Zhongfeng Tian, Ph.D., an Assistant Professor of TESOL and Applied Linguistics in the Bicultural Bilingual Department and his colleague Alisha Nguyen of Boston college have been awarded nearly $11,000 by the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Division K to advance anti-racist research and practices in teaching and teacher education. This grant will fund Tian and Nguyen as they collaborate with teachers and families in two dual language immersion preschools in the Greater Boston Area to design and implement an eight-week anti-racist biliteracy program in three classrooms.
Tian says the project was born out of conversations with Nguyen, a Ph.D. fellow and instructor in the Department of Teaching, Curriculum, and Society at Boston College. With the spread of COVID-19, Tian says both researchers saw a corresponding rise in and response to anti-Asian racism.
“This is not a new problem, anti-Asian racism, it’s part of US history,” Tian explained. “It’s just that COVID-19 awakened people’s awareness that we need to stand in solidarity with different minoritized communities to fight against systemic racism together.”
“This is not a new problem, anti-Asian racism, it’s part of US history,” Tian explained. “It’s just that COVID-19 awakened people’s awareness that we need to stand in solidarity with different minoritized communities to fight against systemic racism together.”
Tian and Nguyen hope that their work will have far-reaching implications on research and policy, such as how to better integrate Asian American literature into early childhood curriculum and instruction. They also see the project as having three primary goals: the cultivation of Asian pride among students of Asian descent, stronger support of teachers in teaching racial and linguistic justice, and progress in bilingual and biliteracy education by challenging what Tian terms the “hegemony of English in the curriculum.”
“We think this intervention could generate important lessons for the people in our field to take up,” Tian said, “and we hope it can have lasting impact, and hope people can follow our steps and continue to engage in this important work.”
To this end, the researchers plan to work with two dual language immersion programs in Greater Boston; one Vietnamese-English program and one Mandarin-English program. Key is the study’s participatory design, which Tian says will leverage the community’s own knowledge, so that teachers and families all have a role to play.
“We don’t want to come to the classroom and frame ourselves as the experts helping them design their curriculum,” Tian said. “We want to work with them, listen to their needs, and design the curriculum with them based on the community needs.”
Thus, the researchers will partner with the community to design two lines of curriculum: one with teachers in the classroom, and a series of home-based reading activities with the families. They plan to integrate into the classroom multilingual texts and media from Asian and Asian-American authors and artists that center on Asian-American history, contributions, and cultural and linguistic practices. In this way, Tian and Nguyen plan to design age-appropriate means of engaging the children in issues of race, ethnicity, and social justice. From there, they will record and note how teachers instruct and engage with these topics in their classes, and how students discuss them both in class and at home during the reading activities. In addition to recordings, they plan on collecting items that students have written, drawn, or made.
“We hope to gain different perspectives from students, teachers, and families,” Tian said. “Those are the three key stakeholders in this project, so we hope through collecting multiple sources of data and through triangulating these different sources, we can gain a holistic picture of what is really going on there.”
But the project is not without its challenges. First among them was their being selected by Division K in the first place, which received 70 applications and could only award three grants.
“We also felt super grateful and honored that people wanted to support us to engage in this important work, that they saw this need…"
“We felt seen, especially as Asian-American researchers,” Tian said. “We also felt super grateful and honored that people wanted to support us to engage in this important work, that they saw this need…We see this as our child, this project that we have so much love and passion for, and finally, we won this grant, and we feel so happy and excited.”
Another possible challenge Tian foresees is how communities will respond to the sensitive research topic. While the reaction so far has been positive, he says some Asian-American communities can live in fear of racism and may be uncomfortable discussing it, especially in early childhood contexts. And with Tian living in San Antonio, not Boston, these challenges may be compounded. Establishing relationships with the community, collaborating with teachers and parents, and even collecting his data will likely have to be done remotely. Fortunately, Tian is not alone. He says Nguyen, who is living in Boston, is an invaluable partner.
“It’s important that you have a collaborator when you work on projects that take a lot of design, energy, time, planning, and implementation…down the road I think challenges will keep coming, but I’m glad I have a collaborator who will go to those two school sites in person so that she can still build a relationship with them,” he said.
So far, the Division K grant has given the researchers a foundation to begin their work. The funds will go toward stipends for a graduate-level research assistant, as well as for teachers and families who engage in the research collaboration, providing books and classroom supplies, and transcription and translation services for the vast quantities of data the researchers will be collecting. While this grant is instrumental in getting their research off the ground, Tian and Nguyen are already looking ahead.
“Hopefully once we finish, once we learn the important lessons from this project, we can move to the next steps,” Tian said. “We also hope to support more emerging scholars who may join us.”
-Christopher Reichert