I had never thought much about New Zealand before moving to Salt Lake City in 2011. I love to travel and I suppose it was on the long list of places I wanted to visit, but it wasn’t near the top and the most I had heard about it was that it was a great place for wwoofing and it was a little like stepping back in time, in a good way (I’m not exactly sure what that was supposed to mean, but that’s what someone told me).
Fast forward to life in Salt Lake City. For the first time I had students who were Pacific Islander. They made casual references to Samoa, Tonga, and sometimes, New Zealand. Most often New Zealand came up as a place where other relatives had immigrated, instead of the US. I began to learn a little about the connections between the LDS Church and Pacific Islanders. Last summer I even visited Ioseppa, out in the desert west of Salt Lake City. All of this made me curious to know more about my PI students, their culture, and how it was that they ended up in Salt Lake City. (In general, I love all the random stories of how we ended up in SLC.)
Spring of 2014, I met a guy named Daniel Hernandez when he came to visit our school. I thought he was great and I took him up on his offer to collaborate in curriculum planning. He happened to mention his wife was from New Zealand.
One thing I had always wanted to do was have students decide the curriculum for the year. I’ll save the details of this for another blog post, but long story short, having students decide the curriculum led to lots of great conversations about whose history gets taught, and why. One day, one of my amazing PI students said something to the effect of, “You know, my family always tells us that our culture is so important, but I’ve never gotten to learn about it in school.” There was a hint of sadness in her voice, but mostly it seemed like genuine confusion—like wait a second, if this is so important, how come schools don’t teach it? Even at an amazing school like ours, she had never heard the message that her history was school-worthy.
I’ve long wanted to find ways to teach more of the history of the lands my students feel connected with (in Salt Lake it was primarily Mexico and Samoa) and so all of this was in my mind as I began my Fulbright application. Initially I had envisioned applying to go to a place like Palestine or Israel, where history is a clearly contested subject. I wanted to learn who was writing the curriculum, how teachers were interpreting it, resisting it, building on it, etc. I like to think that history classrooms can help heal communities, rather than further divide them. I hoped to see examples.
However, fall of 2014, when I looked at the list of possible destinations for the Fulbright Distinguished Award in Teaching, I saw New Zealand on the list and it clicked. I wanted to see how they were bringing Pasifika (their term for Pacific Islanders) history and culture into classrooms, social studies classrooms specifically. I envisioned at least one unit in my World History class could be built from what I learned in New Zealand and had grander dreams of creating a semester-long Pacific Islander Studies class. Plenty of people in Salt Lake could help me do this, but the people with the most expertise are not high school social studies teachers, so I could potentially learn enough to not embarrass myself and then bring together others and we could create something great. (Underlying question: How do we get more PI teachers in SLC?)
I listed Palestine and Israel as my second and third options on my Fulbright application, but since the entire application was focused on my New Zealand interests, I’m not sure those places were ever even up for consideration. (And no one I know got their second or third choice.)
A few life changes later, and I’m now living in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with not a Pacific Islander student in sight. But New Zealand here I come.
Fast forward to life in Salt Lake City. For the first time I had students who were Pacific Islander. They made casual references to Samoa, Tonga, and sometimes, New Zealand. Most often New Zealand came up as a place where other relatives had immigrated, instead of the US. I began to learn a little about the connections between the LDS Church and Pacific Islanders. Last summer I even visited Ioseppa, out in the desert west of Salt Lake City. All of this made me curious to know more about my PI students, their culture, and how it was that they ended up in Salt Lake City. (In general, I love all the random stories of how we ended up in SLC.)
Spring of 2014, I met a guy named Daniel Hernandez when he came to visit our school. I thought he was great and I took him up on his offer to collaborate in curriculum planning. He happened to mention his wife was from New Zealand.
One thing I had always wanted to do was have students decide the curriculum for the year. I’ll save the details of this for another blog post, but long story short, having students decide the curriculum led to lots of great conversations about whose history gets taught, and why. One day, one of my amazing PI students said something to the effect of, “You know, my family always tells us that our culture is so important, but I’ve never gotten to learn about it in school.” There was a hint of sadness in her voice, but mostly it seemed like genuine confusion—like wait a second, if this is so important, how come schools don’t teach it? Even at an amazing school like ours, she had never heard the message that her history was school-worthy.
I’ve long wanted to find ways to teach more of the history of the lands my students feel connected with (in Salt Lake it was primarily Mexico and Samoa) and so all of this was in my mind as I began my Fulbright application. Initially I had envisioned applying to go to a place like Palestine or Israel, where history is a clearly contested subject. I wanted to learn who was writing the curriculum, how teachers were interpreting it, resisting it, building on it, etc. I like to think that history classrooms can help heal communities, rather than further divide them. I hoped to see examples.
However, fall of 2014, when I looked at the list of possible destinations for the Fulbright Distinguished Award in Teaching, I saw New Zealand on the list and it clicked. I wanted to see how they were bringing Pasifika (their term for Pacific Islanders) history and culture into classrooms, social studies classrooms specifically. I envisioned at least one unit in my World History class could be built from what I learned in New Zealand and had grander dreams of creating a semester-long Pacific Islander Studies class. Plenty of people in Salt Lake could help me do this, but the people with the most expertise are not high school social studies teachers, so I could potentially learn enough to not embarrass myself and then bring together others and we could create something great. (Underlying question: How do we get more PI teachers in SLC?)
I listed Palestine and Israel as my second and third options on my Fulbright application, but since the entire application was focused on my New Zealand interests, I’m not sure those places were ever even up for consideration. (And no one I know got their second or third choice.)
A few life changes later, and I’m now living in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with not a Pacific Islander student in sight. But New Zealand here I come.