Sociocultural views and reflective practices

Social constructivists argue that knowledge is not transmitted from teachers to learners in a linear process but actively constructed through interactions in various contexts involving languages, cultural tools and meaning-making practices (Vygotsky, Reference Vygotsky1978). Learning and teaching are deeply embedded in social, cultural, historical and local contexts, shaped through the relationships among individuals and their communities (Lave & Wenger, Reference Lave and Wenger1991; Zajda, Reference Zajda2025). Knowledge is co-constructed through exploration, dialogue and reflection within particular sociocultural settings such as schools and communities (Richardson, Reference Richardson2002; Shor, Reference Shor1992). Social constructivism emphasises that learning and teaching are developed not in isolation but through active participation and interactions in various learning settings. Extending human-human interactions, it is important to include and carefully consider both humans and more-than-human beings or entities in learning and teaching (Volkmann & Fraunhofer, Reference Volkmann and Fraunhofer2023).

In higher education, social constructivism challenges traditional and hierarchical models of instruction by emphasising active learning and critical reflection (Zajda, Reference Zajda2023). It supports a shift toward student-centred and reciprocal learning and teaching where both teachers and learners are seen as active participants in constructing knowledge. For racialised educators and students, this perspective can affirm them as active participants in the learning and teaching process and acknowledge what they bring to learning context(s), for instance, prior experiences. For example, Asian students’ previous learning experiences and cultural views in education should not be seen deficit but as valuable resources contributing to their classroom learning. When it comes to prior experiences, learners and teachers also need to thoughtfully reflect on their experiences. Dewey (Reference Dewey1933) emphasised the importance of reflection and indicated that meaningful learning arises not simply from experience but from reflection on experience, “We learn by doing and thinking about what we do” (p. 14). Building on Dewey’s (Reference Dewey1933) reflective thinking, Schön (Reference Schön1983) discussed practitioner inquiry suggesting that reflection is often cyclical involving reflection-in-action (during the act) and reflection-on-action (afterward). This is particularly useful in education, where practitioners reflect on their past experiences to enhance future decision-making. Furthermore, reflexive practices extend this notion by interrogating how one’s social positioning, values and institutional context influence their work (Finlay, Reference Finlay2002; Pillow, Reference Pillow2003). Reflexivity is especially important in qualitative research and critical pedagogy, where it functions as a tool for uncovering power dynamics, biases and the co-construction of knowledge. While both practices involve critical self-examination, reflexivity demands a deeper analysis of how the self is entangled within broader epistemological and sociopolitical structures.

Recent studies (e.g., Mohamed et al., Reference Mohamed, Rashid and Alqaryouti2022; Novoa-Echaurren, Reference Novoa-Echaurren2024) in higher education confirm that sustained reflective engagement and reflexive practices support educators in recognising the sociocultural complexity of teaching and in reconstructing practice in response to emerging institutional context specifics and diverse student needs. Thus, when taken alongside reflexive practices (Dewey, Reference Dewey1933; Schön, Reference Schön1983; Fook, Reference Fook, Bradbury, Frost, Kilminster and Zukas2010), social constructivism provides a perspective for examining how knowledge is shaped not only by curriculum and context but also by the dynamic identities and interactions of those learning and teaching practices in the learning space (Zajda, Reference Zajda2025). This in turn indicates that learning and teaching are relational and contextual acts, always influenced by power, place, people and culture.

Knowledge, identity and place

The concept of Funds of Knowledge (FoK) was first proposed by Luis Moll and his colleagues in the early 1990s, referring to “historically-accumulated and culturally-developed bodies of knowledge and skills essential for household or individual functioning and well-being” (Moll et al., Reference Moll, Amanti, Neff and González1992, p. 133). It recognises the rich, strategic knowledge found in families, especially those from marginalised or lower socioeconomic backgrounds, which is often overlooked or undervalued in formal schooling. Later, González along with Moll and Amanti (Reference González, Moll and Amanti2005) extended the concept beyond households in their ethnographic studies happening in Mexican American communities and highlighted how community networks such as local trades, cultural celebrations and social exchanges function as rich educational resources. Many other scholars have further extended FoK by considering diverse educational settings such as schools (Barblett et al., Reference Barblett, Knaus, Barratt-Pugh and Waniganayake2023) and classrooms (Hogg, Reference Hogg2011) including rural settings (Anderson et al., Reference Anderson, Horton, Kendrick and McTavish2017) and other everyday settings(Moje et al., Reference Moje, Ciechanowski, Kramer, Ellis, Carrillo and Collazo2004) such as communities (Marshall & Toohey, Reference Marshall and Toohey2010) and museums (Jung et al., Reference Jung, Whalen and Zimmerman2022; Tzou et al., Reference Tzou, Scalone and Bell2010) and by incorporating various resources such as digital tools (Barton & Tan, Reference Barton and Tan2009) and material objects (Pahl & Rowsell, Reference Pahl and Rowsell2011) as meaningful knowledge assets. Therefore, FoK values cultural, linguistic and experiential resources as valid epistemic assets. It should not be narrowly defined by physical or material resources, nor merely associated with economic utility. Rather, the concept should be viewed broadly to encompass the spiritual, cultural, relational and intergenerational forms of knowledge, beliefs, and practices that sustain individuals and communities. For example, when Asian families move to Canada, they might not always carry physical resources or cultural artefacts with them, but they carry cultural traditions and philosophical perspectives (e.g., Confucius ideologies, Daoism, etc.) and embed them in their practices. In addition, intangible resources, such as oral traditions, spiritual teachings, kinship networks and cultural rituals, play a critical role in enabling people not only to survive but also to thrive, particularly within contexts of marginalisation, migration or systemic inequity. Recognising these forms of knowledge affirms the holistic capacities of learners and communities and aligns with decolonial, Indigenous and culturally sustaining approaches to education (Montesanti et al., Reference Montesanti, Fitzpatrick, Verstraeten, Tourangeau, Albert and Oster2025; Ortega & Oxford, Reference Ortega and Oxford2023).

Based on FoK, Saubich and Esteban-Guitart (Reference Saubich and Esteban-Guitart2011) suggested Funds of Identity (FoI) discussing how individuals appropriate and integrate these resources into their self-conception and identity formation. Later, Esteban-Guitart and Moll (Reference Esteban-Guitart and Moll2014) refined FoI referring to “the historically accumulated, culturally developed and socially distributed resources that are essential for a person’s self-definition, self-expression and self-understanding” (p. 31). In other words, it is about different aspects of a person’s life such as cultural practices, relationships, experiences and significant activities that individuals draw upon to construct their sense of self. It also views identity as fluid and socially constituted through participation in sociocultural worlds. For instance, I was a teacher in China, came to Canada as an international student, become an immigrant and then a Canadian citizen with Chinese heritage travelling between two linguistic and cultural worlds. Recently, Esteban-Guitart (Reference Esteban-Guitart2021, p. 169) provided an updated understanding by re-conceptualising FoI in two aspects:

FoI highlights the continuous or evolving nature of identity construction, the importance of embodied meaning making, the necessity of sociocultural and symbolic resources and the significance of empowerment and agency. Agency is understood as “people have the capacity to take action, craft and carry out plans and make informed decisions based on a growing knowledge” Safir & Dugan, Reference Safir and Dugan2021, p. 229). Therefore, FoK (Moll, Reference Moll2019) and FoI (Esteban-Guitart, Reference Esteban-Guitart2023) offer a perspective to view educators’ and learners’ backgrounds, especially those rooted in racialised and multilingual communities as valuable resources that can legitimately inform pedagogy, curriculum and classroom culture. Incorporating these funds can lead to more culturally responsive and relational teaching practices.

Furthermore, the concept of place matters. When FoK and FoI are considered in sociocultural, sociomaterial and sociopolitical contexts, places should be considered since identities and laces are interrelated (Kezabu, Reference Kezabu2022). “Residing in a space pertains only to the simple act of physically/geographically staying in a locality without the sense of place and the eco-cultural rootedness”. The term of place does not simply refer to a location considering geography but also “as socially constructed” (Elwood, Reference Elwood2004, p. 60). Places can be understood as “living entities that serve to be treated with respect and care” (Kezabu, Reference Kezabu2022, p. 192). Sutton et al. (Reference Sutton, Bellingham and White2023) argue that it is critically important to build and maintain “stronger relations with local places […] in nurturing the humility required for living responsibly with place, and addressing past, present and future ecological crises” (p. 363). Places and identities influence each other in both explicit and implicit ways considering what can be accessed (or not) and gained (or lost) from place(s), how interactions happen in certain place(s) and why and what memories of place(s) can be visualised and felt in both subtle and profound ways. Indeed, learners and educators constantly engage in “a process of experiencing, encountering and learning together with place” (Sutton et al., Reference Sutton, Bellingham and White2023, p. 362) and should interact or live “relationally and respectfully with place” (p. 362). The call for relationality also honours and involves consciously and creatively “attuning-with” (Riley & White, Reference Riley and White2019) human emotions, feelings, memories and actions with human and more-than-human things in the same place or different places.

In summary, knowledge, identities and place are interconnected, shaping and informing one another. These interactions can help individuals better understand their identities from multiple angles, offering a way to critically engage with place-based identity inquiry (Langran & DeWitt, Reference Langran and DeWitt2020). Through this process, individuals make sense of the world, examine how place functions and holds meaning(s) and share stories from diverse perspectives.

Asian critical race theory (AsianCrit)

AsianCrit (Iftikar & Museus, Reference Iftikar and Museus2018; Museus et al., Reference Museus, Iftikar and Danico2014) builds on the foundations of Critical Race Theory (Crenshaw, Reference Crenshaw1989) to centre the lived experiences, racialisations and epistemologies of Asian Americans within U.S. educational systems. It offers a critically important perspective to examine Asian diasporic experiences that are frequently marginalised or homogenised such as the perpetual foreigner stereotype and the model minority myth (Kim & Hsieh, Reference Kim and Hsieh2021). AsianCrit not only provides space for the construction of counter-narratives but also supports efforts to reclaim Asian identities and rewrite Asian stories from within their own cultural and historical contexts. Iftikar and Museus (Reference Iftikar and Museus2018) proposed seven tenets facilitating the analysis and discussion regarding how White supremacy manifests uniquely for Asian communities and how their voices can be amplified in scholarship and advocacy: “(1) Asianization, (2) Transnational contexts, (3) (Re)constructive history; (4) Strategic (anti)essentialism, (5) Intersectionality, (6) Story, theory, and praxis and (7) Commitment to social justice” (pp. 940–941). This article focuses on the sixth tenet highlighting “racially marginalized people’s experiential knowledge can serve to challenge dominant, White, European epistemology and offer an alternative and empowering epistemological perspective that is grounded in the realities of people of color” (p. 941). In particular, I share my learner and educator stories in Canadian higher education drawing upon sociocultural perspectives and relation to my learning and teaching practices.

In summary, these perspectives highlight the fundamentally contextual, relational and complex nature of teaching and learning. Educational experiences are always socially embedded, shaped by cultural histories, power relations and institutional contexts. Social constructivism reflexivity, funds-based epistemologies, place-based learning and AsianCrit collectively offer useful perspectives for exploring education including learning and teaching as an ethically, culturally and politically charged practices, especially for racialised and multilingual educators navigating place, power and identity in Canadian higher education.

Storying: First steps into the academic borderlands

My first master’s degree in Canada began with my first philosophy class. It was a course that felt like stepping into an unfamiliar country without a map. Each week, I was assigned close to fifty or even more pages of dense readings, each page layered with complex arguments and abstract language that took me hours to untangle. I carried an electronic bilingual dictionary with me everywhere, my pencil and pens of different colours leaving trails of notes in both Chinese and English as I tried to understand different terms, capture key points and write down my questions and wonderings that seemed to shift depending on the cultural ways of being and doing as well as philosophical perspectives I engaged with.

In China, my academic experience was positive but structured differently: professors lectured, students listened and our written work followed clear instructions, along with some whole-class discussions. In the Canadian classroom, the culture of critical discussion was unlike anything I had known. Classes were filled with open-ended or semi-structured questions, rapid exchanges of opinions, counterarguments and connections classically known as text-self, text-text and text-world. My classmates spoke quickly, weaving in their familiar learning and life experiences and naming terms and scholars mostly from North America. A lively critique of Tim Hortons shop as an example in a philosophical argument aimed to begin something familiar and take it to deeper discussion. The knowing nods and continuous discussion around the room made me realise how much cultural knowledge I lacked. The example was meant to be lighthearted, but it only deepened my sense of being on the outside.

That semester, my professor selected George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four as one of the key texts. Even though I read the novel and understood totalitarianism, I was not sure what to say and felt a sense of discomfort or even fear in our discussions. I value(d) collectivism, mutual responsibility and group-oriented values, which could easily be misunderstood as aligning with the oppressive political structures the novel condemned. I often stayed silent, not because I had nothing to say, but because I feared my perspective might confirm a stereotype or invite suspicion.

The discussion forum, an online space for weekly reflections, was entirely new to me. I would spend hours crafting my posts, rewriting sentences to check grammar, re-reading my responses to make sure my ideas sounded “academic enough.” English academic writing felt like wearing clothing tailored for someone else: functional and even elegant, but stiff on my body. Presentations, too, were an unfamiliar format. Speaking and sharing my prepared ideas in front of the class, I worried my accent would make my words unclear or distract from my ideas. I feared that a grammatical slip might erase the effort behind my preparation. More than anything, I worried that my thinking itself might not measure up to the intellectual expectations of graduate school.

Looking back, that first semester was a season of constant translation: not only between Chinese and English but also between ways of thinking, speaking, being and doing. The classroom became a kind of borderland (Anzaldúa, Reference Anzaldúa1987), where I carried both the pride of my heritage and the weight of my insecurities. Even the snow outside seemed to communicate in a language through its intensity, frequency and volume that I had yet to learn and get used to despite the fact that I was born in winter in a northeastern city in China where snowfall is a seasonal norm.

Storying: Teaching across differences and from the borderlands

When I step into the role of instructor, I carry with me the memories of my early struggles as a graduate student such as the silence in seminars, the worry over my accent and the fear that my ideas were not good enough. Those experiences do not disappear, but they begin to transform. The very differences that once made me hesitant have become the foundation of how I teach: I teach with care and compassion, and I embrace and value differences.

At first, I still felt the sting of other people’s judgments. Hurtful comments from students about my Chinese accent sometimes surfaced in course evaluations. A few colleagues told me I was “too Asian!” or that I “worked in Asian styles” that carried no clear explanation but left the implication that my ways of teaching were somehow less valid. I understand now that these comments were part of a larger system that positioned western pedagogies and English native-speakerism as the norm. Instead of shrinking back, I begin to push forward.

Gradually, I start to see my Chinese heritage not as a liability but as an asset. I embrace my identity as a Chinese Canadian and make intentional space for my students’ cultural and linguistic backgrounds in my teaching. In language and literacy courses, I have encouraged students to share their linguistic backgrounds and talked about culturally relevant and responsive pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, Reference Ladson-Billings, Denzin and Lincoln2000) and its applications in classrooms. For example, I encourage my students, many of whom are pre-service and in-service teachers, to get to know their students beyond how to say their students’ names properly but knowing the meaning and stories of different names in both English and their own languages and cultures. I have used stories such as The Name Jar (Choi, Reference Choi2001), Your Name is a Song (Thompkins-Bigelow, Reference Thompkins-Bigelow2020) and My Name (Kelkar, Reference Kelkar2023) to unpack names, identities and cultural heritage. I have discussed how race and culture shape both language learning and literacy practices and invited students into critical conversations about the hierarchies embedded in language: why certain accents are privileged, why some linguistic forms are labelled “academic” while others are dismissed and how these judgments affect immigrant children’s learner identities and learning opportunities. I encourage my students, many of whom work in multilingual and multicultural classrooms, to think beyond the “standardised” English and to value various languages and multiple ways of communicating. We have explored how oral traditions are not simply sharing ideas but are deeply tied to cultural knowledge and traditions, identity formation and community bonds. I encourage students to question whose stories are told by whom in what ways to achieve whose goals. In addition, I invite my students to see parents and grandparents of immigrant children not as passive recipients of schooling or western knowledge but as knowledgeable partners whose experiences, languages and cultural practices enrich children’s learning. Together, we have (re)imagined inclusive learning environments where multiple languages, narratives and worldviews could coexist without one being forced to dominate the others.

In those teaching moments, I feel empowered as I actively reshaped the space in academia. I have been teaching from the borderlands, not by erasing the differences between “East” and “West” but by using them as bridges. The place I now live, work, walk daily still witnesses histories of colonisation and Indigenous resilience, which reminding me that belonging is not a gift given by dominant cultures (Laurendeau, Reference Laurendeau2023); it is something we build in relation, through respect, reciprocity and shared responsibility (Sutton et al., Reference Sutton, Bellingham and White2023).