Unforgetting the Purpose of Ethnic Studies: Teaching about the Strike, Asian Americans as Activists, and Solidarity

• In Event: Unforgetting Ethnic Studies’ Radical Roots when Developing Curriculum on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders

Abstract

Purpose
We examine the radical roots of Ethnic Studies through the lens of Asian American activism, centering the 1968 Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) strikes and their enduring relevance in today’s struggles for liberatory education. As Ethnic Studies faces state-sanctioned co-optation and depoliticization, we advocate for a pedagogy rooted in collective struggle, structural critique, and solidarity—core principles of the field’s founding. Drawing from our work with the “Foundations and Futures: Asian American and Pacific Islander Multimedia Textbook,” we demonstrate how teaching Asian American activism as resistance counters historical erasure and neoliberal multiculturalism.

Pedagogical Frameworks
This presentation draws on two intersecting pedagogical approaches: solidarity as pedagogy and counter-hegemonic storytelling.
Solidarity as pedagogy foregrounds coalition-building, shared struggle, and accountability across differences. Inspired by the cross-racial organizing of the 1968 TWLF strikes, this framework positions activism as a collective and intergenerational project. Students are invited to reflect on their roles within systems of power, and how to be in solidarity across race, class, and geography.
Alongside solidarity, we employ a counter-hegemonic storytelling framework that disrupts portrayals of Asian Americans as invisible, apolitical, or peripheral to U.S. history. We center stories of Asian Americans as organizers, resistors, and cultural producers. In doing so, we challenge the idea that Asian Americans are merely the subjects of historical circumstance, rather than shapers of history.

We ask:
● What becomes of students in classrooms where Asian American agency and resistance is centered and when Asian Americans are portrayed as visionaries and builders of change?
● How do stories of cross-racial solidarity reshape our understanding of U.S. movements for justice?

Our lessons foreground Asian American student leadership in the TWLF, connecting their work to contemporary youth-led movements. Through storytelling, oral histories, and primary sources, we create space for students to engage Asian American history as a living, evolving struggle that they are invited to join—not simply observe.

Together, these frameworks offer an educational practice rooted in truth-telling, transformation, and refusal. They resist sanitized, state-approved curriculum and offer a liberatory pedagogy that reclaims Ethnic Studies as a project of justice, solidarity, and revolutionary memory.

Curriculum Sharing
Focusing on the TWLF strikes, we illustrate how Ethnic Studies cultivates critical consciousness by centering Asian Americans as activists, organizers, and coalition builders in cross-racial movements. We share classroom strategies that bridge past and present struggles, equipping students to defend and expand Ethnic Studies amid escalating political attacks. While the backlash against Ethnic Studies is nothing new, today’s assaults demand renewed resistance.

Learnings & Findings
Asian American students and activists were key leaders in the 1968 TWLF movement to institutionalize culturally rooted and community responsive curricula.

Reflections & Significance
By anchoring the curriculum in the 1968 strikers’ demands—self-determination, relevant education, and institutional transformation—we reclaim Ethnic Studies’ radical purpose, the explicit dismantling of oppressive systems. This presentation offers an "unforgetting" framework (Winn, 2025), a pedagogical practice rejecting sanitized narratives and reaffirming Ethnic Studies as a project of liberation. Through this lens, we invite educators to sustain the field’s revolutionary legacy in the face of ongoing repression.

Authors

• Jocyl Sacramento, California State University - East Bay

• Karmela Herrera, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Artnelson Concordia, Santa Barbara Unified School District

• Giselle Dejamco Cunanan, Gonzaga University