“They don’t mean me”: a second-generation Asian American teacher’s negotiation of epistemic invisibility and ethnoracial belonging

Asian American teachers remain largely absent from educational research on Teachers of Color, often rendered invisible through aggregated data and flattened ethnoracial categories that obscure internal heterogeneity. This critical narrative inquiry centers the experiences of one second-generation Indian American educator working in a large U.S. public school district to examine how epistemic invisibility and ethnoracial belonging are negotiated within professional life. Multiple in-depth interviews were analyzed through the Listening Guide Method and re-presented as an I-Poem, a narrative profile, and two narrative poems. Her account traces how dominant institutional discourses of teaching, diversity, and racial solidarity frequently fail to account for the layered positionalities of second-generation Asian American educators, and how professional legitimacy and belonging are continually negotiated across institutional encounters. By foregrounding storied knowledge, this study calls for greater attention to how epistemic invisibility and conditional belonging shape the professional lives of Asian American educators.