A Tumultuous Tale of Socially Just Teaching: A Migrant Asian Australian Teacher’s Critical Autoethnographic Account of Guiding White Bodies Through an Asian Ethnoburb

A Tumultuous Tale of Socially Just Teaching: A Migrant Asian Australian Teacher’s Critical Autoethnographic Account of Guiding White Bodies Through an Asian Ethnoburb

Changing geopolitical conditions in the ‘Asian Century’ coupled with transnational migration patterns where at least 34% of Australia’s foreign born population hail from ‘Asian’
backgrounds has meant that one of the Australian Curriculum’s three cross-curriculum priorities centres on ‘Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia’. In particular, the curriculum propounds the importance of Asia literacy in developing active and informed Australian students. However, despite this cross-curriculum priority that purportedly empowers students to “recognise the diversity within and between the countries of the Asia region”, a
paradoxical variance across different classroom contexts in the implementation of key ideas and explanatory materials related to this priority nullifies the curriculum’s stated purpose, and arguably, perpetuates the homogenisation of ‘Asians’ as outsiders in the Australian
national imaginary.

In response, set against the climate of COVID-fuelled anti-Asian racism and drawing on a recent Junior Geography excursion through the central food precinct of an ‘Asian’
ethnoburb with predominantly white students and teaching colleagues, this critical autoethnographic account chronicles a migrant ‘Asian’ Australian high school teacher’s attempts at interrogating the complex and covert essentialising borders in place, while advocating for an understanding of intragroup diversity that re-imagines deficit racialized discourses around the ‘Asian’ diaspora in Australia.

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