As I'm nearing the end of my college career, I've been thinking a lot more about the academy, especially since I've been entirely immersed in it for almost my whole life up to this point. It's interesting thinking about how I've spent a lot of time in college unlearning what I learned when I was younger. I've been thinking a lot about multicultural education in the primary school grades and then the ways we start to deconstruct and critique multiculturalism once we reach college, and the ways we unlearn what we've been indoctrinated with as children. It seems like during each phase of my life, each era of schooling, I learn the "proper" way of dealing with certain issues, only to have that "right" way altered or transformed at a later stage in life. That's how education is. Constantly changing, evolving, being reshaped and rethought.

To concretize, I'll talk a little about multicultural education in elementary school vs. ethnic studies in college; and also my earlier experience of race/gender/class vs. my college experience of with these issues. In elementary school, I was presented with the very 90s version of "global village" multiculturalism; each "culture" is its own distinct force, with its "unique" traditions, customs, beliefs, etc. We've talked extensively in this class about the problems associated with viewing culture as static, fixed, essentialized, and that's precisely how I was presented with "culture" as a child. In college, though, I slowly started learning about the problems associated with this kind of discourse and learning. It was a gradual process of learning bits and pieces here and there, until it all started connecting. During freshmen year, I started learning a little about race theory, gender theory, but it was still fuzzy for me. And then during sophomore year, when I went through a lot of intense social justice programming and training and started actually taking more of these types of courses and challenging myself to have these difficult conversations, the idea of intersectionality of race, gender, class, etc. starting to click for me. This used to be a foreign concept to me, but at this point, I started understanding the definition and how it played out in my own life. I was starting to learn a framework to contextualize a lot of gut instincts and thoughts that I had about race and class and gender when I was younger, and starting to see the connections, how it all fit together and why it matters. It was a slow, enlightening process, and at times it was difficult because it involved unlearning a lot of what I'd learned before. Around junior year, I started to take some classes where my professors were very critical of talking about culture all the time. I didn't understand it at first, and it confused me that a lot of people disliked talking about culture, but slowly, as I read more, it also started to connect for me, why people were so critical of these static conversations about superficial qualities of "cultures," which of course relates to the discourse of multiculturalism. So around the middle of junior year, I also started understanding the critiques of multiculturalism, and around this time, I thought a lot about my own multicultural education up to that point. And I was thinking about how all these new analyses that I was having involved breaking down and criticizing so much of what I learned as a child. It made me really wonder why the education system was set up the way it's set up. And then it struck me that not everyone goes through these same kinds of racialized transformative or "unlearning" and relearning processes that I went through in college. There are definitely lots of people who don't even have to think about race or gender or class or choose not to. It happened that I made choices--took certain ethnic studies class, joined Asian-American organizations, talked to progressive friends and made mostly friends who were people of color--that enabled me to come to these analyses; and had I sheltered myself in other more privileged communities, I would probably still be comfortable and loving the "oh, we live in a wonderful diverse global village! I believe in one race--the human race! I am so liberal!" type of "liberalism" which a lot of people believe in.

And so, as I'm ending my college career and looking back upon how I got to this point, I realize that I still have a lot of growing and learning to do. When I finished high school four years ago, I thought I knew a lot about the world already, but little did I know that I would have the opportunity to learn about my own identities, as a woman, as a person of color, as a child of immigrants, from a more critical point of view. I am lucky to have had the opportunity to meet people who were also discovering new ways of looking at these things, and to learn with them, with each other. I'm glad for classes like Asian American Lit & Crit, because I feel like these classes affirm my identities more than other classes here have. As I continue on my academic and personal journeys in life, I hope that this learning never stops. I think I eventually want to end up teaching little children in an elementary school classroom, and I often wonder how I am going to teach them in a socially conscious way or about social justice issues. If I were an educator, I'd want to find some way to provide an American education that affirmed all aspects of their identities in a way that didn't essentialize them, so that the entire learning process is a good one and positively evolving. But I think, for me personally, it was necessary to learn all that multicultural/rainbow education stuff before I could start learning the critiques of it.

Anyway, yeah, education is an evolving process, that you build, constantly reshape, add to, delete, edit, unlearn, relearn, rediscover...it's transformative....just like writing a paper! Haha, and that is how you know I'm still a student at heart. I'm using this dorky English writing metaphor for talking about education.

Anyway, I've had a good run here. It's been amazing. Thank you, everyone. I wish you the best of luck in everything.

Signing off, Peace,
Viv