Pedagogy in and through paradox: A migrant ‘Asian’ Australian teacher’s excursion with white students through Sunnybank’s Market Square

Pedagogy in and through paradox: A migrant ‘Asian’ Australian teacher’s excursion with white students through Sunnybank’s Market Square

Changing geopolitical conditions in the ‘Asian Century’ (Australian Government, 2012) coupled with transnational migration patterns where at least 34% of Australia’s foreign born population hail from ‘Asian’ backgrounds (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2020) 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 (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority [ACARA], n.d.). However, despite this crosscurriculum priority that purportedly empowers students to “recognise the diversity within and between the countries of the Asia region” (ACARA, n.d., para 3), variance across different classroom contexts in the implementation of key ideas and explanatory materials related to this priority (Ma Rhea & Zhang, 2017) contradicts the curriculum’s stated purpose, and arguably, perpetuates the homogenisation of ‘Asians’ as outsiders in the Australian national imaginary (Lo, Khoo & Gilbert, 2000). In response, drawing on a recent Junior Geography excursion through the central food precinct of Sunnybank, an ‘Asian’ ethnoburb (Li, 2014), with predominantly white students and teaching colleagues, this critical autoethnographic account chronicles a migrant ‘Asian’ Australian high school teacher’s attempts at interrogating the covert essentialising borders in place, and in so doing, advocating for an understanding of intragroup diversity that reverses deficit discourses around the ‘Asian’ diaspora in Australia.

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