2026 Theses Doctoral

Echoes, Silences, and Poems in Between: Arts-based Pedagogies for Exploring Asian/American Civics in Museums

Lyu, Siyao

Asian/American experiences have long been marginalized and misrepresented in American mainstream civic education practices (Goodwin, 2010). Guided by critical pedagogy, AsianCrit, critical multicultural art education, and cultural citizenship, this qualitative study explores the current practices, potentials, and challenges of using arts-based strategies in the teaching and learning of Asian/American civics in museums. It consists of two parts. The first part is an interview study with 6 museum educators about their experiences and strategies for teaching Asian/American civics through the arts. The second part is an action research study at the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) in New York City. As the educator at MOCA and the researcher, I redesigned and re-implemented an existing adult gallery tour into an arts-integrated program for 5 cycles with evolving feedback from 29 adult learners. Learners’ personal contexts, learning experiences, the educators’ teaching reflections, and the process of each tour were recorded, collected, coded, and cross-analyzed to identify the challenges and opportunities in teaching Asian/American civics through the arts at MOCA.

The two parts of this study highlight eight major arts-based Asian/American civic teaching strategies recommended, practiced, and verified by both educators and learners, including: close looking, read the gallery, relational seeing, add visual aids, embodied engagement, storytelling, mapping, and poetic exploration. The study further reveals the five functions of the arts in assisting A/A civic learning: broadening the definition of art beyond Western-master narratives; integrating A/A art philosophies; as an entry point for invitation and scaffolding; as an anchor point for connection, affection, and critical thinking; as empowerment for voice-making and community-building.

Meanwhile, the study also foregrounds the challenges and opportunities of arts-based museum teaching of Asian/American civics in three levels: structural, institutional, and pedagogical; and in four sets of tensions: sad history vs. positive narrative; information delivery vs. arts-based interpretation; adult-oriented information vs. youth-facing interpretation; guided tour vs. free exploration.

With these findings, the study extends existing Asian/American and civic education frameworks, including AsianCrit, Asian American Critical Pedagogy, and ArtC, and proposes an expanded framework for arts-based Asian/American civic pedagogy organized around four central tenets:• Positionality: situate educators and learners in Asian/American civics;

• Identity: acknowledge Asian/American intragroup diversity and dynamics;
• System: foster critical awareness of Asian/American systematic racism;
• Reconstruction: reimagine and reconstruct Asian/American civic narratives.

Hopefully, this framework offers a concrete pedagogical and theoretical foundation for arts-based teaching of Asian/American civics within and beyond museum contexts, while also providing social studies, art, and museum educators with practical arts-based strategies to confront the resurgence of anti-Asian racism through education and creative engagement.