Freedom Schooling:
Reconceptualizing
Asian American Studies for Our Communities
Glenn Omatsu
(This paper was written
for the Asian American Lecture Series of Scripps College, organized by the
Asian American Student Union, Claremont, California, on April 10-11, 2001. This paper will eventually appear in a
special issue of Amerasia Journal ,
guest edited by Dr. Warren Furumoto, on critical issues relating to teaching
and learning and their relationship to Ethnic Studies. Glenn Omatsu teaches at California State
University, Northridge, UCLA, and Pasadena City College and serves as associate
editor of Amerasia Journal. He is active in community and labor
struggles and solidarity movements.)
.
. . new situations bring new contradictions, requiring new visions.1
–
Grace Lee Boggs
The
possible is richer than the real.2
–
Ilya Prigogine
“The educational system today is designed for failure.”
I hear this statement often these days. I hear it often, and I say it myself. I hear it from K-12 activist teachers as
they confront mandates for standardized testing and orders to “teach to the
test.” I hear it from college teachers
who work with first-generation college students as they cope with stringent new
policies limiting those who can come to the university and those who can
stay. Yet, behind this indictment of
the educational system is neither cynicism nor passivity. Based on a critique of today’s educational
system, activists are crafting a new paradigm.
Currently, this paradigm exists only in its broadest outlines. We call this paradigm Freedom Schooling.
In one barrio in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles
County, community organizer Rosa Furumoto is pulling together activist friends
— largely Latino and Asian — to create plans for a Freedom School that will be
run by Latino immigrant parents. The
plans draw from her current innovative programs of Family Math and Family
Literacy, where immigrant parents master basic math and literacy skills so that
they can help their children with homework assignments. Several thousand miles away in Philadelphia
Chinatown, activists associated with Asian Americans United, including ESL high
school teacher Debbie Wei, are launching a Chinatown Freedom School for
inner-city youth long abandoned by the public school system. The plans are based on AAU’s fifteen years
of political organizing work with youth in Chinatown, including its summer
Freedom Schools.
The efforts of Furumoto and AAU are emerging
independently of each other; in fact, until recently, neither knew of the
other’s existence. Moreover, in this
period of severe problems in the U.S. educational system, many other long-time
activists are discussing similar ideas.
Like Furumoto and AAU, some envision actual independent schools, while
others have begun to practice Freedom Schooling in their day-to-day work in
current classrooms.
The
concept of Freedom Schooling itself goes back to the Civil Rights Movement
where African American parents and community activists in the South created
their own schools in response to segregation and the barring of their children
from the public school system.
According to long-time activist Grace Lee Boggs, the new schools did far
more than teach traditional academic subject matter:
In the 1960s Movement
activists had to create Freedom Schools in the South because the existing
school system had been organized to produce subjects, not citizens. People in the community, both children and
adults, needed to be empowered to exercise their civil and voting rights. To bring about a kind of “mental
revolution,” reading, writing and speaking skills were taught through the
discussion of black history, the power structure and building a Movement to
struggle against it. Everyone took this
basic “civics” course and then chose from more academic subjects, like algebra
and chemistry. All over Mississippi, in
church basements and parish halls, on shady lawns and in abandoned buildings,
volunteer teachers empowered thousands of children and adults through this
community curriculum.3
Today, Boggs is associated with Detroit Summer, a Freedom
School for the new millennium that challenges young people today to “rebuild,
redefine and respirit” devastated inner-city neighborhoods. She and other seasoned activists interpret
today’s emerging Freedom Schooling movement as part of an overall revolutionary
effort to create new institutions in society.
Specifically, today’s Freedom Schools overturn not only out-dated
teaching methods and curriculum but also are based on fundamentally different
goals than current schools. According
to Boggs:
Just as we had to create a
Movement in the 50s and 60s to challenge racism, we now need a movement to
challenge the concept of schools as mainly training centers for jobs in the
corporate structure or for individual upward mobility and replace it with the
concept of schools as places where children learn firsthand the skills of
democracy and the responsibilities of citizenship and self-government. This will require a profound change in our
own thinking because we ourselves have bought into the idea that the main
purpose of education should be to train personnel to fit into the corporate
structure. What we need to do now is to begin engaging our children in
community-building activities with the same audacity with which the civil
rights movement engaged them in desegregation activities thirty-five years
ago. Classes of school children from
K-12 should be taking responsibility for maintaining neighborhood streets,
planting community gardens, recycling waste, rehabbing houses, creating
healthier school lunches, visiting and doing errands for the elderly,
organizing neighborhood festivals, painting murals. This is the fastest way to motivate all our children to learn and
at the same time reverse the physical deterioration of our neighborhoods. . .
. Learning will come from practice
which has always been the best way to learn.4
The Freedom Schools described by Boggs and those proposed
by Rosa Furumoto in Los Angeles and AAU in Philadelphia are remarkably alike in
purpose: they stress a constructivist
approach to the education of children; they emphasize a curriculum that
connects students to the needs of their immediate neighborhood; they move
beyond the existing narrow definition of schools as places for training youth
for jobs in the corporate economy; they are explicitly multicultural even
though each school will focus on largely one ethnic group; and they are overtly
political, i.e., they are based on an incisive critique of the current U.S.
educational crisis and promote ways to organize students, parents, teachers,
other school staff, and communities to change this system. In short, Freedom Schools promote and expand
democracy by changing power relations in society. They do this by enabling students to practice democracy. But Freedom Schools are not simply for
youth; they are community schools that reconceptualize education as an
intergenerational process linked to the solving of community needs.
Also, the Los Angeles and Philadelphia proposals share
one other important commonality. In
both cases, the activists envision a strategic connection between their schools
and university Ethnic Studies programs — Asian American Studies, in particular
— but thus far this connection has not materialized, largely due to indifference
on the part of those at the university.
What are the reasons for this indifference? My feeling is that most in Asian American Studies interpret the
efforts of Furumoto and AAU in “small” terms — as “charter schools” — and place
them in the narrow framework of the debate between public and charter
schools. Most also would question why
it is important to divert what they see as scarce university resources on
small-scale neighborhood efforts, feeling that these same resources could be
used to address larger policy questions related to educational reform at the
national, state, and district levels.
Moreover, in the Los Angeles case, most would also question why Asian
American Studies programs should get involved in a Freedom School that will be
largely attended by Latino students and run by Latino immigrant parents.
In this essay, I emphasize why the concept of Freedom
Schooling is essential for Asian American Studies today. As will become apparent in my argument, I do
not define the concept only in terms of actual independent schools — at least
not at this time. I see Freedom
Schooling as the necessary radical vision that we need in this period to
transform our existing classrooms and our own world outlooks. In this essay, I propose ways that all
educational activists can begin practicing Freedom Schooling in their
day-to-day work, whether in classrooms or communities. Conceptualizing our work in this way will
enable us to deal with both the new problems and new opportunities facing us,
especially in Asian American Studies.
Conceptualizing our work in this way also will promote greater dialogue
among educational activists, especially about ways we can link our work across
what we now see as separate levels of the educational system (i.e., preschool,
K-12, special education, adult education, higher education, as well as the
array of community education projects).
Asian American Studies
and Its Roots in Freedom Schooling
In previous writings, I have critiqued the current state
of Asian American Studies for its departure from its founding radical vision.5 I have focused my critique on questions of
curriculum, pedagogy and guiding philosophy.
In this essay, I deepen and extend this analysis by framing my ideas
around the concept of Freedom Schooling.
Let me summarize the main points from my earlier writings:
1. Three decades ago, Asian American Studies emerged
from the fire of student and community activism that was itself connected to
larger social movements seeking to transform all aspects of society. Thus, the founding vision of Asian American
Studies not only challenged the prevailing framework of education; it also
served as the basis for creating vehicles to implement these ideas.
2. Based on this radical vision, activists saw
schooling as not merely imparting information to students but as promoting
critical awareness and encouraging political engagement. They linked learning in the classroom to the
solving of community needs and asserted that students — as well as teachers —
could learn best by doing, particularly through involvement in grassroots
struggles.
3. Activists further asserted that knowledge gained
from classrooms must be used to confront power in society. All students and teachers had the
responsibility not only to study our communities but to change them.
4. Similarly, activists stressed the responsibility
of students and teachers to share knowledge.
They emphasized that every student taking a class in Asian American
Studies had the obligation to share what they were learning with friends,
parents, and others in our community and called upon teachers to build this
responsibility into course objectives.
Knowledge was too important to stay in the classroom.
5. Activists identified the key role that students
taking classes in Asian American Studies could play in our communities. By arming themselves with knowledge from
Asian American Studies and thinking strategically about ways to share this
knowledge with others, students could become agents of social change — but only
if they were willing to link themselves to community movements. In other words, knowledge and ideas could
become material forces if grasped by large numbers of people. Students could help make this happen.
6. Activists envisioned Asian American Studies as
beginning within institutions of higher education but rapidly spreading to
sectors of the community that would never walk into a college classroom — e.g.,
prison inmates, high school drop-outs, senior citizens, immigrant workers,
tenants in inner-city housing projects, housewives, and small business
people. To implement this mission,
activists brought Asian American Studies to the community through traditional
academic activities such as community lectures and forums as well as audacious
experiments such as the creation of community classes, worker cooperatives,
bookstores, newspapers, community drop-in centers, tenants unions, and arts
collectives.
7. Finally, the founding vision of Asian American
Studies stressed that changing society also meant transforming oneself — i.e.,
accepting the ideological challenge to remold one’s own values and
worldview. This remolding, activists
emphasized, could not happen individually but only by participating with others
in movements to serve the community.
8. Over the past three decades, Asian American
Studies has retreated to a narrower definition of its mission based on the
adoption of traditional academic criteria.
Today, links to the community usually take place by offering student
internships and field studies in social service agencies, training students in
research methodology, encouraging professors and researchers to provide
professional expertise in off-campus organizations, and defining students and
teachers as advocates who can change public policy through their research. While these are all valuable activities,
they represent a departure from the founding vision of the field.
9. During the past decade, Asian American Studies has
expanded nationally to now include nearly 40 full programs and probably as many
as 25,000 students taking classes each year.
Never before have our communities had such a large number of students
and teachers educated around problems affecting Asian Americans. This new social base presents intriguing
possibilities for Freedom Schooling in this period.
10. Nevertheless, the growth of Asian American Studies
has been uneven, with a concentration of programs and classes in elite
universities and the near absence outside of higher education. Unlike the earlier period, when activists
took Asian American Studies outside the college classroom and into high
schools, adult schools, workplaces, housing projects, and community centers,
most of today’s practitioners limit Asian American Studies to higher education,
especially in elite institutions.
Thus,
today, activists face both new problems and new opportunities in Asian American
Studies. This new situation challenges
us to think in different ways about the connection between our long-term goals
relating to education and our day-to-day work in classrooms and
communities. I believe that the concept
of Freedom Schooling provides us with the necessary radical vision to grapple
with this question in this period.
First, Freedom Schooling enables us to retrieve the valuable founding
mission of Asian American Studies, especially its emphasis on the key role that
students can play in our communities.
Second, Freedom Schooling provides us with a strategy for dealing with
new conditions in Asian American Studies, in particular its concentration in
elite institutions of higher education.
Third, Freedom Schooling is the larger consciousness that we need today
— a paradigm shift — to enable us to recognize the significance of struggles in
the educational arena and their relation to the overall transformation of
society. In the remainder of this
essay, I elaborate on these three important points.
Freedom Schooling Enables
Activists to Reclaim the Radical Legacy of Asian American Studies
The roots of Asian American Studies lie in Freedom
Schools and the spirit of bold experimentation that marked the movements of the
late 1960s and early 1970s. Inspired by
the liberatory vision of education emerging from the Civil Rights Movement,
early activists defined the first classes in Asian American Studies as places
for learning and places for organizing and, ultimately, as places for
collective empowerment.
Today, with the concentration of courses only in
universities, it is probably difficult for young activists to picture a time
when university classes were but one part of the learning environment of Asian
American Studies. Yet, it is precisely
this enlarged vision of schooling that we need for Asian American Studies
today, a period marked by greater resources than at any previous time. Thus, it would be helpful to summarize how
an earlier generation of students with limited resources brought Asian American
Studies to the community. This
understanding can serve as the inspiration for thinking about new ways that we
can continue this legacy today in a period when we have much greater resources
available to us through Asian American Studies.
Like
the first Freedom Schools in the South that were held in church basements,
early “classes” in Asian American Studies were conducted in community centers,
homes and apartments, and at teach-ins at rallies and demonstrations. In these community settings, the distinction
between students and teachers was not rigidly defined, and participants easily
switched roles, often many times in the course of intense discussions. Learning in these community settings was
also intergenerational, much different from the traditional classroom where
youth are isolated from older generations.
Like companion Freedom Schools in African American and
Chicano communities, early classes in Asian American Studies mobilized students
to respond to community needs through involvement in grassroots movements
around labor issues, housing needs, immigrants rights, and youth and elderly
problems. Participation in these
movements schooled students in power relations in society and provided them
training in valuable leadership skills.
Through these struggles, students also learned the importance of
redirecting university resources back to their neighborhoods. And through connections to community
movements, students discovered firsthand the dual liberatory mission of
education — that of expanding democracy in society and that of transforming
oneself.
In several cities, students and community activists
launched educational projects based on this liberatory vision of
education. One example is the summer
“Asian American Community College” organized and coordinated by students
associated with the UCLA Asian American Studies Center in the early 1970s. Here is the way the student organizers
described their project in Gidra, the
Asian American Movement newspaper which itself was created by students from the
first wave in Asian American Studies:
Over
the past several months concerned community members have developed a college to
serve our people. It is being called
the Asian American Community College.
It arose from the assumption that education is not restricted to the
ivory tower classroom, but is an on-going process. The college belongs to the community. It can be molded to fit the needs of the community.
For this summer there are nine classes
planned. The courses offered are: 1) Group Dynamics and Interpersonal
Relations, 2) The Creative Culture — New Life Styles, 3) Asian American
Movement Seminar, 4) Workshop in Film, 5) Asian Adult Awareness, 6) Asian
American Women and the Movement, 7) Cantonese Language, 8) General Political
Awareness Forum, and 9) Draft Counselor’s Workshop and a class in First Aid and
Legal Aid.
Of particular interest to adults is the Asian
Adult Awareness which will discuss and analyze current social and political
trends with a view to bridging the communication gap between the generations.
The classes are open to everyone and will be held
on weekday evenings. Brochures are
being distributed throughout the Los Angeles area.6
This summer college launched by student activists in the
early 1970s is a good example of projects created by students with limited
resources. Today, in a period when
Asian American Studies has greater resources, what types of projects can
students organize? To answer this
question, we need to grapple with two new conditions distinguishing Asian
American Studies today: the large
number of students now taking classes and the concentration of classes in
universities, especially elite institutions.
Freedom Schooling
Provides Us with a Strategy for Dealing with New Conditions in Asian American
Studies
In the old days of the Asian American Movement, activists
frequently got together to discuss “what to do till the revolution comes.” “What to do till the revolution comes” was a
valuable outlook because it emphasized the urgency of always thinking about the
connection between day-to-day activities and the larger goal of transforming
society. “What to do till the
revolution comes” goaded activists to overcome feelings of passivity and the
tendency to rationalize inaction due to the lack of resources. Thus, rather than waiting for others to
launch large-scale efforts, each activist recognized the responsibility to take
the initiative in their own sphere of work and to always watch for new opportunities
to expand political consciousness.
Today, we can draw from these earlier insights to help us
immediately implement a liberatory vision of education. Obviously, at the current time, only a
handful of activists have the resources and power to open their own physical
Freedom Schools. However, all activists
have the capacity to immediately begin practicing Freedom Schooling in their
day-to-day work. In a previous essay, I
described the creative ways that K-12 activists were profoundly changing
teaching and learning in their classrooms.7 Here, I focus on examples in higher
education, where currently there is a concentration of resources in Asian
American Studies. I use my own recent
classes as examples. For this essay, I
focus on my upper-division classes, although in a future essay I will address
how Freedom Schooling is also essential in lower-division classes, especially
for first-generation college students.
For the past six years, I have had to chance to teach on
a part-time basis at different levels of the California system of higher
education: at Pasadena City College; at
California State University, Northridge; and at UCLA. Not only have I logged many miles as a “freeway flyer,” I have
also gained a deep appreciation of the unique strengths of each institution and
the distinct needs of students at the different levels of higher
education. I have also seen firsthand
the growing numbers of students now taking classes in Asian American Studies,
and I have begun to understand the special challenges in this period
confronting both students and teachers at elite institutions such as UCLA.
In recent years at each of the three institutions, I have
begun experimenting with the concept of Freedom Schooling in all of my
classes. At first, my experiments were
modest: a minor change in a syllabus,
the addition of a new assignment, and the modification of a lecture or two
during the course of the term. However,
my experiments have grown bolder with my growing understanding of the rich
possibilities embedded in our classrooms when we begin to engage students with
a liberatory vision of education. Thus,
in my most recent classes I have experimented with teaching a class without an
assigned textbook or pre-assigned readings in order to open students to a new
awareness of the importance of choosing reading materials and the relationship
between reading, reflection, and practice.
I have also experimented by conducting an entire course without giving a
traditional lecture. For another
course, I held sessions in a community setting to push students beyond their
perception that learning requires the four walls of a college classroom. Finally, at resource-rich UCLA, I have
experimented with web technology. With
the help of webmasters Tam Nguyen and Steven Masami Ropp, I have had students
create largely text-based web magazines:
first, in 1997, for a course on the Asian American Movement with Steve
Louie, and in 1989 and 1999 for my Investigative Journalism & People of
Color classes.8 I now regard
the creation of these kinds of web magazines as an important tool for
networking and communicating with other educational activists, and I have tried
to include a web component in my classes whenever feasible, despite my own lack
of knowledge of web technology.
From the very first class that I taught in Asian American
Studies in 1975, I have always emphasized an approach to learning that connects
students to grassroots community movements, that promotes learning through
practice, and that highlights students’ responsibilities to our
communities. However, in recent years,
I have further developed these core teaching practices to more sharply address
the new conditions in Asian American Studies.
In the examples that follow, I share ways that I have taken up this
challenge through five of my recent upper-division classes at UCLA and
California State University, Northridge.
UCLA Fall Quarter 1999,
“Asian American Social Movements: The Role of Students in Defining the Future
of Asian American Studies”
Class web magazine:
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/99F/asian197j-1/webmag99.shtml
For
this class, I had students examine the current state of Asian American Studies
— and Ethnic Studies as a whole — focusing on the pivotal role they could play
in expanding the field. In the course
syllabus, I identified four critical questions:
1) With UCLA now having a strong Asian American
Studies program with nearly 3,000 students taking classes annually, what
enlarged role can UCLA students play in bringing Asian American Studies into
the community?
2) With the proliferation of Asian American
Studies on college campuses but the near invisibility of Asian American Studies
outside the college classroom (e.g., K-12 classrooms and other community
settings), what new responsibilities face students taking these classes?
3) With the growing strength of Asian American
Studies programs in elite institutions nationally, including UCLA, what dangers
and opportunities does this new situation pose for students in these
institutions?
4) In this critical period, what special
challenges face student activists relating to the expansion of Asian American
Studies?
For this class, rather than assigning a textbook or even
a course reader, I provided students with an initial set of handouts and then,
together as a class, we gathered other readings that could help us answer the
questions facing us. Some of the
reading materials we gathered are listed on the class web magazine.
One new assignment that I used in this class — and that I
now regularly include in other classes — required students to participate in
and/or lead two “political tours” of Los Angeles communities. In classroom discussions, we distinguished
“political tours” from the more common “community tours” as well as other
“tourist tours” of ethnic and racial neighborhoods. In preparation for this assignment, students reviewed what they
had learned in previous classes about specific neighborhoods, such as
information relating to socioeconomic factors, political issues, and
interethnic relations. Before, during,
and after their tours, I asked students to envision an expanded role that
students could play in these communities.
For this course, I also provided training for students as
community educators by drawing from the latest insights from constructivism,
brain-based research, and service-learning.
Far too often, I have seen Asian American student activists at elite
institutions such as UCLA grow in political arrogance as they have grown in
knowledge and power. As a result, they
begin to practice community education with a top-down approach, replicating the
elitism of their institution. Counteracting
this tendency requires both an ideological approach stressing the quality of
humility as well as militancy in community work, as well as providing concrete
training in good teaching practices.
For the latter, I combine learning through practice with methods adapted
from cooperative learning, the use of inquiry method, and other brain-based
educational practices. One helpful
resource that I have used in recent classes is the book Helping Health Workers Learn: A Book of Methods, Aids, and Ideas for
Instructors at the Village Level by David Werner and Bill Bower. Influenced by Freire, they advocate a
teaching approach that “draws ideas out of people” rather than only “putting
ideas into peoples’ heads.”9
For the final exam for this class, students decided to
organize a half-day campus conference to share with other students what they
learned and to mobilize others around an expanded vision of Asian American
Studies. In an essay published in the
campus newspaper, Daily Bruin, one
student from the class, Rena Wong, described the purposes of this conference
and her own insights from her political tour of the Los Angeles garment
district:
Here
[at UCLA], we are trained to be the professionals of the future, to be the
leaders of a country of people we do not really understand. Ethnic Studies courses encourage and offer
opportunities for students to interact with groups within different
communities. It is participation in the
community and in movements for social change that form the key to understanding
the differences between groups of people. . . . I hope the grassroots approach of this class will be a starting
point for us to re-envision our obligations to the university, our communities
and ourselves.10
Class web magazine:
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/aasc/classweb/spring00/webmag_197j/index.shtmll
This student-initiated course emphasized community
organizing in Los Angeles immigrant enclaves and the role of student activists in
these struggles. This once-a-week class
met off-campus in a Koreatown building housing Korean Immigrant Worker
Advocates (KIWA), the Thai Community Development Center (TCDC), and Pilipino
Worker Center (PWC0. Originally, the
goal of this class was to have students help with recruitment for the Summer
Activist Training program sponsored by the three organizations along with
Nikkei for Civil Rights and Redress (NCRR).
However, at the outset of the course, KIWA launched what would become a
year-long boycott of Elephant Snack Corner, a Koreatown restaurant that had
exploited its Latino immigrant workforce, and asked students to help with
picketing and publicity. In addition,
Thai CDC asked student support for its campaign protecting the human rights of
a young boy brought into the U.S. by smugglers connected to the global sex
slavery trade.
Written assignments covered the different dimensions of
student and community activism, with a particular focus on the need for student
activists to transform themselves personally in order to be of service to
communities. For examples, students
grappled with the challenge of Franz Fanon to discover the mission of their
generation and to fulfill it and not betray it. They attempted to put into practice Grace Lee Boggs’ perspective
to make the community their curriculum.
They reflected on the insight of Gandhi that education must be of “the
head, the heart, and the hand.” They
studied and implemented the approach used by Freire to raise political
consciousness in others by drawing ideas out of people and not simply putting
ideas into them. They accepted the
ideological challenge of Lu Xun to both militantly and humbly work in our
communities and distinguish between those to defy and those to serve. In addition, they focused on three other
dimensions of student activism: the
need to link local activism with global concerns, the need for sustainable
activism and to guard against burn-out, and the need to engage in personal
transformation while taking part in movements for social change.
Here is the way one student from the class, Diana Yi,
reflected on the relationship between her work as an activist and educator:
The
three words [of Gandhi] — “the head, heart, and hand” — represent three crucial
components of an activist. The head
represents creativity and knowledge, the heart passion, and the hand putting
into practice what you learn. . . . At
UCLA, classes don’t emphasize the three components equally. Most classes emphasize “brain knowledge” and
involve reading and memorizing the professor’s lecture material . . . We don’t really learn how to apply this
“brain knowledge” to our daily lives. . . .
How can I use this class to enhance my work as an activist and
educator? Increasingly, I’m beginning
to think an activist and educator are the same. But the distinction is that an activist should be an educator,
but an educator is not always an activist.
. . . As an activist, I need to work on my
organizing and outreach skills. As an
educator, I need to gain more knowledge and remain open-minded.11
UCLA Fall Quarter 2000,
“Asian American Social Movements:
Students and the Filipino Vets Movement for Justice and Equity”
CSUN Fall Semester 2000,
“Asian American Studies Field Practicum:
Students and the Filipino Veterans Movement for Justice and Equity”
Class web magazine: http://www.seas.ucla.edu/~hoangv/aas197j/
In fall 2000, I had the opportunity to coordinate student
work in two classes — one at UCLA and the other at CSUN — on the current
campaign by Filipino veterans and their community supporters for justice and
equity. Both classes focused on the
pivotal role that students armed with Asian American Studies can play in social
movements for justice and emphasized the historic mission of students taking
classes in Asian American Studies — that of sharing knowledge they gain from
the classroom with others. For both
classes, I connected students to the Los Angeles-based organization, Justice
for Filipino American Veterans (JFAV), led by Manong Peping Baclig, and their
more than 50-year-old campaign to gain veterans’ benefits promised to them
during World War II but rescinded by the U.S. Congress immediately after the
war.
Working with students on this campaign at two different
campuses enabled me to appreciate the strengths of students at each
institution. At resource-rich UCLA, my
class organized an end-of-the term educational forum that educated other
students about the significance of the veterans’ campaign. Under the leadership of Asian American
Studies graduate student Jessica Kim, students created an educational brochure
called “Conquering Injustice” that analyzed the veteran’s campaign from the
larger framework of Asian American history and the ongoing struggle for rights
and dignity. In this brochure, the
students wrote:
Ethnic and racial minorities in the U.S. have historically struggled for legal, economic, and social equality. Placed within this context, the Filipino veterans’ struggle for recognition and justice represents more than a fight for medical benefits, monthly stipends, and military burials. Their movement has an historical context that reveals a pattern of legal, social, and economic repression of people of color in the United States. The Filipino vets’ campaign is part of this struggle to test and extend the boundaries of American democracy. Placing the vets’ campaign within a historical context reveals its significance as part of a long struggle to obtain legal, political, economic, and social justice for all marginalized groups in the United States.12
In addition, one other UCLA student, Anouh Vang, a Hmong
American, wrote an eloquent op-ed piece for the Daily Bruin coinciding with Veterans’ Day:
My father is a veteran of the CIA sponsored secret war in Laos. When I see the Pilipino veterans living in decrepit rooms with three or four other fellow veterans, I see my father. I see him living his final days alone and distraught. Though broken, these veterans continue to struggle for justice and equity. . . .
By becoming involved in this campaign, I’ve
learned that Veterans Day is about history. . . . The surviving Pilipino veterans represent a point in history that
should be addressed. These heroes are
history, and today we must face this injustice.13
Meanwhile, at CSUN — where students have nowhere near the
resources that UCLA students have — students from my class launched a
grassroots educational campaign, taking this issue into other Asian American
Studies classrooms and before student groups, their families, friends, and
co-workers through presentations and a petition drive. Although my CSUN class was much smaller than
my UCLA class, students from my CSUN class collected three times as many
signatures on their petitions supporting benefits for the vets. I believe they were able to do this because
of their willingness to take this campaign deep into the hearts of their
communities rather than simply collecting signatures on campus.
My students at CSUN also contributed two additional
educational resources to the veterans’ campaign. A Korean American Business major, Sung Lee, was so greatly
impressed by the sincerity and dedication of Manong Peping Baclig when he met
him in downtown Los Angeles that our class brought him to campus to speak on
the vets’ campaign before a student group.
Sung also used his background in technology to create a powerpoint
presentation for the campaign. Sung’s
powerpoint presentation focuses on the ordeal of Filipino vets on the Bataan
Death March and links photographic images with a poem by classmate Ismael
Tumaru. Ismael’s eloquent poem brought
tears to Manong Peping Baclig, himself a Bataan Death March survivor. In the poem entitled “Bahala Na,” Ismael
traced the history of U.S. involvement in the Philippines, the promises made by
the U.S. government to the Filipino vets during World War II, and their 50-year
effort to gain dignity and justice.
Sung’s powerpoint presentation and Ismael’s poem were eventually adapted
into a “flash introduction” for a website created by UCLA student Vincent Hoang
for the vets’ campaign focusing on the pivotal role that students can play in
the campaign.14
CSUN, 1995 – Today,
“Contemporary Issues in Asian American Communities”
It is one thing to emphasize the mission of students
sharing knowledge with the community at a resource-rich institution like UCLA
but quite a different thing at a state college like CSUN, where the average
student works thirty hours each week.
At CSUN, one of the classes I have taught since 1995 is “Contemporary
Issues in Asian American Communities.”
With Asian Americans accounting for roughly 15 percent of the student
body at CSUN — in contrast to the 40 percent share of their counterparts at
UCLA — there is little sense of Asian American student empowerment at CSUN at
this time. On the one hand, this means
that students are conditioned to accept more traditional teaching methods in
their classrooms — even when these methods hinder learning — and to respond
with initial uneasiness to new methods.
On the other hand, this also means that there is little of the arrogance
associated with the trappings of university knowledge and power that is
increasingly evident at UCLA.
My work at CSUN has enabled me to become a better teacher
as I interact with a diverse population of students in my classrooms, such as
non-Asian students from the university’s teacher credential programs, older
students (including a few who are older than me), and students from a range of
skill levels. My understanding of teaching
has also expanded due to my work with “high-risk” but high potential students
specially admitted through the EOP Summer Bridge Program. Finally, my commitment to the goals of
liberatory education have deepened due to association with fellow activist
Warren Furumoto, who has encouraged me to incorporate into my teaching the
valuable insights from constructivism and brain-based learning.
My class on Asian American contemporary issues is a
once-a-week, early evening, lecture-style class that attracts a large number of
non-Asian students due to satisfying one of the requirements in the
university’s teacher credential program.
Over the years, I have come to appreciate these students as an important
resource in my classroom. Many are
already teaching in schools and take my course with the hope that they can
learn something practical to help them work with Asian American children and
other children of color. These teachers
constitute usually a third to half of my class, with the remaining students
being young Asian Americans. Because my
class is only a once-a-week class with students who normally would not interact
closely under other circumstances, I spend the first part of the semester
promoting good group dynamics in my classroom.
I do this through small group discussions, activities linking subject
matter with food, and homework assignments designed to unleash imagination and
curiosity. I agree with brain-based
researchers such as Renate Caine and Geoffrey Caine that a major responsibility
of the teacher is community-building in the classroom.15 I also share the insight of Margaret
Wheatley in her valuable book Leadership
and the New Science that the creation of good organizational culture — or,
in my case, good classroom culture — is vital for healthy group functioning,
learning, and growth. This group
culture, according to Wheatley, functions like a “field” in physics, which,
while invisible, is absolutely essential for enabling the transformation of
particles into waves and vice-versa.16 Similarly, a classroom “field” — i.e., a good classroom culture —
is also invisible but is essential for enabling students and teachers to
transform into learners.
Almost
all students enter my class with the expectation that I will teach them
“content” relating to Asian American issues — or what I call “supplementary
content,” i.e., new knowledge to add on to their existing perspective of
society. Instead, I focus on teaching
an approach that seeks to overturn their existing perceptions of society. In my class I call this approach an
“alternative framework” for understanding issues. I describe Asian American Studies as arising from the necessity
to create this alternative framework.
Thus, for the first part of the semester, I help students construct an
understanding of the approach underlying Asian American Studies by focusing on
seven building blocks:
• Learning
about history and understanding how history relates to the present
•
Discovering how each person’s life intersects with history and
explaining why this discovery is both “terrible” and “magnificent”
•
Identifying key characteristics of a community we are studying
•
Uncovering stereotypes, especially the political use of stereotypes
•
Analyzing the “mainstream” framework surrounding each issue
• Creating
alternative frameworks, especially those that uncover the influence of larger
social, political, and economic factors
• Identifying
social and political movements that mobilize people to fight for justice
Like my other classes, I emphasize the responsibility of
students taking my class to become sharers of knowledge. In my syllabus, I describe the mission in
this way:
This
course emphasizes the special
responsibility of students in Asian American Studies to share what they are
learning with others, such as parents and younger sisters and brothers. Students at universities such as CSUN are a
relatively privileged group today because they remain the only sector in our
community able to learn about Asian American history and contemporary
issues. In contrast, most people in our
community, especially new immigrants, will never have a chance in their
lifetimes to learn what we are studying in this class. Students, thus, have a special responsibility to find ways to share their knowledge with
others.
For
the final paper, I require each student to carry out this mission by creating
and implementing an educational strategy to share what they have learned in my
class with others — whether in their own K-12 classrooms or with friends and
family. I ask each student to focus on
building better race relations in Los Angeles and promoting a greater
understanding of the alternative framework underlying Asian American
Studies. Thus, through their final
papers, the 35 to 40 students who take my class each semester at CSUN can share
these ideas with several hundred additional people.
In
my class during Spring Semester 2000, Loc Nguyen, a Vietnamese immigrant
student, created an exemplary educational strategy for his final paper
targeting his uncle, an older refugee.17 “It is so sad and depressing when I visit my uncle’s family,” Loc
wrote in his final paper. “There’s
always arguing between my uncle and his children. Out of five kids he had, two died when they tried to get out of
Vietnam by boat. The remaining three
were raised in the States. Although my
cousins are not so bad, my uncle does not get along with them. He once told my Dad: ‘I’m glad that two of my sons are dead. Otherwise, I couldn’t stand five devils at
the same time.’”
Loc
analyzed tensions in his uncle’s household as due to cultural conflict. “My uncle considers his kids as foreigners,
and my cousins consider their father as an obsolete man. . . . His body is here [in the U.S.], but his soul
is back in the homeland.” Through his
semester-long educational strategy, Loc wanted to help his uncle solve his
family problem by changing his world outlook.
“I want him to care more for himself, for the Vietnamese Americans here. I want him to understand our status is not
the same as white Americans, and any changes in government policy that relate
to minorities here can affect him a lot,” stated Loc.
For the content of his
educational strategy, Loc drew from the educational approach developed in our
class, especially the importance of connecting each person’s life to
history. He also wanted to educate his
uncle about immigration controversy in U.S. society and how it affected new
immigrants and refugees, race relations involving Asian newcomers, and
grassroots social movements, such as the community mobilization around the
arrest of Wen Ho Lee.
To
implement his educational strategy, Loc enlisted his own father as an assistant
and mediator to help with discussions with his uncle. These discussions were often intense, as described in the
following exchange:
I
tried to explain to my uncle about the behavior of his children that upset
him. The thing that hurt him the most
was their impolite attitude when my cousins expressed their opinions. They talked to my uncle just like two men
with equal rank talking to each other.
In Vietnamese culture, this is not the way. My uncle told me he could not handle that aspect of stupid
American culture. But I explained to
him that this is not stupid because in American culture, it is fair to talk
that way and two persons, no matter who they are, should have equal rights and
equal power when trying to express their opinions. I also pointed out the weakness of Asian cultures regarding the
matters of respect and obedience.
Absolute obedience could never lead a society toward a democratic
path. If there are no equal rights in a
family, a fraction of society, then there are no rights for the society as a
whole. I also told him that my own passive
character is a result of unequal rights in the family. I used to be afraid of my grandparents, my
dad, and all of my teachers. I barely
said a word or asked a question in any of my high school classes. I said this obedience was the reason why Asia
had so many dictators and authoritarians.
Aside from discussions, Loc also brought his uncle on
“field trips” to Asian American ethnic enclaves, Latino communities, and the
Museum of Tolerance (a requirement in my class). Assessing the overall impact of his educational strategy, Loc
felt that his efforts helped to bring his uncle and his cousins together and
also to “create a chain reaction” of education in his community.
My uncle gained a new view about American society and about his kids. . . . The outcome that I had not expected is when I saw my uncle talk to his friends. He was spreading the ideas that he had learned to his friends and his neighbors. And this would create a chain reaction in the community. Hopefully the gate to the outside world will be opened to other people like my uncle.
Asian American Studies
and “the End of the World as We Know It”
In a provocative collection of essays, Immanuel
Wallerstein asserts that “the world as we know it” is rapidly ending. According to Wallerstein, “the world as we
know it” consists of the system of nation states organized around corporate
capitalism and the ideology of liberalism and its belief that social change can
be managed by those in power through gradual reform. This world system has existed for several hundreds of years but
is now disintegrating politically, economically, and ideologically and is not
likely to exist in fifty years.
According to Wallerstein, we do not know what will replace it but the
period ahead is likely to be a “terrible time of trouble.” However, as a social scientist, Wallerstein
also identifies this transition period as a critical time for activists for
“intensive, rigorous analysis of historical alternatives.” He asserts that in this period of enormous
uncertainties, “very small actions by groups here and there may shift the
vectors and the institutional forms in radically different directions.”18
It is interesting to compare Wallerstein’s provocative
analysis to a recent report issued by the CIA on the world in 2015. Like Wallerstein, the CIA report projects a
world in turmoil, where due to environmental degradation future wars will
likely be fought over fresh water, and new epidemics of AIDS and tuberculosis
will ravage nations in the developing world.
But unlike Wallerstein, the CIA report — as a report written by those in
power seeking to protect the interests of the U.S. nation state and the
corporate economy — ignores the social transformative forces at work in this
period, focusing only on the ways that governments, the military, and
corporations can best manage turmoil at this time.19
Taken together, Wallerstein’s analysis and the CIA report
raise three critical questions for activists in Asian American Studies
today: How are we addressing the
question of “the end of the world as we know it”? How are we developing within our communities the new survival
skills needed for this transition period?
And, finally, what alternatives are we putting forward to replace the
disintegrating institutions of the current world system? From my vantage point, these questions are
not being asked in Asian American Studies, and it is the responsibility of
activists to bring them to the forefront, especially with the vision of Freedom
Schooling.
I agree with Wallerstein’s assessment that in this period
of historical transition, the small actions of activists can “shift the vectors
and the institutional forms in radically different directions.” But I add that in this transition period
each activist involved in “small actions” must find ways to share lessons with
other activists to push forward the creative dialogue about “historical
alternatives.”
In her book, Leadership
and the New Science, Margaret Wheatley promotes a similar viewpoint, which
is based on her critique of the pervasive impact of concepts from Newtonian
physics on our social thinking today. 20 According to Wheatley, scientific thinking over the past century
has moved beyond a Newtonian conception of the world, but our social and
organizational thinking — and, I would add our thinking about social change —
continues to lag behind, remaining influenced by Newtonian concepts of
“critical mass,” “inertia,” and “entropy.”
Drawing from quantum theory and studies of complex systems from the “new
science,” Wheatley emphasizes how new analytic frameworks like self-organizing
systems can help us better understand the process of social development and
social change and our own role as activists in the process. Complex systems are characterized by not
only stability but change and renewal, and behavior in these systems occurs in
a “web of connectedness,” where “local, small actions” can have great
significance throughout the system.
In
a web, the potential impact of local actions bears no relationship to their
size. When we choose to act locally, we
may be wanting to influence the entire system.
But we work where we are, with the system that we know, the one we can
get our arms around. From a Newtonian
perspective, our efforts often seem too small, and we doubt that our actions
will make a difference. Or perhaps we
hope that our small efforts will contribute incrementally to large-scale
change. Step by step, system by system,
we aspire to develop enough mass or force to alter the larger system.
But a quantum view explains the success
of small efforts quite differently.
Acting locally allows us to be inside the movement and flow of the
system, participating in all those complex events occurring
simultaneously. We are more likely to
be sensitive to the dynamics of this system, and thus more effective. However, changes in small places also affect
the global system, not through incrementalism, but because every small system
participates in an unbroken wholeness.
Activities in one part of the whole create effects that appear in
distant places. Because of these unseen
connections, there is potential value in working anywhere in the system. We never know how our small activities will
affect others through the invisible fabric of our connectedness. I have learned that in this exquisitely
connected world, it’s never a question of “critical mass.” It’s always about critical connections.21
Wheatley’s emphasis on “critical connections” rather than
“critical mass” highlights for educational activists in this period the
importance of sharing with others all of our experiments with Freedom
Schooling, no matter how small. When we
begin to see our local activities as part of a “web of connectedness,” we can
link our ideas together to engage in the necessary “intensive, rigorous
analysis of historical alternatives” to transform our communities. We can envision new possibilities and
organize to bring these into being.
Engaging in this process of critical and creative
visioning is especially important for the development of the new survival
skills that people at the grassroots level will need in this transition period
of turmoil and upheaval. Brain-based
educational researchers Renate Caine and Geoffrey Caine in their book Education on the Edge of Possibility
define these new survival skills in terms of what they call “the possible
human.” They urge teachers to transform
their classrooms and schools around a new set of goals for education in this
period.
Rather
than discuss the knowledge that people should have, or the skills that they
need to acquire, we would like to frame the purposes of education in terms of
what sort of person one needs to be to develop sustainable communities and
thrive within the new paradigm. If
change really is taking place in the way that we have discussed, and if, as
Kaufman (1995) and others contend, the development of higher orders of
complexity is natural, then what we are working toward is the development of
more complex and integrated people.22
In a previous book — Making
Connections: Teaching and the Human Brain — the Caines elaborate further on
the kinds of “new survival skills” that educators should be teaching in this
period. They assert that teaching
should help students “appreciate complex issues in order to make better
choices.” They identify the prefrontal
cortex — the newest part of the brain in the evolutionary scale — as the region
where values such as compassion, altruism, concern for others, and empathy are
located. Education, they assert, should
focus on enhancing the cognitive skills of students by linking the expansion of
intelligence to the development of new adaptive values. “This requires us to use our brains in ways
that they have never been used before on a large scale,” the Caines write.23
This emphasis on redefining our teaching to evoke new
human possibilities provides us with a deeper understanding of the significance
of Freedom Schooling and our tasks in this period. I have always intuitively felt that the purpose of education —
and, for that matter, of activism — is for the expansion of democracy by
changing power relations in society and promoting the necessary personal
transformation in each individual to better serve society. Or, as much more eloquently expressed by
long-time activists Yuri Kochiyama and Grace Lee Boggs, the goal of education
and activism is one of “expanding our humanity.”
Increasingly in my classes today, under the influence of
Freedom Schooling, I find myself encouraging students to envision the rich
possibilities embedded in our communities and within ourselves. Through Freedom Schooling, we can work with
others to transcend the failing educational system, to envision new
alternatives, and to act to bring these new possibilities into being. Through Freedom Schooling, we can expand our
humanity.
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