The sense of belonging is a complicated topic that is closely connected to one's understanding of identity, culture, and unique life experiences. We organized a one-semester-long workshop series titled "Revisiting Identity, Culture, and Belonging Through Art Making." This article discusses the outcomes of this multi-institutional project…

Korean Americans and Korean Germans exhibit similarities in their upbringing and migration processes: The first generation, speaking Korean natively and solid in their identity as Koreans, attempt to raise their children with a Korean identity in a culture, where English or German is the mainstream language. Given their minority status in either…

This article describes how to build a classroom community by building representations and visualizations of data related to students' names. The goal of this task was to allow students to get to know each other's identities better by collecting and analyzing data about their names and exploring the connection between names and identities. The task…

Clergy sexual abuse is happening in faith communities. Particularly, Korean immigrant churches, though playing crucial roles in empowering immigrants' agency and providing support networks, often fail to support survivors because of both a dysfunction of culture and a fragmented educational ministry. Along with the #ChurchToo movement, young women…

Children's literature is a powerful way to engage young learners in understanding the civil rights movement (CRM); yet at the same time, most children's books focused on the CRM often create ahistorical, inaccurate depictions by only focusing on a few key people such as Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King Jr. or events such as the March on…

In this autoethnography, I inquire into naming the histories and dynamics behind some of the embodied and affective experiences I have had as a Korean American woman of color while studying up/down, across/within, in White-dominant professional spaces such as K-12 schools. This 'in-between' status is part of the nature of being Korean American. In…

In this article, I describe the challenges I encountered and the process I navigated in conducting discourse-based interviews (DBIs) with multilingual transnational participants in disaster recovery in the context of community-based research. Attending to the messiness and complexity of community-based research in the aftermath of human-induced…

The school counseling profession strongly encourages practitioners to work within a multicultural and a social justice perspective. More literature is needed that clarifies exactly how school counselors can use such a perspective in working with Asian student populations. We describe how school counselors can use the Multicultural and Social…

Among educational researchers and practitioners, parent involvement tends to be described as a wholly positive experience, benefitting parents, teachers, and children alike. However, the author--a university professor originally from South Korea--explains that her early interactions with her son's teachers have been one-sided and fraught with…

In February 2019, a counselor, a project manager, and a teacher from the Laurent Clerc National Deaf Education Center were chosen as inclusive excellence ambassadors to the Gallaudet University Division of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. As inclusive excellence ambassadors, Lisa Montalvo, Taiyabah Naeem, and Lia Bengtson believe the division's…

In this article, I discuss my own experience as a critical multicultural educator who is an Asian American. Using the psychoanalytic ideas of Holding Environment and Countertransference, I use the two questions of "where you am from" and "where are you really from" in this article as a way to think through and learn about my…

By mixing up various writing genres, the author interweaves a hybrid narrative of a fable, her postcolonial feminist subjectivity, and her research. The narrative begins with Aesop's fable, "the Bat, the Bird, and the Beast." In the fable, a bat wants to be both a bird and a beast, but being neither, s/he is refused by both. Connecting…

I interrogate my personal diaries documenting my life in New York, Beijing, Tokyo, and Sydney over a 20-year period. Taking bearings from Bakhtinian thoughts, I explore the emergence of my post-diasporic identity as a second generation Korean American through watching South Korean dramas. By conversing with journals kept over a 20-year period, I…

English learners (ELs) from Confucian heritage culture (CHC) are often perceived to be reserved and conforming to the authority of the classroom. But a careful look at struggles between a CHC student and the mainstream teacher reveals that the teacher's views and pedagogical approaches shape academic and social hierarchy in the classroom.…

When Dr. Chia Youyee Vang arrived at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee five years ago, numerous Hmong students along with community residents called for more courses specifically examining their life experiences. Now, her university offers a certificate in Hmong diaspora studies. It's part of a growing tide within Asian American studies--more…