(UN)MAKING IDENTITY: ASIAN AMERICAN TEACHERS' IDENTITY PERFORMANCES Candace J. Chow August 2014 The Asian American population has experienced unprecedented growth in the last decade. However, despite this increase, the experiences of Asian American students and teachers remain untold and irrelevant to mainstream educational policies, practices, and scholarship. This dissertation centers the educational experiences of Asian Americans by asking how racial discourses orchestrate the interaction of race and power in the identities and experiences of Asian American teachers. It explores how Asian American teachers understand and perform identities. In addition, it examines how these understandings and performances of identity influence pedagogy. Using a mixed-methods approach, this study combines analyses of restricted-use data from the 2007-08 Schools and Staffing Survey and interviews from a multiple case study of Asian American teachers. Findings reveal that Asian American teachers are roughly 1.5 times as likely as teachers of any other race to report having control in their classrooms, suggesting that Asian American teachers may be unique in their approaches to the classroom or the ways they are perceived by colleagues and students. In addition, findings indicate that identity performance is contradictory, intersectional, and agentic. This study's findings reveal that although Asian American teachers are subject to race-based assumptions, they actively resist being cast in stereotypical ways, an instead (un)make new identities, thereby contesting the power dynamics that uphold existing racial discourses.