This article reports on a case study that investigated how six Japanese American youth interpreted the effectiveness and relevance of extra-curricular diversity initiatives at their Midwestern middle and secondary public schools. These initiatives were intended to raise cultural awareness, but ultimately promoted cultural fetishism and racially…

What did art education look like within the confines of the Japanese American Internment Camp classrooms? Did the art education in the camps reflect the same curriculum that was being taught outside the camps and what other factors may have played a part in the students' experience? I propose that there were at least three significant…

International revulsion at the violation of human rights during World War II helped spark a global movement to define and protect individual human rights. Starting with the creation of war crimes tribunals after the war, this newfound awareness stimulated a concerted international effort to establish human rights for all, both in periods of war…

The topic of bilingualism has aroused considerable interest in research on language acquisition in recent decades. Researchers in various fields, such as developmental psychology and psycholinguistics, have investigated bilingual populations from different perspectives in order to understand better how bilingualism affects cognitive abilities like…

In 2006, the Japanese American National Museum funded a three year curriculum development project entitled "Enduring Communities: Japanese Americans in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas and Utah." As a member of the team of teachers from New Mexico, I used this experience to study my process of developing meaningful content and pedagogy about…

Published research suggests that literature should transmit ethnic and societal values as well as reassure one's own confidence and self-respect. This study provides a model for examining Asian-American children's and adolescent literature critically from the perspective of identity issues. It examines fifteen award-winning Asian-American…

Japanese immigrants have been living in the United States for nearly 150 years. Yet, despite the continued presence of this population, there is not a lot of research to suggest why Japanese families have not become more active participants in preschools across the United States (US). In an attempt to understand this phenomenon, this paper…

In this article, we describe just one activity from an interdisciplinary social justice unit taught to two fifth-grade social studies classes with the use of Cynthia Kadohata's multicultural historical fiction novel "Weedflower." Often, our younger students feel their voices are silenced...their messages are not heard. Like many of…

Although much has been written recently about holistic orientations to transformative learning, including its theoretical foundations and frameworks for designing learning experiences that engage multiple epistemologies, little is known about learners' experiences and about how engaging multiple epistemologies can foster learning that is…

This qualitative interview study investigated Japanese understandings of spirituality, religion, and The Divine. Thirteen native Japanese living in central Ohio (6 male, 7 female) answered open-ended questions about spiritual or religious activities they engaged in, motivations for engaging in them, what constitutes sacredness, why humanity and…

Cultural variation in relations and moment-to-moment contingencies of infant-mother person-oriented and object-oriented interactions were compared in 118 Japanese, Japanese American immigrant, and European American dyads with 5.5-month-olds. Infant and mother person-oriented behaviors were related in all cultural groups, but infant and mother…

Ideological assumptions about childhood play into the production and selection of children's literature. Various ideologies proclaim that children should be happy and free from stories of evil, children's literature should help children encounter the joys in life, it should be filled with bright colors to keep children's attention, and it should…

Can a vivid presentation about a tragic chapter of history elicit in viewers an empathetic reaction, as well as evidence of the telescopic perspective Mills[1] ([1959] 2000) described as the "sociological imagination"? Does the addition of victims' voices make a noticeable difference in their response to the historical event, as…

With more than 180,000 copies in print, the first volume of "Rethinking Our Classrooms" broke new ground, providing teachers with hands-on ways to promote values of community, justice, and equality--and build students' academic skills. This companion volume continues in that tradition, presenting a rich new collection of from-the-classroom…

Although Japanese Americans' concept of "gaman" has been stereotypically associated with silent passivity, several practiced this principle as a form of resistance in personal writings about the U.S. government's incarceration of them during World War II. This article focuses on the relationship between gaman, an inherited cultural rhetoric often…