According to McClymer, “We can think of the web as the untextbook,” and the abundance of digital resources allows educators to teach history because “the web enables students to become more active learners.” I would like for my students to understand the importance of filial piety and family values for Japanese Americans living in the U.S. and how WWII and the Executive Order 9066 played a key role in testing those values. First, I will ask my students to do a closed textual reading and analysis of the loyalty questions mentioned in John Okada’s No-No Boy. They will access Densho Encylopedia online because it includes information about the loyalty questionnaire that many Japanese American men were required to answer in 1943. This information plays a key role in helping the students understand the main character’s struggle as a young college student who had to choose between his family or the country he was born in. They will write a reflection that includes questions about the loyalty questionnaire and how it might affect the family.
Then, I will provide at least 2 or 3 primary sources such as photos of Japanese American families before and during WWII for the students to examine. They will be asked to find at least 1 primary source from 2 websites: Densho and the Hirasaki National Resource Center. I will invite my students to visit the Densho website to view photo collections of Japanese American families during WWII. The Densho Digital Repository holds extensive collections of digitized primary sources. They will be assigned to select an image from one of the photo collections of a Japanese American family for analysis and class discussion. Then, the students will select a film from the home-movie collection from the Hirasaki National Resource Center, which is part of the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. There are several film collections that feature home-movie footage of Japanese Americans from 1920s to 1960s. My students will select at least 1 home-movie of a Japanese American family before or during the war. The students should be able to make a connection with the selected photo and home-movie and the stories of the families in the novel during an almost forgotten or hidden part of American history. The next lesson plan will include a synthesis of their findings.
I would like to encourage my students to ask questions and dig deeper into the social injustice and how what happened in the past still haunts many Asian Americans who are aware of it. For their final project, their findings and research along with questions can be mashed into a video, or they can create a digital map of family’s journey from home to a camp/camps and to the new home after camp along with some images from the family’s photo collection online.
The digital environment influences the way I teach and learn. I can teach the same objectives for my courses while I change the way I teach my students to think about history. Even though I teach composition and literature, I also place emphasis on history because it is the story of the people. There is so much information that needs to be “uncovered” to show students that history is not just about the past. Learning history goes beyond learning dates, places, people, and events because there are so many stories to discover and uncover. As problem solvers, teachers can learn to foster a learning environment that encourages students to think, to question, to discover, to solve problems, and to learn new ways of approaching history. Educators like me can learn so much from the digital environment. There is an abundance of digital resources that help me to conduct research and compose lesson plans. Also, learning about digital humanities and teaching history in the digital age in the GMU graduate certificate program has encouraged me to view teaching with digital tools and digital media from a progressive perspective. It has reinforced my longtime desire to teach my students the importance of learning with technology to be prepared in a globally competitive world.
