelines of Solórzano and Yosso (2002b), I created my counter-story using the following four sources: (a) my own professional experiences, (b) my own personal experiences, (c) the data and artifacts gathered from my teaching and research projects, and (d) the review of literature on CRT and international faculty. For the first two types of data, I used entries from my own diary and personal blog. The third type of data includes my observational notes from different research projects, course evaluations from my students, and my email correspondence with colleagues and students.

Data Analysis

The creation and analysis of counter-stories often occur simultaneously. Solórzano and Yosso (2002b) suggested two concepts regarding creating and analyzing counter-storytelling: theoretical sensitivity and cultural intuition. Theoretical sensitivity refers to “the attribute of having insight, the ability to give meaning to data, the capacity to understand, and capability to separate the pertinent from that which isn’t” (Strauss & Corbin, 1990, pp. 41-42). Cultural intuition means the capacity to “extend one’s personal experience to include collective experience and community memory, and point to the importance of participants’ engaging in the analysis of data” (Delgado Bernal, 1998, pp. 563-564). I employed both as tools for creating and analyzing my own counter-story as a learner, a teacher, and a scholar of literacy. In addition, different deficit labels based on racialized stereotypes (e.g., faculty of color¹ with limited language proficiency and cultural barriers) and stereotypes of foreignness regarding Asian American faculty (e.g., passive and obedient) were applied to analyze my counter-story.

Counter-Stories

Culturally Situated Silences as Deficit

One of the racial stereotypes that I have experienced as an international scholar in U.S. universities is being labeled as a non-native speaker, which is “often associated with ineptitude, [and being] less competent, inferior, and ineffective” (Li, 2006, p. 127). It started after I came to the United States to pursue my doctoral degree. Because I tend to be silent, I was often labeled as a struggling foreign doctoral student due to my perceived proficiency of English and cultural differences. Because I had been reading literacy journals such as Reading Research Quarterly, Journal of Literacy Research, and Research in the Teaching of English since I was a junior in college, I was confident in understanding the history of literacy research and some current issues in literacy instruction in the United States. However, I could not share these thoughts with my colleagues, who were White-dominant² graduate students in seminar courses in the literacy program.

My passive participation might have been partially caused by the fact that I was not fluent enough to participate in academic discussions with quick-paced and intense verbal exchanges. However, my “disposition of not speaking out when [I] felt uncertain about [my] opinions or interpretations” (Ma, 2008, p. 236) also made it difficult for me to participate in class discussions. Although I was not verbally participating in the discussions, I was thinking of how I could deliver my messages in a more effective manner. However, when I was ready to share my thoughts, the discussion topic had already changed. Ma (2008) reported that all three Korean doctoral students who participated in his study also shared similar participatory patterns in a graduate seminar course. Of course, these patterns were different from those of U.S. students in the same course.

In the United States, students’ engagement in learning is generally linked to their active participation, especially their verbal contributions to classroom discussions. However, students of color may show different participation and engagement patterns in their learning process. Specifically, East Asian students from a Confucian heritage internalize classroom reticence, and this learning style is often cultivated in their heritage culture (Charlesworth, 2008; Liu, 2009). Even after they transform this learning style to fit into U.S. academic discourse, they often still hesitate to cut into conversation with others (Xia, 2009). This is true for me now, even after I have become more familiar with U.S. discourse. On many occasions, during department and service meetings, for example, I still hesitate to share my ideas—uncertain of my response or how my response may be interpreted.

Perception of Foreignness as Nativistic Racism

He usually overcomplicated explanation of tasks which took too much time & was frustrating.

The instructor was very hard to understand. (Comments from student evaluations)

Every semester, my undergraduate course evaluations usually include a couple of students expressing feedback similar to the above quotations. One student mentioned to me during our class discussion about diversity in literacy instruction,

Because I was born and raised in a small town in Ohio, I have never interacted with any person who is not White. I know that I have quite limited multicultural experience, but it is really difficult for me to understand your English, so if you can speak with less accent, I would appreciate it.

In addition, when I teach some of these courses with a practicum supervisor, who is usually a White female graduate student, some of the feedback that I receive positions my White female graduate assistant as the more knowledgeable one because the students feel greater ease of understanding or relating to her.

Notably, I have significantly less feedback like this when I teach the course alone. I have significantly fewer students challenging my teaching practices and the content of the course during instruction. When I am the only instructor they are expected to interact within the classroom, my students usually talk to me directly whenever there is any confusion. When I am not compared with other White instructors, most students respond to me very positively, and there is no communication problem between us, as reflected in the following feedback from my former students:

Others may state that there is a difficulty understanding his accent or some other negative connotation to a foreign born individual but I didn’t. Anything that was unclear was made abundantly clear by the Professor and I think his passion more than makes up for any issue during the class.

Keep Bong Gee around, he’s a really good professor and he keeps the content engaging. Great guy and builds rapport with students.

Bong Gee is extremely enthusiastic and it wears off on his students. I loved being in his class and think he is a fantastic person. I learned a lot from him.

Professor Jang has been one of the best professors I have experienced! He was very motivated and excited to teach which then motivated us to learn material. He gave us material that I believe will be beneficial in our classrooms someday!

As Han (2014) pointed out, when White preservice teachers take a course from faculty of color, it is often their first time interacting closely, in a university setting, with faculty having different linguistic and cultural backgrounds from their own. In this setting, the foreignness (Chang, 1993) of faculty of color—in terms of their teaching style and verbal interactions—makes students feel less comfortable and efficient compared with taking a course taught by traditional professors from the dominant group in society.

A senior faculty member, an African American female, told me that the issue is not isolated to international faculty but is an issue for all faculty of color (e.g., Martinez, Chang, & Welton, 2017; Stanley, 2006). She said that she also sometimes receives feedback from her students regarding their uncomfortableness in interacting with faculty of color with accents. After reviewing my course evaluations, she provided the following feedback on my yearly evaluation used for tenure and promotion:

These kind of comments are disheartening to read, but sadly are commonplace for faculty of color, and especially faculty whose English is marked or “accented.” Such comments only remind me of the amount of work that we need to do as teacher educators around issues of diversity, equity, and social justice, especially as we are preparing teachers to work in increasingly linguistically and culturally diverse contexts. I am glad to have Dr. Jang on board to help us continue toward this mission.

In her feedback, my challenges as an international faculty member were “acknowledged, confronted, and supported” (Stanley, 2006, p. 711). As she described, I think our job as teacher educators is to educate our preservice teachers to understand the dynamics of multiple cultural and linguistic diversities in educational contexts, preparing them to teach students with diverse racial and cultural backgrounds. Faculty of color “who may not look or think like the majority members of our culture and society” (p. 711) may enhance the process. However, the responsibility to do this work cannot be shouldered by faculty of color alone. Institutions, the field, and each faculty member should do the work together for social justice.

Foreignness as a Barrier to Legitimate Literacy Research and Instruction

When I taught a literacy practicum course for master’s students that focused on literacy assessment and intervention at my current institution, one of my students asked, “Bong Gee, how can you teach us this course even though you are a non-native speaker? It’s all about decoding stuff.” The student’s question implies that effective decoding instruction must be taught by native speakers. Yes, if decoding instruction is evaluated by the instructor’s abilities of pronunciation and phonological awareness, I might not be a qualified person to teach the course. As a non-native speaker, I cannot pronounce the core six syllables consistently in the correct way, especially those r-controlled vowels. In Korean, there is no clear distinction between /r/ and /l/ sounds, and though I came to the United States after I received my undergraduate degrees, it is still difficult for me to internalize those sound distinctions. In this course, I am expected to use and teach the Road to Reading (RTR) approach, which consists of five steps to decode multisyllabic words (Blachman & Tangel, 2008). This approach is very helpful for students with severe reading challenges. However, I argue that additional factors, such as culturally relevant pedagogy, motivation and engagement, and digital literacy, should be incorporated into implementing the RTR lessons. One of the previous instructors who taught the literacy practicum course and helped me prepare for it rejected my idea of including those topics into the course curriculum, saying,

Bong Gee, those kids our master’s students will tutor cannot read well. If they cannot read, they must master decoding skills first. We have only 25 hours of practicum and that is not much time, so we have to teach decoding only in this course. Once they can read, then you can consider additional areas such as culture, technology, and motivation.

If effective decoding consists only of certain skill sets that can be demonstrated by native speakers, then there is no way for international faculty like me to teach this course effectively and successfully. If we define early literacy instruction as teaching standard English, then White middle-class people should teach most of the early literacy courses. Unfortunately, this monolingual and monocultural perspective toward literacy is something I have always encountered and negotiated. For example, I have one White colleague from my graduate school who told me that literacy professors should be “English kings.” I knew that the phrase “English king” implied White professors who speak standard English. I thought her words implicitly represent prescriptive perspectives toward language use, which “depends on an ideology (or set of beliefs) concerning language which requires that in language use, as in other matters, things shall be done in the ‘right’ ways” (Milroy & Milroy, 2012, p. 1). Just after I got a teaching job, one senior faculty member gave me an informal suggestion as a teaching mentor: “Bong Gee, when you teach undergraduate students, you can say to them, I can teach you content, you can teach me English.” At first, I did not think that this was a racially blinded, White-dominant suggestion. However, I could quickly recognize this when I actually mentioned it to my undergraduate students. I still cannot forget their embarrassed facial expressions. Because the course was about disciplinary literacy, the academic English language could not be separated from the content. Of course, I will never say that again.

However, this monolingual, monocultural, and deficit perspective toward literacy education has been contested by many scholars (e.g., Dudley-Marling, 2007; Gutiérrez, Morales, & Martinez, 2009; Kabuto, 2016). Without understanding how children from racially or culturally diverse backgrounds may develop their literacy and literate identities in different ways, nondominant group students’ literacy practices will always be considered as a deficit (Gutiérrez et al., 2009; Scheurich & Young, 1997). I believe that my inability to pronounce some specific sounds and my accented English do not interfere with teaching and developing my culturally relevant early literacy course. I have a diverse cultural and linguistic background, as do many U.S. students in today’s schools. Although the context is very different from White-dominant settings, in some ways I have more experience teaching multilingual, bilingual, and bidialectal students because international contexts such as Korea emphasize the learning of English along with their mother tongue.

Even though the myth of standard English is prevalent among classroom teachers and researchers, I agree with the position of Milroy and Milroy (2012) that “standardization [is] as an ideology, and a standard language [is] as an idea in the mind rather than a reality—a set of abstract norms to which actual usage may conform to a greater or lesser extent” (p. 19). Of course, this standardization ideology is then used to empower certain dominant individuals, groups, and institutions that are considered as normal and standard at the same time to subordinate other groups by considering them as different from normal (Lippi-Green, 2012). According to Matsuda (1991), “people in power are perceived as speaking normal, unaccented English, [and] any speech that is different from that constructed norm is called an accent” (p. 1361). Literacy education should not be a process of imposing the hypothetical standard English norms on marginalized groups. Instead, we should value diverse ways of being literate and understand that literacy instruction and learning intersect with race, gender, class, culture, and language (e.g., Compton-Lilly, Papoi, Venegas, Hamman, & Schwabenbauer, 2017; McLean, 2007; Perry, Moore, Edwards, Acosta, & Frey, 2009).

Model Minority as Imposed Professional Choices

I also gradually recognized that certain roles and discourses were imposed on me, and I began to internalize them. One of those discourses was related to research methods. When I participated in analyzing qualitative data with other U.S. colleagues, I was often marginalized by my lack of cultural, linguistic, and community awareness. However, when I discussed quantitative findings with other colleagues, most of them usually listened to what I said—this happened even when I was a first-year doctoral student. One of my U.S. colleagues even told me, “Gosh, I am always surprised by Asian people whenever I talk to them about statistics. You guys are excellent in understanding math!” Sometimes, instead of resisting those social stereotypes, I conformed to them, hoping to navigate a better way to communicate with other scholars and students. When I conformed to this stereotype of Asian male scholars being good at statistics, I felt much more comfortable. When I attended the American Educational Research Association (AERA) conference, the test and measurement division was full of international Asian male scholars, and I could communicate with them easily, even in Korean. I was not sure whether I could be successful if I chose to be a qualitative researcher. There were few international Asian male models of qualitative scholars. Although I could find some international Korean male scholars who conducted qualitative research, their careers seemed lacking compared with those of Korean male scholars with a quantitative research agenda.

If I had pursued my PhD in literacy in South Korea, would I have become the quantitative literacy scholar that I am now? I am not sure. It is interesting to note that when finishing my master’s thesis, one of my major research interests was the meaning of silences in adolescents’ literacy practices, a topic that is usually examined using such qualitative research methods as critical discourse analysis. Furthermore, my least favorite subject was math when I was a high school student. Statistics was still difficult to study in the United States, but I could develop my own self-efficacy by accepting the social expectations from others. Whether I liked or disliked it did not matter.

Colleagues are familiar with my scholarly work as a quantitative researcher, despite the fact that my interests as a researcher have revolved around topics more qualitative in nature. Although my personal epistemological beliefs on education and literacy are based on sociocultural and critical perspectives (e.g., Ladson-Billings, 1995; Street, 2003), it is hard to ignore that my training in quantitative methods has influenced me to use postpositivist approaches (Phillips & Burbules, 2000), which seek a certain level of objectivity. Considering that critical perspectives on education and literacy originated from criticism that postpositivism was “concerned with only efficiency and rationality of [scientific inquiry], neglecting social inequalities and issues of power” (L. Mack, 2010, p. 9), these two epistemologies seem mutually incompatible. However, for me, these paradigms intersect with other factors, such as race, gender, and nationality, thus shaping my unique professional identity (Ladson-Billings, 2000).

To tell you the truth, I am still a bit uncomfortable in writing this type of counter-story. I usually do not share this type of story with others; I am afraid of it. What if somebody asks me, “How do you know that it was racism?” What if someone asks me, “Bong Gee, why are you making me feel uncomfortable?” However, I believe that this counter-story will create significantly meaningful and positive influences on my professional and personal lives, as I have unmasked myself in this article to share challenges, doubts, and struggles that I face as a faculty member of color in the literacy field.

I acknowledge that although there may be a greater representation of African Americans, Latinos, and women in some educational contexts (vs. Asian men), my positioning as an Asian male needs to be considered within larger sociopolitical contexts. Asians and Asian Americans in the United States are still sometimes perceived as “honorary whites” (Tuan, 1998)—both within and outside the group. Although the model minority status is a myth, some Asians are complicit or silent in a system that they also benefit from (and in which they receive more privilege than African Americans and Latinos). For example, I described how I was perceived as smart in math as an Asian male—while this is a constraining stereotype, it might be also one that benefited me in being perceived as a capable quantitative researcher (though this was not my interest). This idea also applies to my intersectional position as a male. Although women outnumber men in the field of literacy, it needs to be considered that women are still systematically oppressed and disadvantaged in a variety of ways. This caution is not to discount, dismiss, or downplay the racism and discrimination that Asian males face. However, in an effort to be critical, it is important to nuance the positioning of Asians and Asian Americans—particularly as most of this article centers on my positionality as an Asian male.

Discussion

As heard from my own counter-story, my experiences as a literacy learner, a teacher, and a scholar in the United States cannot be explained using only one theoretical framework or lens. All of these personal, professional, and academic experiences have influenced and shaped my identity as a literacy scholar, like a patchwork consisting of multiple pieces of fabric sewn together. Each piece of fabric is connected to my professional identity as a whole.

Counter-Storytelling Advancing AsianCrit

By sharing my own counter-story, I would like to send a message to all international faculty in the literacy field: You are not alone in your higher education positions. Even though we battle every day against different types of racialized stereotyping, it is our responsibility to find pathways and make our cross-cultural experiences and knowledge assets, not deficits (e.g., Han, 2012; Smith & Wolf-Wendel, 2005; Villalpando & Delgado Bernal, 2002). Although we are perceiving “the world [as] different from those whose discourse dominates” and “to explore that difference, to acknowledge it, is to be vulnerable” (Espinoza, 1990, pp. 1885-1886, as cited in Espino, 2012, p. 33), I would like to encourage more faculty of color, especially Asian American faculty, to share different types of foreignness and model minority myths that they face via their own counter-stories. Considering little is known about how race and foreignness intersect for Asian American faculty in the literacy field, more counter-stories would contribute to advancing AsianCrit in literacy.

Career Development of Asian Male Literacy Scholars

As few studies (e.g., Cheng, Wang, & Zhang, 2013) have investigated potential barriers and challenges Asian male faculty face during their early career development, this counter-story of how one international literacy scholar has shaped his personal and professional identities regarding literacy learning, teaching, and research contributes to more nuanced understanding. As with mainstream early career scholars, I realize that there are certain areas or topics that I am expected to teach or research. The main purpose of this study was to make my experiences salient so that others can understand international Asian male faculty’s unique experiences that faculty who are identified as White or “mainstream” may not experience. In this article, I highlighted two ways in which I have navigated the way others have positioned me versus how I have positioned myself. Drawing on CRT and reflecting on what this means for diversity, equity, and inclusion, I have sought to illustrate how for an early career faculty member of color, career decisions are not solely shaped by an individual trajectory.

The words of senior scholars, peers, students, and others have a strong influence on what opportunities seem reasonable and accessible for those who are coming through the pipeline. We need to consider how we can create spaces in which we can reap the true benefits of diversity—faculty of diverse backgrounds need to feel supported in developing multifaceted research interests. What did our intellectual community lose when I was not supported in pursuing my initial interests? Specifically, in terms of diversity, inclusion, and equity within the literacy research field, it is important to recognize what is lost when the totality of possibility, knowledge, and potential that faculty bring is not supported. Subsequently, this means making salient the kinds of taken-for-granted comments and perspectives that lead to the types of interactions that I have encountered.

Implications for Literacy Instruction

I would like to shift to recommendations for teaching and changing expectations for Eurocentric, White-dominant views as centered and more valued than the experiences and assets of international and nondominant, marginalized scholarship and scholars. In most classrooms in the United States, I can see myself in the young people and children my students will be teaching. In so many ways, we are teaching beyond the people in our teacher education programs. We are teaching toward the children they will be teaching, and therefore have an obligation to reframe the assumption of a single story. In particular, the following two aspects informed by CRT and AsianCrit would be helpful for reenvisioning literacy instruction.

Rethinking participation and engagement

My counter-story, presented under the subtitle of “Culturally Situated Silences as Deficit,” suggests that teachers need to attend to both students’ talk and their silence in democratic and multicultural classrooms and other educational settings (Schultz, 2009). If educators realize “the act of talking is a cultural practice, and freedom of speech should not become a pressure to speak,” then “a freedom of silence may be no less a fundamental cultural right than is a freedom of speech” (H. Kim & Markus, 2005, p. 196). Based on these assumptions, we should create more open curriculum and expand the notion of participation to “democratic interactions which invite multiple perspectives, including those perspectives that are privileged or silenced” (Schultz, Buck, & Niesz, 2000, p. 33). Furthermore, through actively listening to students’ silences, teachers create more opportunities for students to interact with each other and reveal their own voices. If “silencing is about who can speak, what can and cannot be spoken, and whose discourse must be controlled” (Fine, 1991, p. 33), then teachers should listen for silence such as “missing conversations and overlooked perspectives” (Schultz, 2003, p. 109).

Culture as an asset, not deficit

Educational practices such as learning and teaching harbor multilayered complexities; there is not one quick fix or a golden rule to follow. In a similar way, my counter-story suggests that literacy learning and teaching should be understood using multiple lenses rather than using such dichotomies as success/failure, effective/ineffective, and scientific/subjective. Students of color from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds may need different guidance and support to become better readers and writers compared with students from dominant White cultures. In addition, a teacher’s instruction counted as ineffective based on the scientifically based educational research framework (Shavelson & Towne, 2002) may promote students’ active engagement in learning and be more culturally relevant to students of color. As Street (2003) suggested, if we do not incorporate multiple ways of knowing and learning into literacy curriculum, students’ literacy practices that are different from those of dominant groups will continue to be labeled as deficits. Gutiérrez et al. (2009) explained that literacy is always situated in social and cultural contexts and “the consequences of learning a literacy are dependent on its context of development” (p. 213). She pointed out that remediation programs such as the RTR program that I described above “employed moralistic or deficit-oriented perspectives to justify their need and implementation” (p. 227). I agree that early literacy instruction should “focus on the sociohistorical influences on students’ learning and the context of their development” (p. 227) and treat the cultural and linguistic tool kits of students of color as potential assets that we can develop and bring into meaningful and critical literacy practices.

Conclusion

While writing the last part of this article, I am still asking myself, “Am I a qualified literacy researcher and educator?” I hope that my counter-story presented here will contribute to promoting more culturally sensitive mentorship for faculty of color (see D. Mack, Watson, & Camacho, 2012, for some good examples). In addition, faculty of color can contribute to diversifying the limited racial, linguistic, and cultural diversity of the “current teacher workforce—that are White, English monolingual, middle class, and female” (Haddix, 2017, p. 141). I look forward to encountering more previously unheard voices from faculty of color via their counter-stories that will serve as a foundation for promoting racial and social justice in literacy teaching and teacher education.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Supplementary Material

The abstracts in languages other than English are available at

Author Biography

Bong Gee Jang is an assistant professor in the Department of Reading and Language Arts at Syracuse University. His main areas of research include literacy motivation, engagement in digital settings, and disciplinary/content literacy. His research has appeared in such journals as Reading Research Quarterly, Educational Psychology Review, Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, and The Reading Teacher. Bong Gee teaches courses related to disciplinary literacy and language arts for both preservice and in-service teachers. He also teaches introductory and advanced quantitative methods courses to graduate students.

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