War, Genocide, and Curriculum: Cambodian Americans Challenging Historical Amnesia in K-12 Schooling

• In Event: Asian American Pedagogies as Remedy: Resisting Systemic Erasure

Abstract

Purpose
Over the past two years, I have been working with the Orange County Department of Education to help establish a model K-12 curriculum on the Cambodian Genocide for the state of California (CA SB-895). The bill orders that educational entities collaborate with community groups, genocide survivors, and cultural experts to develop curricula that brings visibility to Cambodian, Hmong, and Vietnamese histories in the United States and prior to U.S. arrival. In this paper, I describe some of the growing pains of this work and argue that for Cambodian Americans, the struggle for culturally relevant curriculum is a fight against both mainstream forgetting as well as an Asian American hegemony that invisibilizes Southeast Asian American experiences.

Perspective
This paper engages Lin Goodwin’s (2010) notion of “curriculum as colonizer” in relation to the invisibility of Asian Americans in the U.S. school system. Through this project specifically, I examine what Cathy Schlund-Vials (2012) has labeled the Cambodian Syndrome which refers to the troubling dismissal of the Cambodian genocide as little more than collateral damage from Vietnam war. In U.S. schooling, this has led to a historical and political amnesia towards Cambodia and its people, including those who have resettled in U.S. communities.

Method
I use case study to tell this story about the Cambodian Genocide curriculum in the state of California. This approach is appropriate when the phenomenon of interest has ill-defined boundaries and real-life complexity that requires multiple data sources to gain an in-depth understanding (Yin, 2014).

Data sources
The data that comprise this study include literature, notes, and reflections on the Cambodian genocide curriculum project across two years.

Findings
I describe this story through a series of critical developments including how this political project emerged CA SB-895. This state mandate projects the growing voice of Southeast Asian Americans and should be understood as part of an ethnic studies movement nationally that seeks schooling that is decolonial and self-determination for historically marginalized communities in the U.S. education system. I share how the Cambodian Genocide model curriculum, as a political and pedagogical project, challenges the historical amnesia of U.S. curriculum that encourages forgetting as a tool of acculturation and colonization.

Significance
The official knowledge that is sanctioned by dominant curricula rarely allows for those most affected by events to represent these histories on their own terms. This paper helps make clear that the Cambodian genocide is an event that must be centered, understood, and foregrounded in the classroom. Moreover, this paper describes this curricular work as a critical intervention into the Cambodian Syndrome, the historic amnesia that characterize official U.S. positions in schools and elsewhere.

Author

• Vichet Chhuon, University of Minnesota