Blackboards and Barbed Wire: Reconsidering the Teachers of Japanese Americans at the Minidoka Concentration Camp Schools

• In Event: Learning from Educators who have used the Profession as an Act of Resistance

Abstract

This paper centers on the teachers at the Minidoka Concentration Camp, one of ten camps run by the War Relocation Authority where Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II. While existing literature has often focused on official curriculum frameworks developed outside the camps, this study draws on letters, early publications, oral histories, and diaries to reveal the contested pedagogical inclinations and racial attitudes of the teachers themselves. By tracing the varied perspectives of educators, this paper shows how education in camp functioned as a battleground for defining the limits of racial liberalism under the realities of incarceration. These findings invite renewed attention to how educators can serve as instruments both of harm and care within state-sanctioned systems of injustice.

Author

• Abigail Jean Kahn, Stanford University