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2021/04/06 13:26:29瀏覽330|回應1|推薦5 | |
A ‘History of Exclusion, of Erasure, of Invisibility.’ Why the Asian-American Story Is Missing From Many U.S. Classrooms on the morning of March 17, Liz Kleinrock contemplated calling out of work. The shootings at three Atlanta-area spas had happened the night before, leaving eight dead including six women of Asian descent, and Kleinrock, a 33-year-old teacher in Washington, D.C., who is Asian-American, felt the news weighing on her heavily. But instead of missing work, she changed up her lesson plan. She introduced her sixth graders over Zoom to poems written by people of Japanese ancestry incarcerated during World War II. Her lesson included “My Plea,” printed in 1945 by a young person named Mary Matsuzawa who was held at the Gila River Relocation Center in Arizona: “I pray that someday every race / May stand on equal plane / And prejudice will find no dwelling place / In a peace that all may gain.” “I feel like so many Asian elders have been targeted because of this stereotype that Asians are meek and quiet and don’t speak up and don’t say anything, and therefore that makes our elderly easy targets,” Kleinrock said to TIME by phone, speaking of the purpose of the lesson. “And so it’s so important to be loud and to bring attention to this. Education is so important. If we don’t know our history, then we’re doomed to repeat the same thing over and over again.” Kleinrock was not the only educator rushing to fill that gap. On March 19, Katie Li, 37, the Boston Public Schools Ethnic Studies coordinator, described a “panic” among higher-ups trying to put out statements and provide resources in the wake of the shootings, but not knowing how to make sense of what happened in the Atlanta area themselves. “Many people who are in power trying to address this right now have no idea how to interpret it,” Li tells TIME. “Many people are saying, ‘It’s just happening now. This past year has been such a hard time for Asians.’ If people actually understood the history of Asian America, they wouldn’t be so short-sighted in their statements addressing this moment…[The shooting] amplifies hundreds of years of history of exclusion, of erasure, of invisibility.” The spa shootings in the Atlanta area represent, to many, the grim culmination of a year in which anti-Asian violence has increased across the United States. But this year is also part of a history that began long before 2020. And in fact, educators and historians tell TIME, anti-Asian racism is directly linked to history, and how members of the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community are often depicted in U.S. history lessons: as foreigners or national security threats, as opposed to people who have lived and worked in America and have challenged it to live up to its ideals of equality for all. In early California, thousands of Chinese immigrants were employed by the railroads to do the toughest work; circa 1890.In early California, thousands of Chinese immigrants were employed by the railroads to do the toughest work; circa 1890. George Rinhart—Corbis/Getty Images There are more than 22 million Asian Americans (about 6% of the U.S. population), representing nearly 50 ethnic groups and speaking more than 100 languages, and they make up the fastest growing racial or ethnic group among eligible U.S. voters. Yet little of their story is taught in K-12 U.S. schools. But, as the events of recent years—from the Black Lives Matter movement to former President Trump’s racist statements—inspire educators and activists to call for more teaching of the history of marginalized groups in America, that may be changing.
What Asian-American history is—and is not—taughtThe U.S. has no national curriculum that requires the teaching of any kind of history, let alone Asian-American history. But individual states’ social studies standards, which influence what will be included in standardized tests and textbooks, only scratch the surface of Asian-American history. Though there’s no central database of how Asian-American history shows up in those standards, curricula tend to focus on a few milestones, including Chinese immigration in the mid-19th century, Chinese laborers’ role in building the transcontinental railroad, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and the incarceration of nearly 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry—including American citizens—during World War II. But those moments hardly tell the whole story. And, educators say, they don’t give an accurate picture of the Asian-American experience. A more complete version of the history might include a deeper look at anti-Asian discrimination, with lessons about the mob violence faced by immigrants from Asian countries. It would also include milestones in U.S. history achieved by people of Asian descent, from labor leader Larry Itliong’s role in organizing the landmark Delano Grape Strike to Patsy Mink becoming the first Asian-American woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. And it would go beyond the boundaries of the United States. With that in mind, on March 19, Moé Yonamine, 43, a high school social studies teacher in Portland, Ore.—who teaches five minutes from where 3,676 Japanese Americans were held before being transported to internment camps—reminded her students that Asian-American history can’t be understood fully without considering the consequences of foreign U.S. actions and how those actions shaped circumstances that led people to flee Asian countries. Yonamine said she will be spending her spring break putting together a lesson plan about Asian-American history-makers to know.
“It feels like, while I’m grieving, I’ve been put in action to teach things that we don’t have enough curriculum for,” says Yonamine. Patsy Takemoto Mink attending a subcommittee hearing/markup around 1971-1972. Patsy Takemoto Mink attending a subcommittee hearing/markup around 1971-1972. Courtesy Gwendolyn Mink/Patsy Takemoto Mink papers, Library of Congress. Sohyun An, a professor of elementary and early childhood education at Georgia’s Kennesaw State University who has researched how Asian-American history is represented in state social studies standards nationwide, lives about 20 minutes away from the spas that were attacked. She worries that if students only learn about Asian American history as an immigration story, they may not realize how long the community has actually been here. And, she says, that ignorance can have serious consequences.
“Asians were part of the United States even well before many white European immigrants came through Ellis Island,” An tells TIME. “Kids grow up in Georgia and think Asians are all foreigners, and when they become ‘the enemy’ to the national crisis like COVID-19, ‘the military enemy’ and ‘economic competitor like China or Japan,’ it’s all coming from a missed opportunity in school [to teach] that Asians are a part of America…Curriculum is not a matter of academic debate. The danger is real.” ‘They don’t want to talk about race’Georgia’s state social studies standards for what fifth-grade students are expected to know list Japanese aggression in Asia and the Pearl Harbor attacks, but not the incarceration of Japanese-Americans in the U.S. One of An’s students, Lisa Chu, 29, a fifth-grade teacher in suburban Atlanta, says she’s asked her students in the last year to consider why that is.
“They’re able to kind of see we don’t learn this because we either don’t think it’s important enough to learn, or it just kind of puts the U.S. in a bad light,” says Chu, “and so it’s better to talk about other countries and their wrongdoings than it is our own and to be reflective of our own past mistakes.” Scholars agree that one of the reasons a full history of Asian Americans has not been incorporated into core U.S. History curricula in K-12 schools is because it doesn’t portray America in a positive light. “K-12 American history texts reinforce the narrative that Asian immigrants and refugees are fortunate to have been ‘helped’ and ‘saved’ by the U.S.,” Jean Wu, who has taught Asian American Studies for more than 50 years and is a senior lecturer emerita at Tufts University, said in an email to TIME. “The story does not begin with U.S. imperialist wars that were waged to take Asian wealth and resources and the resulting violence, rupture and displacement in relation to Asian lives. Few realize that there is an Asian diaspora here in the U.S. because the U.S. went to Asia first.” Occasionally, major world events can lead to more teaching of Ethnic Studies—but that hasn’t been the case with Asian-American histoRy. “Attention to teaching histories and realities of racialized marginalized groups has always been reactionary instead of proactive in U.S. K-12 education,” Wu says. “Historic moments such as the murder of Vincent Chin, the Japanese-American Redress Movement, the destruction of Koreatown, 9/11 and targeting of South Asian Americans did not engender interest in AAPI histories and curricular re-evaluation in K-12.” The obstacles to improvement are many. For example, Noreen Naseem Rodríguez, an Assistant Professor of Elementary Social Studies at Iowa State University, says that many of the teaching candidates she supervises have not had exposure to a wide range of historical perspectives, and might hesitate when it comes to instructing them. In the 2017-2018 school year, about 80% of public school teachers were white, compared to 2% who were Asian. “I see this real terror that they’re going to say or do something that will upset parents and end their careers, so they don’t want to talk about race,” Rodríguez says. “They want books that have diverse characters, but they don’t really want to talk about racial discrimination or stereotypes, unless it’s through a simplified context of bullying. So when teachers are trying to emphasize notions of being nice or kind rather than being anti-racist, not being unjust, that’s why we’re not ready as a society, or particularly as K-12 educators, to deeply engage with these topics because perhaps we ourselves haven’t done that learning.”
The way forwardThere are signs, however, that people may be ready to learn. The increase in Asian Americans in Congress, in Hollywood, in newsrooms and among K-12 teachers have all been key to raising awareness of the lack of Asian American history, historian and author Erika Lee tells TIME, after testifying during the historic March 18 congressional hearing on anti-Asian discrimination. The real question now, she says, is whether that frustration over lack of resources will be channeled into meaningful systemic change in rethinking core U.S. History curricula. Nisei Japanese-Americans participating in a flag saluting ceremony at a relocation center in forced internment during WWII, 1942. Nisei Japanese-Americans participating in a flag saluting ceremony at a relocation center in forced internment during WWII, 1942. Hansel Mieth—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images Leading education non-profits and publishers such as Zinn Education Project, Learning for Justice and Rethinking Schools have long tried to address the issue by publishing articles and lesson plans on Asian-American history-makers and milestones and that adapt historians’ work for young readers. And the education organization Facing History tells TIME it is working on a new curriculum on Asian Pacific Islander and Asian American Pacific Islander history. There are also Asian-American organizations that offer resources, like the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center’s education website. One new resource for teachers that came out in 2020 are lesson plans for K-12 by Asian Americans Advancing Justice, pegged to the PBS Asian Americans documentary that aired in May 2020, and the organization is figuring out how to organize professional development workshops for teachers. 美國在12年的教育課程,小學到國中的教材裡,找不到有關亞裔歷史檔案,高中至大學為選修課程,也就是說極少數亞裔學生會點選有關自己亞裔的課程,研究所碩士班,博士班專題研究另當別論,也就是說在於學校當局與政黨政府的關係,諸如哈佛大學,史丹佛大學,哥倫比亞大學,加州大學,康乃爾大學等少數學院,自行安排研究亞裔或是其他又有色人種的專題研究,其報告只是限於學術研究,無法發揮實質性的效益. .... 美國各大城市相繼爆發擊緺(掌嘴)亞裔事件,以及無故攻擊亞裔事件,而且有擴大跡象,根據情資顯示出,有不法人士接受不法團體聳動擅動,在某些社交媒體散播仇恨亞裔等言論,甚至於攻擊亞裔成功,可以得到金錢或是等值的物品回饋等等,美國社會大千世界,無其不有,無可厚非令亞裔人士感到無所適從,美國實在是太自由喇,你愛幹什麼就幹什麼. 亞裔美國人數量超過2200萬,約占到美國總人口的6%,然而在美國的歷史教科書中,卻很難看到完整講述亞裔歷史的內容。
是因為美國教育界害怕揭露對美國不利的歷史、曝光美國當年的帝國主義行徑。同時,缺乏全面歷史觀的教師群體也不願意深入涉及種族問題,這致使亞裔等邊緣群體的歷史成為了美國教育中喪失的一環。 通常來說,美國教科書主要關注的是美國亞裔歷史的重大“里程碑事件”,主要包括中國移民在19世紀中葉來到美國、華裔工人為美國修建鐵路、1882年美國通過《排華法案》,及二戰期間美國設立集中營關押近12萬日裔美國人等事件。 美國歷史教學也從未將買黑奴,壓低黑人摘棉花的事件,耕耘放牧挖掘礦產等重體力的工作記錄於歷史檔案,美國社會充滿種族岐視,白人壓制有色人民,亞洲人以及中南美洲人等等,其中黑人長期被壓制,許多公共場所至今扔然限制有色人種進入.請參考美利奸帝國淪亡錄001-005....
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