Please view a PDF version of the article we wrote for the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Community Newsletter: Lived Experiences Informing a More Lived Curriculum: Bearing Witness to the Japanese American Experience of Exclusion
Participants in Only What We Can Carry at the site of the Manzanar Concentration Camp
Only What We Can Carry 2009: Lessons from the Japanese American Internment
Global Source has just completed our pilot year of an K-12 educational development project called, "Only What We Can Carry", funded through grant from the WA Civil Liberties Public Education Program. The purpose of this project was to demonstrate how a lived experience for educators around a topic of study such as the internment can inform and shape a more enlivened curriculum for the students they serve.
We worked with two teams of teachers for this pilot: two fourth grade teachers from Wilkes Elementary on Bainbridge Island and a multiage teacher and teacher-librarian from Breidablik Elementary in Poulsbo.
This project was centered around a professional travel study experience to Manzanar Concentration Camp in California, now a National Historic Site run by the U.S. Parks Service, completed in May 2009. Our team of educators were accompanied by several Japanese Americans from Bainbridge Island who are former detainees who lived through the internment as children and young adults. We were honored to have Lilly Kodama and Frank Kitamoto join us. As sister and brother, they were 7 and 3 when their family was interned in 1942. This was their first trip back.
We were also privileged to have Bainbridge Island resident Kay Sakai Nakao accompany us on this journey, who was 22 when she was sent with her family to Manzanar. This was her second trip back. We were also joined by Mary Woodward, daughter of Walt and Milly Woodward, who were the editors of the Bainbridge Review during the years of WWII and ran the only paper in the US that offered Japanese-Americans a voice and vital link with their Island community. Mary recently authored a book about her parents, WWII and the Internment called: “In Defense of our Neighbors”, which contains a rich collection of facts, photographs and artifacts we will be drawing from for this project.
Surrounding this trip, Global Source, in collaboration with others, will organize a series of dialogues, field trips, research forays and professional development sessions aimed at guiding the participating educators through a process of developing, implementing curriculum projects aimed at teaching students about the Japanese-American Internment experience, with an emphasis on integrating these projects within the WA State Social Studies Classroom Based Assessments.
We are looking to collect primary and secondary source material which can help students in the 21st century bear witness to the internment of our island neighbors in a comprehensively lived and local way. The participants will be building starter libraries and banks of curricular resources for their classrooms, which we will be sharing with the wider educational community. We will also be sharing what we learn from this project with local teachers through a professional development program we will hold as the culmination of this pilot project.
For more information about this program, please contact Global Source
