I think of teaching at the college level as part curriculum development and part pedagogy. Curriculum is what you teach, and pedagogy is how you teach. For me, curriculum development includes designing syllabi, locating reading materials, and composing lectures, while pedagogy covers lesson planning, leading class discussion, and designing assignments, exams, and other forms of assessment. While I wish I could devote more time to pedagogy, curriculum development looms large for virtually all of us who teach on Vietnam and Southeast Asia because of the paucity of available teaching materials. There are numerous textbooks, primary source readers, teachable movies, and lesson plans for more developed fields like American, European, or East Asian history. But there’s far fewer resources for teaching Vietnam and Southeast Asia, and having to spend so much time on the what limits how much time instructors on the how. I simply can’t focus on lesson planning when I have to translate primary sources from scratch or hunt down obscure readings for my students.
Curriculum development for my own students is an incredible amount of work, but there are very few venues in academia to share that sort of work. Peer-reviewed journals prefer to publish original research rather than syllabi, and a new translation of a primary source will not earn you tenure if you are working at a research university. Yet professors – who have one foot in research and another in teaching – are uniquely positioned to turn the newest, most cutting-edge scholarship into actual curriculum. In fact, that’s the coolest thing about teaching at the college level!
My interest in curriculum development also stems from my personal experience. I was dissatisfied with the way I was taught the Vietnam War in high school because it flattened out the complexity and diversity of the Vietnamese dimensions of the war. It also seemed to erase Vietnamese refugees like my family from history. Moreover, when I started college, I was shocked to discover that the history curriculum at the K-12 level was sometimes a decade or two behind the research. So starting around 2021, when I was no longer worried about my tenure case, I began dabbling more and more in curriculum development. I worked with the now-shuttered Choices Program on a series of teaching videos and presented at four or five teaching workshops for K-12 educators.
The purpose of this irregular series is to share the materials I’ve created for these workshops and for my own students. The posts will typically focus on a single text, movie, or topic. This series is aimed at college instructors and high school teachers, and some posts may be useful for middle school teachers as well. As a history professor, I’m not the best person to offer lesson plans for the K-12 level and especially not for disciplines outside of my own. I also can’t tell you whether a particular book is a good fit for which K-12 grade level. But what I can do is provide background information, translate primary sources, and suggest supplementary readings on Vietnamese history and the Vietnam War – all from a Vietnam-centered perspective.
Image credit: cottonbro, https://www.pexels.com/photo/white-book-page-on-brown-wooden-table-4778341/