Embedded Files
First Generation Immigrant
A Mother-Scholar
An International Educational Researcher
Full Professor with Tenure
I am an advocate for the rights of minoritized populations. My calling is to amplify the voices of marginalized and oppressed learners of color through research, teaching, and service.
I am a Professor and Director of the Doctor of Education (Ed.D.) program at a U.S. university. I earned my Ph.D. in Foreign, Second, and Multilingual Language Education from The Ohio State University in 2012. As a first-generation immigrant from Hong Kong, China, and a mother-scholar, I am committed to advancing the rights and amplifying the voices of minoritized communities through research, teaching, and service. My international scholarship spans China, Hong Kong, Italy, Taiwan, and the United States, drawing on critical pedagogy, discourse analysis, Bakhtinian theory, multilingualism, early childhood education, and teacher education to interrogate the intersections of language, identity, power, and equity. My collaborative research with 11 researchers in Reggio Emilia, Italy, culminated in an edited volume focused on affirming the rights of emergent bilingual and multilingual children and their families. My professional accomplishments include receiving a Fulbright award, serving as an invited speaker at a Harvard conference in 2021, serving as Co-Principal Investigator on a U.S. Department of Education National Professional Development grant, and serving as an invited guest editor for the Journal of Asian Pacific Communication. My scholarship has appeared in journals including TESOL Quarterly, Urban Education, and Impacting Education: Journal on Transforming Professional Practice. Through my scholarship and academic leadership, I challenge dominant paradigms and work toward more equitable, humanizing, and transformative educational practices for historically marginalized communities worldwide.
Born in mainland China and raised in Hong Kong, I experienced immigration, linguistic adaptation, and socioeconomic inequity from an early age. My parents’ unconditional love and sacrifices profoundly shaped my understanding of how lived experiences intersect with social structures and power. Having lived in Hong Kong before and after the 1997 handover, I developed a critical consciousness of how colonialism, language hierarchies, and shifting power relations shape knowledge production, identity, and educational policies and practices. These experiences ground my commitment to interrogating dominant discourses, challenging linguistic and epistemic hierarchies, and amplifying the voices of immigrants, refugees, and historically marginalized communities. Grounded in social constructionism and critical pedagogy, my scholarship and leadership in doctoral education draw on critical and decolonial perspectives to interrogate dominant epistemologies and challenge the structures that sustain inequity.
My recent publications examine how to disrupt Whitewashedness in teacher education. At the heart of this work is a central question: What does it mean to be Whitewashed? I examine how teacher education systems and structures, historically shaped by predominantly White educators, may reproduce Whitewashed ideologies through instructional standards, curricula, teaching materials, cultural representation, and assessment practices. These structures can normalize assimilationist expectations and nationalist narratives while marginalizing diverse cultural, linguistic, and epistemological perspectives. Although the underrepresentation of teachers of color is widely recognized, we must also critically examine how Whitewashed ideologies are embedded in the very foundations of teacher education. My scholarship seeks to identify and disrupt these ideologies while affirming the identities, voices, and rights of learners of color. I am currently engaging with new scholarship to deepen this inquiry. My publications on Whitewashedness are available under Links to My Publications of this website.
Together with Dean Emeritus Dr. Brenda Fyfe, I spearheaded an international research project examining how Reggio Emilia-inspired approaches can affirm the linguistic, cultural, and educational rights of emergent bilingual and multilingual children and their families. Supported by the Faculty Research Grant and the Beatrice and David Kornblum Institute for Teaching Excellence, the project included a research study in Italy in 2019 and brought together 11 researchers from universities and institutions to investigate the connections between the Reggio Emilia philosophy, multilingual education, and equitable early childhood learning environments. Through international collaboration and engagement with educational practices in Italy, we explored how educators can recognize children’s diverse linguistic and cultural repertoires as valuable resources for learning, identity development, and participation rather than barriers to overcome. The project emphasized the importance of moving beyond assimilation-oriented approaches toward educational practices that respect children’s linguistic rights, affirm family knowledge and cultural identities, and create meaningful opportunities for multilingual children to express themselves and construct knowledge. This collaborative work culminated in the Routledge publication Affirming the Rights of Emergent Bilingual and Multilingual Children and Their Families: Interweaving Research and Practice through the Reggio Emilia Approach. The book connects research, theory, and educational practice, offering insights for researchers, teacher educators, early childhood professionals, and advocates working to advance equitable multilingual education.
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Contact
Contact yleejohnson31@gmail.com to connect with me for Keynote Speech and Publishing Opportunities
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