OiYan Poon
OiYan Poon is an educator, author, speaker, and race and education scholar. She is co-director of the College Admissions Futures Co-Laborative and a Senior Research Fellow for Education Equity at the NAACP LDF Thurgood Marshall Institute.
Dr. OiYan Poon is a community-engaged research scholar, educator, storyteller, and leader for intersectional racial equity. Her research has focused on the racial politics of Asian Americans, education access, affirmative action, and admissions systems and practices. She is the author of Asian American Is Not a Color: Conversations on Race, Affirmative Action, and Family (2024, Beacon Press), which explores how Asian Americans are shaping the future of race relations through debates over education policies like affirmative action, using personal narrative and interviews of Asian Americans across the country. In Rethinking College Admissions: Research-Based Practice and Policy (2022, Harvard Education Press), she and her co-editor, Mike Bastedo, and colleagues examine and offer new ideas to transform the unequal structures and systemic norms of college-going in the U.S.
OiYan has worked closely in partnership with practitioner-leaders to advance race and class equity in college admissions. In 2019–20, with practitioner-leaders from ACCEPT she co-led the Hack the Gates project, which convened researchers and practitioners in college admissions to begin reimagining college admissions systems. According to Dr. Angel Pérez, NACAC CEO, this influential work inspired NACAC to launch the creation of a Center for Reimagining College Access. Dr. Poon was also a lead co-author of amicus briefs defending diversity and race-conscious admissions, submitted to federal courts including the US Supreme Court in the SFFA v. Harvard case.
After earning her Bachelor’s degree at Boston College and M.Ed. in College Student Affairs Administration at the University of Georgia, OiYan worked in multicultural student affairs, as the first Asian Pacific American Student Affairs director at George Mason University and the first Student Affairs Officer in Asian American Studies at UC Davis. She earned her Ph.D. in Race & Ethnic Studies in Education and Graduate Certificate in Asian American Studies at UCLA.
Born and raised in Massachusetts to immigrants from Hong Kong, OiYan now lives in Chicago with her husband and daughter. In her free time, she enjoys baking, binge watching trashy reality tv, listening to NPR, exploring the rich food cultures in Chicago, and spending time by the lake and local coffee shops.
What is Public Pedagogy?
The idea for Public Pedagogy came from my professional background as an educator committed to supporting people of all ages to learn about the world around them, so they can consider how they can best contribute toward a more just society. Although it’s natural for people to be curious and wonder, with concern, about why social inequities and injustices, especially racial inequalities, continue to persist in our society, there are few opportunities for people to be supported in their learning journeys. Supported, evidence-based educational opportunities about the social systems that keep inequalities in place are unfortunately rare in our formal PK-12 schools. Even though ethnic studies, women and gender studies, and other related academic programs like them exist in higher education, the numbers of college students who enroll in these courses are relatively few. Not to mention, the majority of people do not get to complete postsecondary education, and reactionary campaigns seek to ban this kind of learning that can open up new possibilities for a more humanizing world.
The mission of Public Pedagogy is to mentor and support efforts to dismantle barriers to education, to encourage learning for justice, and to open possibilities for power through knowledge to the people.