My teaching innovation involves envisioning a module (sub-units) and assignments that address the culture, history, and presence of Asian Americans within US context(s) and landscape(s).
Teaching Innovation
In order to enhance my unit on Asian American Migration history in a manner that sets a stronger foundation for our class, students will read an excerpt from books discussing local, NYC Asian American communities and will identify the ways identity, intersectionality, health disparities, and social determinants of health are present in each community profile.
Complexity Through Specificity: Asian America Through a Local, NYC Lens
This project provides for the incorporation of Asian Diaspora history into the Latin American and Caribbean History survey course.
Asian Diaspora History in the Latin American History Survey
In my Fundamentals of Communications Technology class, I used two documentary films about media representation to discuss the underrepresentation and misrepresentation of Asians and Asian Americans.
Teaching about media representation
This teaching innovation focuses on the uptick in discriminatory rhetoric and actions, hostility, violence, and xenophobic messaging towards Asian Americans. As a nation, we have been struggling to produce nondiscriminatory, trustworthy, and even-handed coverage of Asian-American communities. Hence, Anti-Asian bias runs rampant and was especially pervasive during the coronavirus outbreak. My aim is not to task students with just highlighting the unsung heroes or shedding a positive light on the Asian-American experience. It’s an deep dive into missing context, misreporting and underreporting anti-Asian hate crimes and sentiments. Finally, we will question how Asian Americans are seen and perceived by mass or traditional media institutions by scrutinizing works published in the last few years.
Challenging the Narrative: Demanding Nuanced Coverage of Asian-American Communities
In this project, racially diverse community college students will critically examine and rebuild the syllabus of ART 3100 (Pre-history to Contemporary Art).
Transforming Art 3100 Syllabus: Toward a Racially Responsive Art History
In this project, racially diverse community college students will critically examine and rebuild the syllabus of ART 3100 (Pre-history to Contemporary Art).
Transforming Art 3100 Syllabus: Toward a Racially Responsive Art History
To help students ground their understanding of research methods specific to AAPI communities, I am going to begin the semester by assigning 5 excerpts from personal AAPI stories.
Where I’m Really From: Using AAPI Personal Stories for Research Methods Learning
My teaching innovation is inspired and shaped largely by context. Since Hispanic and Black students are the majority at Bronx Community college, and South Asians and Asian Americans comprise only about 4%, I assume (though not take it for granted) that students would not “naturally” gravitate toward an Asian American course in order to learn about their own cultural identity. Instead of building a monolithic course around narrow demographic needs and necessities, I will take an approach advocated by Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak in a speech, “Higher Education in the Subcontinent”. I will focus on “a noncoercive rearrangement of desires” by reminding students that “democracy is not about us, but those unlike us.” By introducing Desi Hip Hop as a cultural formation in contemporary U.S., I would love to, not only make Asian American Studies more relatable to non-white non-Asian students, but also let them imbibe alternative modes of identity refraction. Hip Hop is my course beeswax, but desi Hip Hop is the marrow that would allow a window into cultures of solidarity, resistance, transnationalism that bind diasporas.
Desi Hip Hop: Cultural Appropriation or Transnational Solidarity?
I’m constructing a unit on race as speculative that explains how “Black” and “Asian-American” are both categories created and shaped from colonial & white supremacist ideas.
