Constructions of Taiwanese/Chinese Asian American Women Teacher Identities: A Complicated and Complicating Auto/Biographical Study

Conducted as an auto/biographical and narrative qualitative research study, this dissertation traces the researcher's winding journey in search of her teacher identities, whose cultural and discursive meanings are always changing. There are two subjects in this study--the researcher's colleague as her research participant and the researcher herself--namely, one Chinese American woman teacher and one Taiwanese American woman teacher, who struggle with trans-national and cross-cultural teaching experiences. The researcher utilizes both humanist/modernist and poststucturalist perspectives to explore these two subjects' shifting and multiply constructed "identities." The researcher adopts first a humanist/modernist "categorization" to identify these two teachers as "Asian American women teachers" and then takes a poststucturalist approach to call into question humanist/modernist "identity categorization construction" as being rigid and static, separating people and placing people as permanent others. Using poststructuralist conceptions and interrogations of identity and experience, the researcher explores further the cultural, social, historical, discursive and mythic elements of her auto/biographical representations. As the researcher shifts to a consideration of "selves" as sites of "permanent openness" and "resignifiability," she takes language/narrative as a site of exploration to investigate what and who constructs the subjects' multiple subjectivities. By examining her writing performances, the researcher not only questions the two subjects' experiences but also explores, to the extent possible, their subjectivities as well as their intersubjectivities. By telling multiple tales of her research participant and herself, the researcher explores auto/biography's social and political potential that refuses to be limited to any one account of identity or experience. The researcher finally comes to recognize her research journey as processes of dealing with issues of difference and acknowledges that this research makes the following possible contributions to the American educational field. This research exemplifies some innovative uses and forms of poststructuralist autobiographical and narrative inquiry. It offers an opportunity to examine the discourse of Eastern humanism--Confucianism, whose influence has been far reaching among many labeled as Asian Americans. It provides an in-depth study of two "Asian American woman teachers" whose voices, although always changing and shifting, and not representative of any essentialist category, might contribute insights about issues and constructions of difference in the American educational community. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]