Educating Online for #StopAsianHate

By Zainab Cheema

On Friday, July 9, 2021, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker signed the TEAACH Act, which requires public schools to teach a unit of Asian American History. This historic move follows spike in anti-Asian hate crimes over the past year. The bill is motivation for education circles that have stressed the importance of teaching Asian American topics and history in ways that spread awareness, connectivity, and community.  In this post, I’ll be discussing a number lesson plans and resources that leverage the tools of virtual education towards stopping Asian hate.

The stakes of committing to #StopAsianHate and #StopAAPI hate are critical. On March 16, 2021, a series of mass shootings took place at three Asian massage parlors in Atlanta, GA. Eight people lost their lives, most of them Asian women. The incident was like exclamation mark punctuating a year of violence against Asian Americans. After Asians were blamed for the COVID-19 pandemic, hate crimes against Asians have skyrocketed. The Stop AAPI Hate coalition announced that it received reports of 3,795 hate incidents against Asian American and Pacific Islander communities from March 19, 2020, to Feb. 28 of this year. These included from attacks; beatings; harassment on the streets or in schools and workplaces; and the psychological fractures of micro-aggressions against the physical and emotional well-being of Asians and Asian Americans.

Resources and Lesson Plans for AAPI Justice:

Establishing Proportion

How can online education be used to address this issue? One approach is to help students understand marginalization in a visceral way. While COVID-19 has been the trigger to AAPI hate, there are often other socio-economic misperceptions driving the violence that takes place. Education for AAPI Justice often requires dismantling misperceptions of Asians as a “successful” model minority “occupying” a disproportionate number of jobs and opportunities.

• One strategy for lesson plans and training programs involves adapting Kellie Carter Jackson’s game with her students at Wellesley College. In her game, Dr. Jackson asks students to take out a sheet of paper and write down names of ten contemporary Americans making important contributions to society from each group category: Asian American, African American, LGTBQ+, Indigenous American, etc. The teacher or trainer can decide beforehand the criteria of being an important contributor to society, and whether to spotlight the activity on one group or keep it panoramic to include multiple groups. When they begin putting names on paper, students often come to realize the gap between the white majority and minority group(s) when they struggle to come up with names. This can be followed by discussion that helps students address their perceptions of the outgroup(s) and before and after the activity.
• This New York Times Lesson helps to humanize Asian and American students suffering the effects of discrimination and bullying in schools. Featuring a video with Asian American students navigating the classroom space after COVID-19, this NYT resource provides a useful set discussion questions to help guide conversation and reflection about the treatment of Asian and Asian Americans following incendiary rhetoric on “the Chinese virus” and “the Kung Flu.” The activity gets you to think—what would you feel like if you were made to feel like a virus?

Historical Context of #AAPI Hate

As teachers and educators known, context is king in the classroom. This leads us to our second set of strategies: helping students understand the historical context of stereotypes of Asians and Asian Americans in U.S. society. Race operates by defining an in-group against marginalized and excluded out-groups, which includes Asians and Asian Americans. Lesson plans can be developed by leveraging multi-media resources about the historical context of stereotypes throughout history, including the stereotypes associating out-groups with uncleanliness, disease, or pollution. Take a look at these resources:

• This Ithaca College Library resource has compiled an interactive timeline of Asian American stereotypes in media culture. Organizing film and media by decades, the resource gives you a tour from the 1919 Lilian Gish silent film Broken Blossoms (which featured a white actor in Asian face) to the 2015 Star Wars film A Force Awakens (which features Asian interspace gangsters). A lesson plan might involve asking students or trainees to watch clips from two or three historical sources and summarize the way Asian characters are represented. In class discussion, students and trainees can be asked to make connections between their analysis of the historic stereotypes in the snippets of film and media that they examined and stereotypes that they may have observed in our contemporary culture.

• This NPR resource contextualizes the historical racism through which we relate diseases with different world geographies. Historically, plagues and infectious diseases were often linked with minority groups and foreign geographic regions. “In 14th-century Europe, Jewish communities werewrongfully accused of poisoning wells to spread the Black Death. In 1900, Chinese people were unfairly vilified for an outbreak of the plague in San Francisco’s Chinatown. And in the ’80s, Haitians were blamed for bringing HIV/AIDS to the U.S.” Understanding the cultural stories that we have historically told ourselves about where pandemics come from helps us to dial down the COVID-19 fear factor towards places and spaces. This activity can be followed up by the teacher presenting data on how infectious disease works. This will help destabilize the tendency to blame certain regions for pandemics.

• For her Edutopia article, Sarita Kharuna sat down with sixth grade math teacher Dawoun Jyung to discuss how to combat Asian American stereotypes. Jyung designed a two-step lesson designed to humanize the victims; create the space for students to articulate the difficult reactions and emotions generated by the events; and to frame the violence within the history of anti-Asian and Asian American racism. In Step One (using this slide deck and lesson plan), Jyung played two news videos covering the rise in anti-Asian violence, and then offered a Google Form where students voiced their reactions. In Step Two (using this slide deck and lessonplan), Jyung played videos of historical incidents of Asian and Asian American marginalization in the United States. This step helped students make connections between incidents of violence they had previously discussed and the broader structures of race influencing our stories and scripts about minority groups.

Online education amplifies the opportunities to intervene in constructive, thought-provoking ways that could bring lasting change to our society. If you have an idea for a lesson plan or training session for #StopAsianHate and #StopAAPIHate, I’d love to hear from you.

Other Online Resources

• Asian Americans documentary on PBS
• Pear Deck Educational Resources on #StopAsianHate
• Asians for Black Lives
• Berkeley South Asian Radical History Tour
• Social Justice books for children
• Asian American Feminist Collective
• Asian American Racism and COVID-19 (website with resources)
• Resources for K12 teachers
• Anti-racism Coursera course