Achieving Against The Odds

7 Teaching, Tenure, and Institutional Transformation: 125Reflections on Race, Culture, and Resilience at an Urban Public University

Peter Nien-chu Kiang 7 Teaching, Tenure, and Institutional Transformation Reflections on Race, Culture, and Resilience at an Urban Public University I Want to Go On I want to go on. Her words broke a long silence from the front of the room. A few moments earlier, she had faltered in her project presentation about the experiences of Vietnamese Amerasians and had begun to cry quietly. Usually, Trang sat in the back with one or two other Vietnamese friends, trying to remain safe and unobtrusive. Had the pressure of speaking her second language in front of everyone in class overwhelmed her? Perhaps she was reliving the memories of her own life in Vietnam. Maybe she recalled how hard it was to arrive here five years ago in the land of her father, still not knowing who or where he was. Are you sure? Yes, I want to go on. She completed her presentation, filled with emotion in accented English , teaching the class about struggle and survival. On the last day of the semester, I reminded the class of the context and meaning of those words, “I want to go on.” There are strengths to be shared and lessons to be learned from Southeast Asian refugees, especially in facing and overcoming obstacles. From the back of the room, Trang looked up for a moment and smiled. Everyone nodded in recognition. This example of Trang’s determination to go on, in spite of her struggle to speak at the front of the room, captures some of the shared learning that has defined my work since 1987 at an urban, public, doctoral-granting university. I, too, have tried to go on—as a teacher, an advocate, and an organizer across the fields of education and Asian American studies. 125 Inspired by students like Trang and her classmates, I have resisted the compartmentalized categories of scholarship, teaching, and service that traditionally define faculty roles and responsibilities, and have used the following integrative themes of sharing voices, crossing boundaries, and building communities as more accurate, authentic ways to describe my commitments and contributions in the university. Sharing Voices Much of my work as a researcher and teacher centers on sharing voices— creating contexts in which immigrant voices, student voices, women’s voices, Asian American voices, and so forth, can be expressed and appreciated. The voices of those who are traditionally silenced or structurally marginalized, like the Vietnamese refugee high-school student who states in one of my articles, “We don’t feel like our voice the authority would ever think of,”1 literally fill my curricula, publications, and projects, as well as my classroom and office. The purpose, process, and presentation of my research and writing— whether with Vietnamese children in a bilingual fourth-grade classroom or Vietnamese American high-school students or Cambodian college students or Chinese adult immigrant learners in a communitybased ESL program—document and authorize student and community voices. In turn, those voices serve to challenge the validity of dominant paradigms (race relations paradigms or models of student persistence, for example) and enable alternative theories to be grounded. In addition, by sharing voices in the classroom through both the content and pedagogy of my teaching, students consistently report that they can “speak up” and “feel heard,” unlike in other school settings, where they are frequently silent or silenced. This is particularly significant in my undergraduate classes, where immigrant students of color are the majority. In my graduate education courses as well, sharing voices models a student-centered pedagogy and reinforces the importance of drawing from primary sources for content—crucial principles in our teacher education program. Crossing Boundaries The structure of my faculty appointment and my teaching responsibilities purposefully cross both disciplinary and bureaucratic, institutional 126 Peter Nien-chu Kiang lines. My day-to-day practice is multidisciplinary on many levels— reflecting the nature of my dual professional fields in Asian American studies and education as well as my commitment to seek connections across boundaries that isolate subject matter or separate people. In my relationships with colleagues and communities, I find that my own organizing experience, biracial background, and connections to the various worlds of K through 12, undergraduate, and graduate education enable me to move comfortably and productively across boundaries of race, culture , gender, and class to facilitate collaboration and forge coalitions. Building Communities Nearly every aspect of my research, teaching, and...