Disaggregating Asian Identities through Case Studies of High School Students in Electronic Textiles Classrooms

Abstract

While most of the identity-related work within STEAM education has examined learners from different marginalized groups, Asians and Asian Americans are some of the least studied identities despite the underrepresentation of several Asian sub-groups within STEAM fields. Educational research has embraced the “model minority” myth, adopted a White-colonial gaze, aggregated Asians into a single “racial group”, and treated it as a dominant group within STEM fields. By resisting the White-centered, colonial simplifications and also conducting ways of engaging with learners that identify with Asian communities, we present four case studies of “Asian” high school students in two STEAM classrooms (which were both implementing an electronic textiles unit) in an attempt to disaggregate and to highlight the diversity and complications in the the otherwise simplified “Asian” identity. We answer the question of how electronic textiles projects support students’ “Asian” identity expression, negotiation, and development. We share how our cases accentuated the role of materiality and pedagogical context in opening possibilities for students to narrate stories of historical, cultural, and familial significance while navigating their complicated “Asian” (or not) identities. We discuss the implications of our findings for the research, design, and practice within STEAM activities to better support the highly diverse and invisibly marginalized Asian-origin students.

1. Introduction

“How would we name, research, and know ourselves and others if this gaze weren’t the dominant one through which education (research and practice) was imagined and enacted?”

[1]

Buried within the methods section of this paper, there may be a hypothetical sentence such as “10% of the learners identified as Asian or Asian American.”, if we were to discuss the “Asian” learners participating in our study in ways similar to how most other educational studies typically report about “Asian” learner racial identities. Through and within this paper, we contest the flattening and simplification of Asian and Asian American identities. We call scholars to go beyond what Paris calls the “White settler colonial gaze” [1]. Drawing from decolonial theories [2], we resist the aggregation of Asian sub-groups in ways that dehumanize learners and erase differences and disparities. Instead, we argue for complicating Asian students’ racial and ethnic identities within U.S. classrooms and their connections to STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics) learning. We are guided by the following research question: How do “Asian” students navigate their racial and ethnic identities as they engage with computing within an electronic textiles unit? as we study the participation of four “Asian” students in an electronic textiles unit across two high school computing classrooms.

The “Asian” racial category perpetuates colonial logic by communicating an artificial ethnic homogeneity and by masking inequities within sub-groups such as, among others, the under-representation of Filipinos within STEM fields [3] (and their broader marginalization within the Asian American umbrella [4]). While the aggregation of demographic data in the sciences has resulted in the masking of the under-representation of Asian Americans within the sciences—and their exclusion from Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives, as well as institutional funding [5,6]—such practices have implications within STEAM education such as perpetuating the model minority myth [4,7,8] and other stereotypes associated with Asian learners, thereby robbing them of personhood [9]. As Takagi [10] notes, “the term ‘Asian-American identity’ encompasses on the one hand a strategic politics, and on the other a limiting trap for the expression of diverse ethnic cultures” (p. 239). Asians, through homogenization, bear the burden of stereotypes such as being smart, hardworking, and good at STEM subjects, which pitches them against other oppressed communities of color such as Black and Latinx, while justifying White supremacy within the U.S. [7]. However, adopting learning theories highlights the cultural, social, and political aspects of learning. Further, culturally relevant pedagogy and materials enable STEAM classrooms to engage learners identifying with Asian sub-communities to relate to their racial and ethnic backgrounds beyond stereotypical representations, and to then participate as fuller humans.

Sociocultural and sociopolitical learning theories emphasize how knowledge creation and learning are grounded in cultural contexts, learners’ social and material contexts, and political identities [11,12,13]. Further, decolonial theories highlight the hierarchical power relations between cultures, geographies, and their connections to knowledge production due to histories of colonization across the globe [1,2]. These theories call attention to multidimensional and intersectional learner identities, the learning context, and their role in shaping learner experiences. Defined as stories or narratives of oneself and about others that one tells [14], identity plays an important role in shaping learning and learner experiences. Further, the multidimensional and intersectional nature of identity [11,15] complicates how we study, understand, and center learner identities within our design, practice, and research. Learner identities across different dimensions such as race, gender, geography, etc., as well as the power relationships between them, further complicate learners’ identities and their interactions while learning, thereby privileging certain identities over others as learners engage in learning activities. Histories of colonization have created “geopolitics of knowledge” that value knowledge and learning within Western, metropolitan contexts while pushing narratives from non-Western contexts to the margins [2]. Such power relations are reflected in how we design learning opportunities within STEM education—privileging abstract problem-solving within contexts that may be far removed from the lived experiences of learners from marginalized communities. On the other hand, STEAM contexts such as electronic textiles (hereafter e-textiles) enable learners to tell stories of personal relevance, thereby allowing opportunities for learners from marginalized communities to engage with stories from their communities (see [16] for a detailed review). Such interactions change how learners, who traditionally do not identify with STEM, relate to STEM disciplines and develop identities at the intersection of their cultural practices, meanings, and discipline.

In the context of the U.S., Asian hate and anti-Asian sentiment, as well as the recent histories of controlled immigration that are colored by the colonial White gaze [17], have led to simplistic narratives about the dominant participation of Asian students in STEM disciplines while erasing the diversity and disparity within Asian sub-groups. Moving away from the White gaze, we need to pay closer attention to “Asian” learners to complicate our understanding of this categorization and to better support students at the margins within this group. However, the experiences of learners with Asian identities within K-12 STEAM learning contexts remain underexplored—scholars, educational researchers, and the broader research community have embraced the “model minority” myth [4,8,18] and have treated Asian learners as a dominant group that is sufficiently represented in STEM fields, even when that is far from the truth for many Asian sub-groups. For instance, Filipino and Vietnamese students are still a tiny minority within the total population of students who obtain STEM degrees in undergraduate programs in the U.S. [3]. This highlights not only the diverse nature of the “Asian” category, but also how sub-group disparities and histories are hidden and erased by the oversimplification of the category and by communicating a false homogeneity. Such a grouping further robs learners of personhood and perpetuates White supremacist categorizations [7,9]. Subjected to colonial logics and the geopolitics of knowledge, “Asian” learners, their cultural practices, and stories are marginalized within STEM learning contexts. But, unlike Black and Native American populations, Asian populations within STEM education and how learners engage with their identities are topics that are understudied and underexplored. We seek to displace colonial logic within education [2] (p. 83) and push boundaries in how we engage with Asian students. In examining identity formation among Asian students, we seek to learn how we can support identity development when this “development” has to occur in spaces where identity has, in the first place, been imposed and constantly contested [9].

Attention to learning contexts stresses the role of resources, materials, and artifact creation in the learning process [13]. Further, sociocultural and sociopolitical theories highlight how these resources can support learners’ identity development while engaging with disciplinary practices. Earlier studies in STEAM education have adopted identity-related theories to better understand the participation of learners from marginalized communities (e.g., Black, Native American) in STEAM activities such as e-textiles) (e.g., [19,20,21]). Such work has allowed researchers and educators to better support learners at marginalized intersections, such as Black girls and Native American boys and girls, to tell stories about themselves and their communities, thereby pointing at the potential of these STEAM learning contexts to uncover the simplification of the “Asian” identity.

To challenge and deconstruct the simplifications and erasure of Asian identities in STEAM, we examined student participation in an e-textiles unit by qualitatively analyzing classroom video transcripts and student projects from 15 weeks of the 37-week unit. In challenging the uptake of the settler colonial logics in educational research, we want to unsettle and complicate the use and adoption of the “Asian” tag in broader educational research practices. We do so by looking at a STEAM learning context, taking a closer look at student e-textiles projects, and exploring how the materiality of e-textiles has enabled the complication of student “Asian” identities through cultural storytelling and through the resistance of homogeneous groupings while learning STEAM.

2. Background

2.1. Learner Identity Development

Sociocultural theories of teaching and learning emphasize the importance of learner identities for learning [11,12,13]. In stories that learners tell about themselves and others, they continuously make sense of the learning concepts and context in relation to who they are [14]. By going beyond the acquisition model of learning and thinking of learners as acquiring skills or disciplinary facts, sociocultural theories view learning as learners developing disciplinary practices as they move from the periphery to the center of the discipline [22]. For instance, viewing computing learning as a sociocultural process means that learners engage in disciplinary practices such as creating computational artifacts or projects while developing their identity as belonging to computing. Learner identities and how they relate to the discipline become integral to how learners engage with the discipline as they become enculturated to the ways of thinking, doing, and being in the discipline [23].

While learners’ identities are central to their learning, it is essential to note that identities are not singular and instead are multi-dimensional and intersectional [15]. Learners bring their identities across different aspects of their lives, such as race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, socioeconomic class, etc. These intersect and complicate their lived experiences and how they participate in learning activities. Further, as sociopolitical theories highlight, identities are not neutral; they are imbued with power dynamics in a given context [24]. For instance, historically, computing classrooms have notoriously privileged White men, resulting in exclusionary practices that have kept Black and Brown students from the discipline [15,25].

2.2. Asian as a Contested Identity Construct

Race-based grouping in the U.S. context is tightly woven with colonial histories. For the most part, White settler colonizers, the people in power, have taken the role of assigning different racial groups their categories and places in the social hierarchy [17]. For instance, Black is an assigned category, one that is historically based on the “one-drop rule”, similar to how indigenous people are assigned “indigeneity” by the fraction of their blood composition [17]. While most of the race-related conversations focus on ethnic identities related to the histories of the colonizations of the U.S. and the slave trade, the more recent immigration of Asian communities within the U.S. has opened doors to a continuation of racial categorization practices that shape Asian identity within the U.S. context [17]. The Asian identity has a unique and complicated history, and it involves the immigration of different sub-groups of communities of Asia into the U.S. in the last 60 years. With the initial waves of Asian immigration to the U.S., Asians today are a highly diverse group composed of widely different sub-groups from different parts of Asia, including, for example, India, Korea, Vietnam, and the Philippines [17,26]. In a post-Civil Rights movement construct, the initial groups of immigrants did not identify with the imposed identity of “Orientals”. Inspired by the Civil Rights movement, and in response to the ongoing racism, youth on college campuses coined the term “Asian American” while rejecting “Orientals” [17].

Today, East Asians, Southeast Asians, and South Asians all identify differently with the term “Asian” [17]. For instance, Filipinos struggle to identify with the pan-Asian identity, which is dominated mainly by East Asian sub-groups in the U.S. [27]. Further, the model minority construct leaves youth with questions about who counts as Asian or how they are or are not Asian, thus imposing stereotypes about Asians that shape our understanding of the model minority, e.g., that they are successful in STEM and hardworking [3,7,9,27]. Learners form and figure out their racial identities in high school. Youth from recent immigrant families have been found to constantly move between different identities, which are not always in sync with disciplinary identities and expectations [27]. Thus, we must answer the question of what opportunities are available for them to learn within a discipline matter, particularly within STEM fields (which are notorious for their exclusion of marginalized communities) [23].

Racial and cultural identities such as “Asian” or “Asian American” have been intertwined with disciplinary identities of being a “STEM person” or participating in STEM fields [7,9]. And yet, such explorations of how “Asian” youth navigate STEM learning in teaching and learning contexts are understudied. Earlier research indicates the contested nature of such identities—i.e., what it means to be Asian or Asian American. “Asian American” as a construct is fraught with political histories and has served as a tool to further racist immigration policies. Such a construct has been considered a broken, strategic, and political label that limits Asian youths’ ability to express the diversity hidden under the broader umbrella term [17]. Youth in U.S. high school classrooms will negotiate their disciplinary, racial, and cultural identities as they participate in STEM activities [27]. However, these connections are barely explored within K-12 STEM education settings. As such, in this paper, we take a critical stance and shed light on how students navigate their cultural identities while engaging with computing within an electronic textiles unit in Exploring Computer Science [28] high school classrooms.

Despite this marginalization—i.e., the imposed monolithic Asian identity and the accompanying model minority myth—individuals within Asian sub-groups are not passive recipients of the categorization. They constantly make sense of their community and its boundaries or terms of membership through shared cultural symbols, history, and other aspects that capture the essence of peoplehood [7,9]. For example, Asian youth will navigate their identity-related concerns by answering questions such as who they are, where they belong, and what sense they make of that identity [27]. In addition, even with Indians, Koreans, and Filipinos being some of the fastest-growing Asian subgroups, we have little understanding of how youth from these subgroups (and others) navigate their learning settings, their experiences, or how they make sense of imposed racial identities [17].

2.3. The Role of Learning Contexts in Identity Development

Learning environments for youth should be designed to support identity development and sensemaking, thereby affirming the different intersectional identities that learners bring in [13]. Environments include the materials that learners interact with, pedagogical practices, and curricular designs that invite diverse identities to engage with the discipline. Activities that invite learners to engage with disciplines have profound implications for learner disciplinary identity formation [23]. For instance, tool designs such as e-textile construction kits can potentially engage more girls and learners from marginalized ethnic groups by bringing sewing and crafting into computing learning spaces, thereby allowing learners to center their cultural practices within computing [29]. In particular, STEAM activities are inclusive in that they enable diverse student identities to engage with STEM through the integration of art practices; some examples include the use of e-textiles to create fabric-based electronic artifacts [16], the use of art and found materials to create interactive art sculptures [30], or the programming of visual animations to create digitally-augmented movement and dance performances [31]. E-textile toolkits have repeatedly been shown to be an effective avenue toward complicating identity work through the intersection of weaving, sewing, and crafting with computing and circuitry [16]. Such instances of integration have enabled learners from marginalized communities to make personally relevant computing artifacts and to tell stories about themselves and their communities [19], thus further supporting pedagogical practices that center students’ cultural and racial identities.

In addition, materiality has been a focus of research within STEAM learning environments, particularly within physical computing spaces such as e-textiles [30,32]. As learners engage with the materials and activities within STEAM learning environments to create artifacts, they must also navigate the various capabilities and properties of the materials they work with to discover and explore the different ways that they can use the materials to create, explore what artifacts they can make, or how they can leverage their materials’ properties to express thoughts and ideas. This opens up opportunities in which to explore and further understand learners’ sensemaking on their use of materials for self-expression, identity development, and creative engagement [30,33]. Within our work, the students’ use of e-textiles to construct and communicate stories of their families, cultures, and communities crystallizes the roles and affordability of e-textiles materials and toolkits for uncovering the rich nuances of Asian identities.

3. Materials and Methods

3.1. Context and Participants

We were uniquely situated to conduct this study in a high school that is located in the Las Frutas (pseudonym) suburban neighborhood in Southern California in the United States. Las Frutas has a very diverse Asian population, which was reflected in the overall composition of the participating classrooms since the school admitted students through a lottery system, with a preference given to families living within the attendance boundary (i.e., the geographic area served by the school with regard to student enrollment).

The study involved two classes of an online e-textiles unit as a part of the Exploring Computer Science curriculum [28], which was held during the academic year 2020–2021 (during the COVID-19 pandemic). The teacher, of one of the few teaching e-textiles unit within the curriculum, opted to participate in the study. Learners were sent physical kits to their homes, which were composed of two Adafruit Circuit Playground Arduino microcontrollers, two sets of seven-color sewable LED lights, a roll of conductive thread, multi-color felt sheets, cotton sewing threads, and sewing needles (Figure 1). Using these materials, students made four e-textile projects within the unit while they learned computing and circuitry concepts by making art-based textile artifacts. Creating with e-textiles required learners to design the aesthetics and circuits of their projects, and this was followed by crafting their fabric-based projects by sewing electronic components, such as LEDs and microcontrollers, with conductive threads (Figure 2 shows a sample e-textile project). We selected the middle two of the unit’s four curricular projects, the wristband, and collaborative mural for our analysis. They were chosen as these projects were used to emphasize the idea of initially representing cultural identities as they relate to their students’ names (wristband project) and then to the community that they identify with (mural project). For the wristband project, learners brainstormed on the meanings of their names and made a wristband with three glowing lights that were connected to a battery pack to communicate these meanings. For the mural project, learners brainstormed the different communities they identified with and selected one of them. Making the mural involved designing a computational circuit with a microcontroller and LED lights, as well as programming four different light patterns to tell a story about their selected community via the mural. Both projects provided opportunities for learners to highlight their stories, and to use circuits and computation to narrate them. The teaching team comprised the teacher, Ben, and the first author serving as the teaching assistant (TA). They modeled project ideas for learners by sharing their cultural and ethnic narratives, as well as related project designs.

3.2. Data Collection

The online sessions of the two classes that Ben taught (i.e., Class1 and Class2) were video and audio recorded through Zoom. The transcripts of the recordings served as one of the primary data sources for our analysis. Learners also used an online learning management platform called SeeSaw (https://web.seesaw.me/, accessed on 1 August 2023), in which they maintained a journal where they documented their progress on their projects. Within these online journals, learners were prompted to share pictures of their planning of the projects in progress, the code associated with them, and their reflections on their process. Planning documents included sketches or illustrations that learners made to visualize and draft their ideas around their circuit projects, as well as circuit diagrams that illustrated the connections between different circuitry materials (e.g., wires, LED lights, buttons, etc.).

3.3. Data Analysis

We used a case study approach to examine how students expressed and navigated their “Asian” identities and complicated them [34,35]. Of the 11 students (out of the 70 total across the two classes) who self-identified as being part of Asian communities through their projects, we developed case studies for four students who had consented to be part of the research and actively participated during the unit (i.e., they completed the two projects and had consistently responded to prompts on Seesaw). The four students also belonged to four of the five most dominant “Asian” sub-groups living in the school neighborhood as per the U.S. census data, thereby providing heterogeneity within the dataset.

We read the class video recording transcripts to identify the interactions specific to the selected students or the teaching team’s instructions for the two selected projects. We iteratively triangulated with student journal entries and developed cases for each student [35]. The case studies enabled a deeper engagement with the data to explore and understand how each student’s individual cultural and racial identities intertwined closely with how they engaged in computing, making, and crafting.

We jointly practiced rigor while developing case studies by having extended engagement with the data during the collection and analysis steps [36]. The first author served as a TA throughout the course, whereby they interacted with learners as they made their projects. Further, the authors collaboratively looked at the data iteratively over six months in a non-linear fashion, moving between and triangulating [35] across different data sources while developing the cases; we drew both from extensive observational and student-reported data across 37 class periods to develop individual narratives of student participation and engagement with the discipline while making the projects. Moreover, the first author’s participation as a TA during the unit, their extensive experience with e-textiles, and their identity as a scholar of South Asian origin enabled a deeper interpretation of the dataset. Further, the second author’s identity as a Filipino scholar informed our data analysis and reporting of the cases.

4. Results

The following sections present the case studies for each student (student names are pseudonyms). Each case study describes a student’s ideation of their wristband and mural projects, the specific connections they made across their identities, their cultural contexts, their projects, and their use of the physical materials and code to implement their projects and ideas. We also illustrate, in these case studies, how the students concretely went beyond the typical model minority myth treatment and categorization that Asian learners are usually subjected to. We describe in these cases how the students named themselves and their communities, as well as highlight how they engaged with their cultural and historical knowledge and practices to communicate their identities and create their e-textile projects.

4.1. Santos: Filipino Roots and Colonial History

Santos described himself as being of Filipino origin, and he was learning programming for the first time during the program. Throughout the projects, Santos grappled with ideas around his Filipino identity, as exemplified in his consistent references to the symbolism and iconography of the Philippine flag. Santos’ original circuit design for his storytelling wristband featured lights arranged as three yellow stars in a triangle formation surrounding a central yellow sun figure. This particular arrangement of the stars and sun resemble elements of the Philippine flag, which are arranged similarly (Figure 3a,b). The teacher also expressed his appreciation of Santos’ circuit design and highlighted how he placed his lights differently than his classmates’ designs, which mainly involved placing the lights in a line: “yours looks really cool. I really like your circuit. It’s a very interesting circuit.” At the time, the students were still learning to engage with e-textile materials, and most of them created simple circuit designs that closely resembled the example project shown in class (Figure 4). Santos, however, went beyond the demonstrated template and placed the lights and connections in ways that required him to expand how he understood circuit placement; this prompted the teacher’s positive reaction toward Santos’ circuit design.

In his actual wristband, however, Santos changed his design so that the lights were arranged in a linear order; the colors of the lights he used also differed from those on his original design. This could be because the original design, though intricate, was buggy: the placement of the battery holder was such that both positive polarities were on the left and negative polarities on the right, which would not have worked given his current circuit design (see Figure 3 for his circuit design and the placement of the battery holder). This highlighted Santos’ lack of experience working with e-textile materials. Yet, he could still create a complex design inspired by his desire to express his knowledge about his Filipino origins. His final wristband had two light-blue and one blue light arranged in a line (Figure 5). When explaining this design, he advised it represented events around his family; specifically, it was about his brother who will be born soon: “This bracelet’s color blue represents my little brother who will be born on September.”

For his mural project, Santos returned to his original design of arranging three yellow lights to represent stars in a triangle formation around a yellow light in the center representing a sun (Figure 6). Santos’ description of his mural project remained consistent with his ideas during the circuit design stage of the wristband project:

“So, this is my mural project. It’s the three stars and sun. Each of the three stars represent the colonies of the Philippines. The names were Visayas, Mindanao, and Luzon. There’s the three patterns I have [Santos describes the blinking pattern of his mural where the lights of the stars blink twice and move to the sun]. The sun in the middle represents the freedom (sic) and the eight rays [of the sun] represent the first eight colonies in the Philippines.”

Identifying each element of the Philippine flag is a critical driver in the design of his circuit and code. In a brainstorming activity that was conducted to think about what communities they want to tell stories about with their mural, Santos identified his “gaming community” and “Filipino community”. He put together pictures representing each community: pictures of game elements and a console controller for his gaming community, and an image of the Philippine flag and Filipino dishes for his Filipino community (Figure 7). He focused on the Filipino community for his mural: “I’ll choose the Filipino community because it means more to me”.

Santos’ code (Figure 8) showed that each of the main Philippine islands (i.e., the three stars) lit up to blink separately from each other depending on which of the two buttons (button1State and button2State) in the circuit were pressed: the star for Luzon blinks when both buttons are pressed; when only one button is pressed, either the star for Visayas (button1State is pressed) or Mindanao (button2State is pressed) blinks; and the central sun blinks when no buttons are pressed. Furthermore, each function for each star was named according to the name of the island that a star represented (e.g., Luzon(), Visayas(), and Mindanao()); these functions housed the blinking behavior for each star. Through this button-driven blinking behavior, Santos highlighted the integral pieces of the Philippine flag. Furthermore, his descriptions of his circuit and aesthetic design for his mural drew precise references to the historical significance of elements of the Philippine flag, particularly his understanding of the historical meaning and representation of the three stars and sun: “The sun represents peoples (sic) freedom and democracy, and the stars represent the 3 main islands of the Philippines, Luzon Visayas, and Mindanao”. The reference to “people’s freedom and democracy” is deeply descriptive of the Philippines’ colonial history of Spanish, and later American, colonization.

4.2. Hanae: Japanese Cultural Elements and Connections to the Japanese Community

Hanae’s description of the creation of her wristband demonstrates the connections that she has with her name, its history (in connection with her parents), and how the activity of creating a wristband provided a space for her to reflect on herself and what she wants to do with her life. Her deep reflection on the meanings of her name and the connections she made to communicate the history of her name suggests that having a Japanese name was a significant part of her identity.

“My wristband represents my name, which can have lots of meanings and interpretations. But in general, it means something close to distance, to proceed, or both physical and philosophical road. I believe my parents named me this way so that I can explore the world and myself as I grow up and view the world from a wide perspective. And so, the first thing that came to my mind was the sky, since it will always be there and have a lot of space. I never really had a time to think and reflect on the meaning of my name, so by creating this wristband, I feel like it was a great opportunity to think about what I should be doing in my life. I am proud of what I created both as a learning engineer and as a person.”

Her wristband design featured a collection of clouds arranged against a blue background, which symbolized the sky (Figure 9). Her choice of using clouds to represent her name tied into the “many interpretations” of her name, as well as her parents’ intention for her to “explore the world” and “view the world from a wide perspective”. Her circuit design, while arranged in a zigzag pattern to mimic the randomness in the locations of clouds, is a slight deviation from the straight linear pattern that was shown to the students with the example project (Figure 4).

“Clouds represent my first name. My name itself relates to things or ideas related to “time”, “distance/area”, or physical “road”. It’s a philosophical word and there can be many interpretations, so I decided to use clouds since they can be seen in the sky.”

Hanae’s mural (Figure 10) went beyond just reflecting on her own identity (which she performed with her wristband project) to highlighting broader reflections about the Asian community. For her mural, Hanae used her design to tell stories about her Japanese community, referencing cultural elements such as proverbs and aesthetics. The composition of her mural is based on a proverb that involves a dango (a Japanese dumpling) and flowers; the positioning of the dango and flowers also reflect the translation of the proverb (“dango over flowers”). Hanae kept this symbolism in mind when thinking about her mural composition in relation to the electronic components she used and described how she wanted the LED lights to highlight different parts of her mural.

“I am mainly telling about what is aesthetically pleasing, but also referring to a proverb that involves a flower and dango […] I want my dango to stand out more than the flower, as in flashing and flickering for longer periods of time. The proverb [I mentioned] gets literally translated as dango over flowers so I want the dango to be the center of attention.”

When talking about the light patterns she coded, Hanae related her thoughts to the proverb and how the design reflects the proverb’s deeper meaning around beauty and necessity. In her code (Figure 11), she created a variable for the light of each dango (pink, white, and green) and the flower, and each function encapsulated a pattern for the alternating blinking in each of the lights for the dango and the flower. The function names also described the actions of eating the dango (firstBite(), secondBite(), lastBite()) and watching the flower (watchingFlowers()), which she referenced in her description of the proverb.

“It all relates to the proverb. The proverb is meant to tell the reader to value substance over style. While a flower can look pretty, it cannot benefit human lives other than for our view while food is necessary and provides quality. I also simply like dango more than looking at flowers, so I chose to have the three LED lights stand out more than the LED on the flower.”

When asked how her design relates to the communities she’s designing for, she highlighted her connections to the broader Asian community and the more specific Japanese community. She describes her strong ties to the Japanese culture that she grew up with while also describing her mural as a way of expressing her pride in her identity amid current events of violence against the Asian community; this was a reference to a recent attack on Asian women in a spa in Atlanta, Georgia in the US at the time [37,38].

“I chose the Asian community, specifically the Japanese one. The image on the left is a traditional food that is similar to mochi, the middle image of a cherry blossom, and tea [referring to her circuit diagram, Figure 10b]. I chose this community because I feel a strong connection to Japanese culture. I grew up with it and I like the food and culture. It holds a big place in my heart and I thought this project would be a great opportunity to express my passion. […] I would like to design for the Asian community. I have a Japanese heritage and since Asians have been getting attacked for outrageous reasons lately, I feel like this was my time to be proud of my race and express who I am. I will never become another race throughout my life, so I want it to be a feature I can be proud of.”

4.3. Aera: Futuring and Korean Cultural Connections

Aera, a student from a Korean family, used the opportunity to make e-textile projects during the unit to explore her Korean identity and development as a teen as a way in which to prepare for graduation and entering college life. She drew a caterpillar that was “getting ready to change into a butterfly” just as she is “working on slowly getting ready for college.” She said that this was the first time that she made something light up, and that she was happy with the way her wristband turned out (Figure 12a). She brought her experience with crafting into her construction of this project, which can be seen in her sewing of the boundary of the caterpillar with green thread (which was not required in the project) instead of using glue to put the fabric pieces together as her classmates had carried out (Hanae’s wristband, for instance). She also sewed the conductive thread in a way that concealed it under the green body of the caterpillar, i.e., along its edges (see the circuit diagram, Figure 12b) while the LED lights lit up through the felt. She acknowledged that she took the opportunity of this project to reflect on herself instead of connecting it with her cultural identity: “The caterpillar doesn’t really relate to my name, but I think it represents how I’m unsure what I will be when I get older.”

“The wristband relates to my identity because I’m still unsure of what I will be or do when I get older. The caterpillar is eating the “leaf” and getting ready to change into a butterfly and I am working on slowly getting ready for college. I’m really happy with the way it turned out and it was really fun to make since it was so hands on and the first time I make something light up. The caterpillar doesn’t really relate to my name, but I think it represents how I’m unsure what I will be when I get older.”

She continued her musing about her future in her mural design, this time tying it with Doljanchi, a Korean cultural ceremony that is performed to celebrate the first year birthday of a newborn, which involves cooking various food items. Aera depicted Doljanchi in her mural project by describing that the “mural is about the tradition of a baby’s first birthday, where they have objects placed in front of them to predict their future, life, or future career.” With a history of higher death rates among infants in Korea, Doljanchi was adopted as a cultural practice to celebrate the first successful year of a child’s life. The ceremony involves placing household objects such as a pen or pencil, a book, thread, or a rice bowl in front of the child while dressing the child in a traditional dress. The child would then pick an object that would indicate their future (e.g., selecting the book would indicate good education, a bowl of rice for an abundance of food, etc.). Aera, too, designed her mural to include objects—books, a pencil, wool yarn, and a bowl of rice—that a year-old child can choose (see the circuit diagram, Figure 13a). She further explained that her mural was “telling a story about a Korean tradition for a baby’s first birthday where different objects are placed in front of them, and their future or career is based on the object they choose.”

Aera utilized the circuit elements and the program to highlight the different aspects of a Doljanchi ceremony. By connecting each light to a separate pin on the microcontroller, Aera programmed each light separately, whereby they lit up for the same duration so that no light pattern places “more focus on one of the objects more than the others because they all have the same amount of meaning.” She continued that “I want the LEDs to act in different ways but still in a way that each of the objects have equal importance or equal chance of being picked since that’s what it would look like to the baby.” This is visible in her code (Figure 14) for each of the light pattern functions, Sparkle(), Accordion(), ConsecutiveBlink(), and Blink(); despite making different light patterns, each light lit up based on the pattern for half of a second when it was their turn to turn on, and this took place without drawing attention to any one particular object. In making the different light patterns, Aera programmed the lights with the baby in mind, “kinda what the baby would see in front of them.” She continued to sew the lights underneath the felt cutouts of the different objects and sewed the objects onto the felt using a regular white thread, specifically paying similar degrees of attention to crafting her e-textile project with care (see Aera’s final project, Figure 13b).

4.4. Prem: Dreaming of a Diverse India and Centering Familial Values

Prem comes from a South Asian—specifically South Indian—immigrant family. He lives with his parents in the United States while some of his relatives live in Hyderabad, India. As witnessed in his wristband and mural projects, familial values and connections were central to Prem’s racial identity building. Through his wristband project, he shared the narrative of hard work and successful life as valued by his family. This was visible in his circuit and aesthetic designs, and in his reflections on the project. His wristband design (Figure 15) included a stick figure of a person climbing up a set of stairs to reach a target at the topmost step. Prem drew this image to include what his “parents always say: you have to work hard now in order to succeed later.” Throughout his description accompanying the project, he emphasized how important it is within his family to “become successful” and that working hard is the way to achieve success. However, he did not elaborate on what “success” meant to him or his family. He used the climbing stairs metaphor to communicate this idea that is central to his family, and he placed lights along the stairs with the person on a stair step that was close to the target (i.e., the “success”). He utilized the lights to highlight the significance of stairs and how “they are very important” for success. At the same time, he hid the battery holder underneath the target’s paper cutout, as well as achieved an aesthetic sense and circuit connections for his wristband (Figure 15).

Prem’s narrative of hard work leading to success is comparable to the model minority myth and its implications on their participation in learning activities, such as the stress of “being successful” and fitting within STEM [7,8]. It is also compelling that this central theme stood out for Prem when given a chance to bring aspects of his identity that mattered the most to him.

“My design is about this phrase that my parents always say: you have to work hard now in order to succeed later. They’re always pushing me to work hard and I try my best to do that. The path my stitching makes represents the path to success. The person is running up the path and trying to reach the target, which is success in this case. You have to work hard to succeed. The wristband also represents my motivation to work hard: my desire to become successful in the future… My design is about how I grew up always hearing this phrase: you have to work hard now in order to succeed later. The LEDs act as a light on the stairs and show that they are very important steps. The battery holder is the target that you have to reach to become successful.”

Prem continued to center his identity around his family by presenting his relationship with the Indian community in his mural project. His identity as belonging to the Indian community rather than the broader “Asian” community was evident in his community map drawn out just before designing the mural (Figure 16). Prem placed the “Indian community” at the top of other communities he identified with, and he indicated it with a picture of the Indian map with different states being marked in different colors, as well as with another image of the symbol of the dominant religion, Hinduism, which his family observed.

Although Prem initially chose to represent the Marvel community (Figure 17a) while brainstorming project ideas for the mural, he changed his circuit and aesthetic design to represent the “diversity of India” (Figure 17b). He reasoned this change, explaining that the “Marvel community (which I picked originally) didn’t really have any traditions or goals or anything like that”, and he felt that he could speak to some of these aspects by instead showcasing the Indian community in his project. He shared that he can highlight diversity in terms of the “many different languages and traditions in different parts of India” through the mural project. His choice of an Indian map with colorful Indian states further highlighted the state boundaries as divided based on regional languages during the national planning post-independence from British colonial rule [39]. The colors in the map used to indicate the different states—saffron, white, green, and blue—were also the same colors as the Indian flag with a central blue-colored wheel. Prem also chose a national map with solid boundaries at the country’s northern tip, Jammu and Kashmir, whose boundaries are politically contested. However, Prem did not engage with that tension during the project.

He overlaid LED lights and circuits on the multi-colored map by placing lights at four different parts of the country to indicate the different geographies—similar to how it is typical of India being spoken of in terms of the South, North, West, and East. He further placed a red light at the top near New Delhi to indicate how “many different people in India are united by the center of India, which I thought to be the capital, New Delhi. That is what my lights represent.”

He continued to highlight and celebrate diversity across the Indian sub-continent, as well as celebrated the country in the way he programmed the lights through the microcontroller (Figure 18). When tasked to make four different light patterns as a part of the conditional if-statements within the mural project, Prem programmed the lights to create different patterns to highlight the theme of “Unity in Diversity.” He named the light patterns Unite(), Tour(), Together(), and Forever() in his program to animate “the many different cultures and languages that India has, even though it is all one country.” The Unite() pattern had the red LED at the capital turned on while others blinked in a sequence. He described the pattern as showing “that even though there are many different cultures and languages in India, they all share something in common, which is that they are all Indian people. I represented the center of India as the capital, which is what ledRed is next to.” The other pattern, Tour() had the lights make a chase pattern to indicate “There is not a state or area that is exactly the same as another” and that the light pattern lets one “tour the country.” The following light pattern, Together() had the lights blink in unison to indicate that “despite all of the differences in culture and language, Indians will all stand together strong. They will fight and do whatever they can to protect their country.” The final pattern, Forever() had all the lights light up throughout to indicate that “India is a country that will stay united as one forever. There won’t be any groups breaking off or anything like that. All of India will shine brightly together.” Similar to Santos, Prem never identified with the “Asian” or even “South Asian” community, he and instead directly engaged with details of being a part of the Indian community.

5. Discussion

Three key themes stood out across the cases: (1) the learners’ navigation of different dimensions of their “Asian” identity, (2) learning materials serving as open sandboxes for learners to make their projects, and (3) the pedagogical opportunities afforded by storytelling through STEAM projects.

5.1. Emergent Counternarratives of Asian Identities and Communities

This research framing or question about the Asian identity among learners did not guide our data collection. Yet, these diverse narratives counter the homogeneous “Asian” label. The different, rich stories that learners told through their wristband and mural projects demonstrated a form of resistance toward the White settler-colonial gaze of “Asian” as a homogeneous “other” group within the US context [1]. While all of these students would have been grouped under the broad “Asian” term, the stories that the students brought to life through their projects enabled us to highlight the richness in the diversity of their cultural and racial identities, as well as in their personal and familial connections. Furthermore, these identities and connections are critical aspects that counter the typical (colonial) view and practice of aggregating Asian cultures within a single category, which leads to an erasure of such cultures. Complicating instead of simplifying enabled us to take a closer look at the students from the often ignored Asian sub-groups, which can forefront the ways through which to support students to engage more meaningfully within STEM fields. The learners’ tellings of their meaningful stories is a form of resistance to the assimilation and erasure of the usually unsaid stories, in which they did not let their stories flatten into the White colonial labels. This was evident in how the learners across the four cases barely identified as “Asian”, and yet they would have been categorized as “Asian” in the usual way of reporting student demographics in educational research. Further, their projects highlighted the diversity across the different Asian sub-groups and learners’ sense-making of the same. By choosing personal stories connected to family, land, colonial histories, and cultural elements and practices, the learners represented themselves as part of their specific communities, and they went beyond the simplistic model minority myth that accompanies the White Settler colonial gaze [1,9].

5.2. E-Textile Materials as Open Sandboxes for Identity Exploration

The e-textile materials learners used to make their wristbands and murals served as open sandboxes by enabling learners to transform the circuit, computational, and fabric components of the toolkit in ways that specifically spoke to their personal, cultural, familial, and historical narratives, which were presented through their projects. Notably, the malleability of circuit components, such as the conductive thread, enabled the accommodation of different designs and layouts that were meaningful for learners and their projects. For instance, this was visible in Santos’ initial wristband design, where he organized the lights and the battery pack to represent meaningful symbols from the Philippine flag (the arrangement of the sun and stars) or in the ways that other students like Prem and Aera placed lights to highlight the critical aspects of their personal, familial, and cultural narratives, or in using stitches to blend with the aesthetic design of their projects. By combining the flexible fabric with the conductive, electronic materials, the e-textile toolkit offered learners opportunities through which to organize the components in functional and aesthetically meaningful ways in order to tell personally relevant stories while representing different aspects of the stories creatively.

While prior studies on the use of e-textiles for learning have highlighted how e-textile toolkits support Black girls and indigenous students through expressing their identity formation [19,20,21], our work highlights how e-textiles aid youth to make sense of the imposed, assigned, and contested “Asian” identity by highlighting and drawing from the complex historical, cultural, and familial aspects of their identities. Such negotiation was evident in how Aera and Hanae carved their own space within the “Asian” community to tell stories specific to their Asian cultural sub-groups, or how Santos and Prem identified directly with their sub-groups without mentioning the broader “Asian” community. Instead, Santos focused on the colonial history of the Philippines and its relationship with Philippine lands and symbolic representations. He initially tried using a design inspired by the Philippine flag during his wristband project design, but he then later adopted and layered it with computational light patterns in his mural project. Similar yet different, Prem took the opportunity of the mural project to tell the story of a diverse India and his vision for a united home country. Hanae and Aera centered cultural and linguistic meanings across both their projects. Hanae communicated a Japanese proverb while using material flexibility to represent objects of significance in the Japanese proverb, and she further highlighted its meanings by programming light patterns. She also used the opportunity to make an explicit call to highlight the Asian community in response to anti-Asian violence and sentiments (at the time of the program in Spring 2021, Hanae was responding to the recent attack on Asian women in a spa in Atlanta, GA). While material resources have been discussed in terms of disciplinary connections and practices, STEAM activities that bundle diverse materials and disciplines have the potential to invite and sustain meaningful learning by enabling them to bring in narratives that are usually not discussed within racially skewed STEM fields such as computing. Materials that serve as sandboxes and bring to dialogue divergent practices have the potential to do this.

The affordability of the e-textile toolkit as open sandboxes was also highlighted by where the students were designing and creating their projects. In particular, students’ learning and creating were situated in their homes, which likely shaped their engagement with the materials as they were surrounded by their own families, communities, and even the physical artifacts and possessions they had in their homes. The presence of their own families and communities possibly forefronted the familial and communal concepts and values that were salient in the students’ creations, as well as in their discussions and explanations of their creations. Prior work by Johnson et al. [30] has shown how the social situativity of learners’ creating within their homes enables the learners’ families and communities to be sources of input, feedback, and critique during the creation process, which shapes learners’ engagement and ideas around their own creations and projects. In future expansions of our work, we plan to look further into the roles of Asian learners’ families and communities in facilitating the creation of personally meaningful and relevant projects that support their interests and backgrounds while engaging in the expression and exploration of their nuanced identities.

5.3. Storytelling STEAM Projects as a Pedagogical Approach

In addition to materials, the pedagogical structuring within the curricular unit further allowed learners, even those new to STEAM activities such as e-textiles, to deeply engage with the discipline while supporting their identity negotiation at the intersection of the discipline and their racial communities. Through the four projects, the curriculum allowed learners to explore their identities, relationships with communities of affinity, and to design projects that tell stories. In this, the projects not only built in conceptual complexity, but also provided scaffolds within the project for ideating, designing, and making identity-related storytelling STEAM projects. The projects within the constructionist curriculum enabled learners to make simple circuits, build computational circuits, and program them while expressing ideas of personal relevance [40]. At the same time, the teaching team layered the context for making these projects by providing opportunities for students to explore their identities and communities. Learners were invited to use the wristband project to tell a story of themselves and the mural project to tell a story about their community. The teaching team modeling similar projects further scaffolded the learners, especially with the first author sharing her South Asian origin story while presenting sample project ideas for both curricular projects. Pedagogical activities such as community mapping allowed learners to brainstorm their belonging to different identities before choosing one for the mural project. Learners were reminded to tell stories of only communities they felt they belonged to, thereby guarding against perpetuating power hierarchies and simplified stories. Such careful scaffolding further enabled learners with complex, intersecting, imposed, and laden identities—such as the learners from the Asian communities in this study—to navigate the different dimensions of their backgrounds while developing their stories and completing their projects.

Overall, the case studies highlight the need to resist the flattening of the “Asian” identity as a research construct in how we conduct research and attend to cultural and historical differences, as well as what it means to learner participation and learning within STEAM contexts. It has implications for how educators make room for these narratives to emerge in their settings by designing learning opportunities accordingly. One approach can be to adopt e-textile-like materials and toolkits that serve as open sandboxes and invite diverse student project designs and implementations. In addition to adopting tools, there is a need to devise activities and project expectations that enable identity-related ideas to surface and be incorporated into project designs. All of these, in combination, can then surface identity-related narratives.

5.4. Limitations

The findings reported in this paper are limited by the constraints during the data collection and analysis processes. First, the data were collected during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic (Spring 2020) when the participating teacher was teaching the curriculum online [41]. Learners attended the classes from their homes, which limited opportunities for students to collaborate on projects and—at the same time—reduced the visibility of the student learning process to the artifacts and reflections that learners shared on the online platform and during meetings. Second, to accommodate diverse familial and personal challenges during the pandemic, the school observed liberal attendance and participation policies such as not requiring students to turn on their cameras during class meetings, reducing student online presence in text chat and online sharing, and privileging learners with linguistic comfort with English. Third, to make space for collaborative learning and to leave room for students to engage during classes comfortably, we did not record the small group discussions to leave room for students to develop relationships, thus keeping the data collected to only whole group discussion recordings. Fourth, we analyzed data through these lenses in retrospect instead of the research question guiding our data collection plan and implementation as this could have potentially led to missed opportunities in specifically engaging with learners about their “Asian” identities and conducting targeted data collection. However, within the limited data collected, the in-depth case study was sufficient to illuminate the diversity within the racial category and to problematize the usual monolithic representations of Asian identities.

6. Conclusions

Our case studies and findings demonstrate that students more immediately connected to their subgroups because of their proximity to their lived experiences as opposed to the broader, more typical, and less nuanced “Asian” label. Findings from this analysis are comparable to that of McGee’s work [7], in which the narratives of the model minority myth among Asian students was dismantled, and where there were instead calls for connecting with the complicated lived experiences of Asian students in STEM fields. STEAM learning contexts, particularly the pedagogical design and learning activities, opened doors for students to navigate identities and to express themselves through storytelling. Such opportunities may support “Asian” learners to move away from the typecasting and the associated stress to fit and thrive in STEM [7]. Learner projects within the case studies highlight the need for identity-affirming spaces that enable learners to connect with and express their racial and ethnic identities by diving into their nuanced lived experiences beyond the “White settler colonial gaze” [1]. The way we challenged this gaze through this paper is a form of resistance to the erasure of people’s narratives that are critical to understanding the underlying problems, tensions, and lack of criticality within education research.