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Engaging K-12 Audiences in Archival Studies and Memory Work
BY JOANIE HARMON
While speaking to middle and high school students as the co-author of the 2022 book, “A People’s Guide to Orange County,” Thuy Vo Dang has found that young people are interested in archives as a concept, even if they don’t exactly know the pre-digital meaning of the word.
“They hear the word ‘archive’ and they usually think it means putting a couple of photographs on your computer and putting it in a folder,” says Vo Dang, an assistant professor in the UCLA Department of Information Studies. “They don’t really understand the nuance and complexity of what archival studies is and what memory work really means, like the stakes of that work for your community … empowering your community to have a voice in history books and in narratives that we tell in public about ourselves, our families or communities.”
Professor Vo Dang is currently working on a project funded by the Wallace Foundation to assess the needs of BIPOCserving arts organizations in preserving their history, with UCLA colleagues Michelle Caswell, professor of information studies, and Tonia Sutherland, assistant professor of information studies.
“So much of community history is located in these arts institutions, and they are even more underfunded than the mainstream arts organizations,” Vo Dang says. “They’re usually small in capacity. Their operating budgets are so small that they sometimes don’t qualify for these larger grants, and so to really understand and address their needs, we needed to do field research.
“This past year, we surveyed 113 arts organizations across the country that serve Black, Indigenous, People of Color communities, from dance to visual arts,” she says. “They are led by BIPOC folks as well. Our survey results weren’t very surprising. A lot of these organizations felt like when they [worked] with universities, academic researchers, or students who are sent to intern with them, they often wouldn’t support anything that was sustainable for these organizations in preserving their histories in the long run. It was always a one-and-done situation, so there’s a lot of mistrust of institutions that continue to inform the way that BIPOC arts organizations operate.”
Professors Caswell, Sutherland, and Vo Dang are codirectors of the UCLA Community Archives Lab, which matches students with community archives such as the Chinese Historical Society, the El Monte La Historia Historical Society and Museum, and the Texas After Violence Project. The students, who are trained in community archiving principles, work on projects to help catalog, preserve, and exhibit the holdings of these archives.
Thuy Vo Dang, assistant professor in the UCLA Department of Information Studies, discusses how an understanding of memory work and archives will enhance K–12 learning, with ways to preserve and empower marginalized communities with a commitment to teaching about identity based on primary sources such as refugee art.
“Before sending them out to partner with these arts organizations, we need to understand what the organizations’ unmet needs are,” says Vo Dang. “I see the work that we’re doing with the Wallace Foundation BIPOC arts study as having a potential ripple effect. We’re focused on the organizations, how to serve them, and how to train our students while doing that.”
Professor Vo Dang is serving on a UCLA Information Studies committee to develop an undergraduate degree program, and says that, “The urgency is getting the work we do in information studies and archival studies to translate to a much younger audience than we’ve been able to do so far through our graduate program. That’s one step, scaling from graduate studies to undergraduate studies. And then for me, even younger audiences are really important to engage.”
Vo Dang is about to do just that. She was invited to write a chapter on Vietnamese American history for “Foundations and Futures: Multimedia Textbook on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.” Led by the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, the textbook is aimed at ninth grade to early college and is being created with a $10 million grant from the California State legislature.
Vo Dang, who used digital primary source materials that include refugee artwork and oral history interviews, is excited about the project and says it is a true collaboration between higher education and K–12 educators, including STEM and history teachers.
“The textbook involves hundreds of experts and curriculum designers,” she says. “We have a whole lot of involvement from partners who are K–12 STEM and history teachers. The curriculum developer that I’m working with onmy chapter is a history teacher from the Irvine Unified School District. She’s great at fostering creativity among young learners, so there are some assignments that include making art, conducting oral history interviews with elders, or even thinking about food as an accessible entry point.
So much of community history is located in these arts institutions, and they are even more underfunded than the mainstream arts organizations. They’re usually small in capacity. Their operating budgets are so small that they sometimes don’t qualify for these larger grants, and so to really understand and address their needs, we needed to do field research.
“We try to make these kinds of materials and entry points accessible to younger learners, and then the out puts they create serve to focus on their own empowerment as creators,” says Vo Dang. “So many students first learn about a different point of view, commu nity, or their neighbors through food. There is a module focused on bánh mì, the Vietnamese sandwich and Cà Phê Sữa Đá, or Vietnamese iced coffee, as a way to think about the history of French colonialism and the way cultures get hybridized as a consequence of terrible geopolitical forces. We ask students to analyze aspects of Vietnamese identity embedded in these products that came out of colonialism, then we prompt them to think about other such food or products from [their] own community—spaghetti or pizza, or whatever that they take for granted, as everyday products of consumption. These might tell a deeper and richer history, if you only pause to reflect and think about how your identity might be related to them.”
The textbook’s commitment to teaching about the complexity of identity is evident in the assignments, many of which are based on primary sources such as refugee art. Vo Dang says that these materials particularly resonate with younger learners.
“It’s both art history [and] history … that really captures the lived experience, the feelings and the sentiments of people who are escaping a war-torn country,” she says.
“When you teach about refugees, what you’ll find is there are a ton of records that exist on refugee communities because they tend to be over-documented by state actors, by governments, by the United Nations, and all of these larger external forces … these are top-down records and were not created by these communities. They do not capture how individuals actually lived through, coped with, and survived these moments. You can’t really get at that without looking at the artwork that’s produced by them and the oral history and testimony that comes out of the community.
“That younger learners can be creative themselves and produce meaningful artwork from what they’re learning or co-create with their elders and community members … teaching all of that fosters a sense of a deeper investment in the stories that they’re learning,” says Vo Dang. “And for students who are represented by curriculum like that, it is empowering to see themselves represented, to see their stories be valued and taught. Students who aren’t represented in a chapter like the Vietnamese American experience can enrich and deepen their understanding of another culture and find intersections with their own culture.”
Professor Vo Dang underscores the inquiry-based connections between how students in the UCLA Department of Information Studies are trained in the archival fields, and how those same points of inquiry translate to K–12 education.
“These are models that can be scaled to the K–12 sector because these are all questions relevant in the high school curriculum: Whose voice matters? Who gets to write the narrative about the past? What are the tools that we use to write these narratives?” she says. “These are the types of questions that UCLA IS is training [our] students to ask, so it makes perfect sense to ask those questions at a younger age. When they are in their American history class or their world history class and they’re studying colonialism, they can apply these more critical and complex questions and think about themselves as actors in the creation and dissemination of these stories, so that when they see a gap in the K–12 textbook, they can ask, ‘What can I do to write counternarratives or fill in the gaps, and what are some of the methods that I can use?’
“It’s the sense of social responsibility that you want to instill [in students], that they have a role to play in knowledge production and the dissemination of knowledge,” says Professor Vo Dang. “And it leverages what students already have in their possession—that you kind of pull out a little bit more—which is curiosity.”
It’s both art history [and] history … that really captures the lived experience, the feelings and the sentiments of people who are escaping a war-torn country. When you teach about refugees, what you’ll find is there are a ton of records that exist on refugee communities because they tend to be over-documented by state actors, by governments, by the United Nations, and all of these larger external forces … these are top-down records and were not created by these communities. They do not capture how individuals actually lived through, coped with, and survived these moments.
