Resources for Implementing AAPI Curriculum at Your School

We are excited to share that following their very successful Harvest Moon Soiree, our partner Teach Asian American Stories (TAAS) has launched a website and begun district outreach! The Teach Asian American Stories mission is to ensure educators have access to the highest-quality resources and training available, so that all public school students in New Jersey grow up understanding that Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are part of the fabric of our nation, and all AAPI children know they matter and belong. TAAS has begun reaching out to school districts across New Jersey to support their professional development needs (funding is available), and would welcome any help from MUV-NJ allies in connecting with district leaders. Please visit the website to learn more or connect directly via the TAAS interest form.

For in person, paid PD, please reach out to Teach Asian American Stories, who will link you with Immigrant History Initiative, YURI Education Project and/or Institute for Teaching Diversity and Social Justice and will help subsidize the PD.

For free, virtual, live, interactive PD, you can reach out to Asian American Education Project by emailing laura.houcque@gmail.com Laura Houcque Prabhakar is AAEP's East Coast & Midwest Regional Coordinator. The Asian American Education Project's Fall workshop schedule has been finalized! Here is a link.

SAADA (South Asian American Digital Archive) has hired an Education Outreach Coordinator. If you are interested in learning more, you can reach out to Emmett Haq at emmett@saada.org

Teachers can also get PD certificates from participating in the free professional development workshops from Asian American Education Project. The public is also welcome to attend these webinars.

We don’t have to reinvent the wheel. There are wonderful free curriculum resources and lesson plans available:

The Asian American Education Project features a comprehensive set of free K-12 curriculum resources. On their website, we can find lesson plans covering time periods from 1850 to 2019, on topics such as civil rights, citizenship, education, gender equality, hate crime, immigration, military service and more. These lesson plans are developed for Social Studies, US History, World History, English, and sometimes Mathematics. These curriculum contents were developed in collaboration with the UCLA Asian American Studies Center and PBS LearningMedia. The thematic units were created by Curriculum Specialists at Stanford University. All lesson plans are free, and free Professional Development workshops are available, which can lead to free PD certification.

Advancing Justice | Chicago and the TEAACH Coalition have created the following resources to support educators in teaching Asian American history.

Sample Scope & Sequence for Grades K-5: Integrating Asian American Experiences into Reading and Social Studies

Sample Scope & Sequence for Grades 6-12: Integrating Asian American History into Social Studies

Asian American Education Resource Database: K-8 Resources (Airtable)

Asian American Education Resource Database: 9-12 Resources (Airtable)

The South Asian Americans Digital Archive has recently published “Our Stories” a 480 page Book on South Asian American stories with a companion Curriculum Guide to help teachers use the stories in their classrooms.The e-book is $20. The curriculum guide is free. Some other possibilities are teaching a lesson from the free book In the Face of Xenophobia regarding South Asian American history. There are additional lesson plans available here.

Please check out Samip Mallick's presentation for the Teaching for Justice conference. Samip spoke specifically about how teachers can incorporate SAADA (South Asian American Digital Archive) resources.

The College of Education of University of Illinois offers an asynchronous AAPI Curriculum professional development opportunity! Please check out Teaching Equitable Asian American Community History

You could also teach a lesson on Pacific Islander studies from Teaching Oceania.

Sima Kumar, Make Us Visible NJ Board Member and New Jersey educator who teaches high school and college students recently published an excellent feature article calling for the inclusion of AAPI literature in the high school American literature curriculum in NJEA Review. She also created a Curated List of Asian, Asian American, and Pacific Islander Literature for High School Language Arts Curricula

We are so grateful to Dr. Chrissi Miles and Gabriel Tanglao of the NJEA for hosting the AAPI Curriculum Webinar series which is available for free and on demand. We are so grateful to Kathy Lu and Julia Wang from Immigrant History Initiative, Sima Kumar and Rajneet Pimmi Kaur Goomer from Make Us Visible NJ for teaching the series!

Here is an AAPI booklist with resources that you can add to your library collection and add as mentor texts in your curriculum.

Here is a resource guide we curated.

There are also creative ways to incorporate Asian American history and contributions right in our own backyard. Did you know that the first Chinatown on the East Coast wasn’t in New York City, it was in Belleville, New Jersey? After building the transcontinental railroad that transformed our country, Chinese Americans settled in Belleville after finding it more welcoming than other parts of the country. In learning about Asian American history, our children will also have the opportunity to learn what makes our state so special.