Archipelagic thinking in teacher education: Mapping transnational identities and relations of Asian American and Filipino teacher candidates

Abstract

This qualitative study examined how Asian American teacher candidates in Seattle and Filipino teacher candidates in Quezon City come to know their raciolinguistic and ethnolinguistic identities, their relationships to Indigenous knowledges, and their emerging pedagogies within teacher education. Applying an Archipelagic Thinking framework, the research engaged teacher candidates through cartographic dialogues, or reflective mapping, dialogue journals, community visits, and discussion-based practices, that center identity, place, and colonial legacies. Findings revealed four entangled connections across both sites: teacher candidates drew on emotions as epistemic resources for identity development; they reckoned with what colonial education systematically withheld about Indigenous peoples; they navigated the disciplining of their identities toward and away from imperial centers of power; and they constructed emerging anti-colonial pedagogies of care. Rather than comparing two separate sites, this study reads these experiences relationally as entangled effects of US imperial education projects. Implications call for decontinentalizing teacher education through structural commitments to multilingualism, Indigenous relationships, critical self-study, and relational research designs.