UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A Penn State College of Education faculty member is part of a multidisciplinary team across several universities that has been awarded a $3.5 million Transformative Research Grant from the Spencer Foundation to conduct a large-scale, five-year study on community-driven initiatives to teach Asian American studies in K-12 classrooms.

Soo-yong Byun, professor of education, demography and Asian studies, said the study — which is being conducted across California, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey and Texas — aims to document challenges and barriers faced by the social justice movement regarding implementation of Asian American studies in the classroom, especially in the wake of increased violence against Asians and Asian Americans spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic. The researchers said they are also planning to use the information to provide resources for more states to eventually implement Asian American studies as a mandated part of their curricula.

“We’re trying to respond at the grassroots level by trying to prevent this violence by promoting the learning of Asian American history,” Byun said. “During the social justice movement, we know more about how some racial groups have fared, but we don’t know much about others like Asian Americans. So, we’re going to look at the five states where bills have already been passed to mandate Asian American studies in the K-12 classroom.”

The awarded team includes scholars with diverse methodological and disciplinary expertise, including ethnic studies, curriculum studies, K-12 policy, learning sciences, case study analysis, survey methodology and network analysis. Noreen Naseem Rodríguez at Michigan State University serves as the principal investigator (PI), with co-PIs Byun, Sohyun An at Kennesaw State University, Esther Kim at the College of William and Mary, Michael Brown at the University of Michigan and Jennifer Higgs at the University of California, Davis.

Byun, who is a co-funded faculty member with the Social Science Research Institute, said the process to be selected to receive this prestigious grant was extraordinarily competitive, making this team’s selection an accomplishment in and of itself.

“Getting a grant for $3.5 million is not something you see often in social science and particularly education research,” Byun said. “It’s the largest grant that I’ve ever received for a project that I’ve been part of, so, we’re very proud of our team and really excited to be working on our project.”

In his role as a quantitative researcher, Byun will be responsible for developing the survey instruments for the project that will measure students’ learning and civic engagement.

Byun will spend the next two years developing and drafting the instruments and conducting a pilot study. After some refinement and adjustment, a larger-scale survey will be conducted in the third year of the project. 

“Although those states have passed a bill, they don’t necessarily know how to teach Asian American studies or have the resources or professional development opportunities,” Byun said. “So, we will go into the research sites to try to figure it out — what to teach, how to teach — to try to generate new information or new resources regarding how to teach Asian American studies. If we have this well-documented information, we can share it with teachers in K-12 settings as well as preservice teachers at the college level.”

Byun said the goal would be for not only the states that already mandate Asian American studies as part of its curriculum to improve the quality of those courses, but to make it easier for more states, including Pennsylvania, to adopt it as well.

That, he said, could be the most lasting impact of this study.

“I think our project and our findings will have very important implications for curriculum design here in Pennsylvania," Byun said. "And once we figure it out, we’ll try to scale it up. ... This is a grant for transforming the system rather than just understanding the process of implementation of Asian American studies.”

The project also has four partner organizations: AAPI New Jersey, a nonprofit organization supporting New Jersey educators by developing K-12 Asian American and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) curriculum and offering professional development to teachers across the state; Asian Texans for Justice, a nonprofit organization supporting civic engagement and policy advocacy on behalf of Texas’ AAPI communities; The E Pluribus Unum Project, a nonprofit group that led the statewide advocacy for AAPI histories to become a legislated mandate; and Foundations & Futures Asian American Pacific Islander Multimedia Textbook at the Asian American Studies Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, a textbook project that is the first comprehensive digital textbook of its kind focused on AAPI content for high school and college students.