Leveraging Community Assets and Carving Out the Anti-Racist Futures: Asian American Teachers’ Pedagogies and Praxis in Urban Schools

Framed by community-responsive pedagogy, this study focused on Asian American teachers in NYC public schools and explored how they used community resources in their teaching for students who were predominantly of Asian descent. The findings show that the teachers centered their students’ own ethnic communities to discuss and make sense of hatred and harassment targeting Asian communities during the pandemic. Teachers also used various locally available and culturally and ethnically rich community resources to help young students affirm their racial, ethnic, and cultural identities while developing their critical consciousness of the history of racism amidst the dehumanization and criminalization of Asians.