About

Haeny S. Yoon is an Associate Professor of Early Childhood Education and the Director of Early Childhood Programs at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her scholarly interests include children's play and identity, popular cultural and contemporary childhood, young children's writing, critical perspectives on curriculum, and the teacher as a public intellectual. She holds a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction with a focus on Language and Literacy from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, along with a Master of Education in Elementary Education and a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology/Economics from the same institution. Her research and publications focus on understanding children's funds of knowledge through play, critically examining early literacy practices, and exploring issues of race, ethnicity, and multiculturalism in early childhood education. Yoon's work emphasizes the importance of listening to children, the role of popular culture in literacy development, and the complexities of identity formation in diverse educational settings. She has contributed to the field through numerous articles and book chapters, advancing critical and culturally responsive approaches to early childhood curriculum and teacher education.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Social Science
• Gender studies
• Political Science
• Psychology
• Art
• Pedagogy
• Social psychology
• Media studies
• Law
• Literature
• Developmental psychology
• Mathematics education
• Aesthetics

Selected publications

• We Contain Multitudes: Vulnerability, Belonging, and the Transformation of Doctoral Mentorship

  Teachers College Record The Voice of Scholarship in Education · 2026-01-01

  articleSenior author

  Emerging from the editors’ experiences as immigrant, first-generation scholars and their year-long professional development series for doctoral students, the introduction outlines the challenges of belonging, identity, and institutional structures. We frame core commitments for meaningful mentorship: centering student voices and agency, recognizing community cultural wealth, embracing multimodal scholarship, and demanding institutional transformation alongside grassroots community-building. Contributors use essays, autoethnography, visual art, music, sculpture, photography, and game design to illuminate how doctoral students build counterspaces of care, negotiate layered identities, and create peer and faculty mentoring relationships. While celebrating these generative practices, the introduction calls on institutions to move beyond informal networks toward structural investments that sustain marginalized doctoral students. Collectively, the issue reframes mentorship not as a prescriptive formula or individual responsibility, but as shared ethical commitment to transforming doctoral education.

  PublisherDOI

• Editors’ Introduction: Expanding Possibilities through Arts-Based Pedagogies and Methods

  Language Arts · 2025-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Visualizing Asian American Identities

  2025-08-08

  book-chapterSenior author

  In a digital, multimodal research study conducted by Cheng Stahl, we share collages, facilitated by researchers and constructed by Asian American youth aged 17–23 about cultural roots and possibilities. We emphasize how visual data is inherently part of youth culture, highlighting how the visual mediates identity, mobilizes political participation, and works as a conduit for activism and resistance. The visual collages act as a way of conversation with both oneself and the researcher through construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction—how does the placement of images evoke critical conversations around race, gender, sexuality, class, language, and ability? By juxtaposing images alongside youth narratives to generate multimodal data, we center the social, material, political, and cultural identities of young people. That is, youth identities are not simply racialized but complex, layered and, importantly, agentive—more than the sum of their traumas. This chapter illustrates how collaging—and, by extension, other forms of making—opens possibilities for shared, participatory meaning-making, destabilizing hierarchies between the researcher and the researched. Beyond the colonial gaze of traditional visual anthropology, we offer collaging as a participatory production where young people participate in image-making rather than passive subjugation to the researcher gaze.

  PublisherDOI

• Redefining Learning and Development at the Nexus of Home, School, and Community: When Children’s Cultural Knowledge Comes to School

  The Educational Forum · 2024-08-08

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Young children bring rich social, cultural, and political knowledge to school, cultivated in their homes and communities. This knowledge, ranging from household skills to multilingual practices, is often marginalized in schools that value different norms. Drawing from ethnographic studies in Illinois and New York kindergarten classrooms, this article explores how children's home and community knowledge informs their school experiences. I argue against the false dichotomy between school and out-of-school learning, highlighting the importance of listening to children's perspectives to co-create meaningful curricular inquiries and broaden our social imagination.

  PublisherDOI

• “Saving a picture forever”: Documenting and curating “truthful” images at school

  Anthropology & Education Quarterly · 2024-10-25

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Abstract With a focus on Parker, a Black second‐grader, this paper explores how photographs taken by children reveal aspects of identity that adults do not always capture or deem important in school spaces. In fact, while Parker was often imaged and positioned in deficit ways, children's photographs expanded static narratives told about Parker. While troubling documentation, the findings highlight the ways children's capacities, strengths, and contributions are overlooked by images reproducing neoliberal logics.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Reimagining Diversity, Equity, and Justice in Early Childhood

  2023-07-10 · 3 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Introduction

  2023-07-10 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book presents a reconceptualization of literacies as they intersect with children's identities within and across communities. It focuses on how children read each other through deficit framings. These peer readings exacerbate harmful perceptions of race and class, mediated by institutional discourses that work their way into the children's everyday relationships. The book considers communication, attuning to the multimodal ways children voice their experiences of the world and self. It also focuses on the interrelationship between adults and children where boundaries intentionally blur. The book addresses what spaces could look like when boundaries are opened up. It explores how we organize experiences for children, from read-alouds to remote learning to printed text distribution to mentoring programs. Programs designed for children, at times, typify adult agendas and goals.

  PublisherDOI

• Stacked Childhoods

  2023-07-10

  book-chapterSenior author

  Childhood memories frame how researchers and educators interpret the experiences and feelings of young children. Adults read children's experiences through their own ideologies, lenses, and experiences. At times, educators mis/read the experiences of immigrant communities who balance the shifting tensions of belonging and home; at times, even those identifying as immigrants may not fully attune to the ever-changing circumstances and landscapes of contemporary childhood. Drawing from a kindergarten classroom in NYC, the authors place children's classroom narratives alongside adult memories to confront the limitations and presumptions made through adult gazes as well as the pedagogical possibilities of re/centering children.

  PublisherDOI

• Reflecting, Representing, and Expanding the Narrative(s) in Early Childhood Curriculum

  Urban Education · 2022 · 10 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Social Science
  • Pedagogy

  In this manuscript, we recognize that young children learn stories that propagate white supremacist narratives through selective traditions of early childhood curriculum. The role of early childhood teachers, therefore, is to critically examine curriculum for biases, omissions, and distortions, as well as to rewrite curriculum to tell accurate stories and disrupt what Viet Thanh Nguyen refers to as “narrative scarcity”. Through a qualitative study of pre-service teachers’ (PSTs) re-imaginings and revisions of early childhood structures, processes, and texts, we highlight the moves that teachers made to rectify, represent and expand narratives related to communities of Color.

  PublisherDOI

• Popular Culture as Sites of Belonging and Healing

  2021-01-01 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Mariana Souto‐Manning

  Erikson Institute

  12 shared

• Carmen Lugo Llerena

  Columbia University

  4 shared

• Tran Nguyen Templeton

  Columbia University

  4 shared

• Emma Brooks

  2 shared

• Lalitha Vasudevan

  Columbia University

  2 shared

• Debbie Sonu

  2 shared

• Linda Ware

  1 shared

• Celia Genishi

  1 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Curriculum and Instruction (Language and Literacy)

  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Other, Elementary Education

  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• B.A., Sociology/Economics

  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign