Place, Memory, and Historical Injustice: Learning History on an Internment-Era Bus Tour

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 13
  In Roundtable Session: Complicity, Identity, and Nationalism in History Curriculum

Abstract

This paper explores a unique educational experience called the Landscapes of Injustice Field School. This two-week course, attended by teachers, university students, and community members, was oriented around a bus-tour of Japanese Canadian internment sites. The Field School’s purpose was to teach the history of Japanese Canadian dispossession, incarceration, and exile during and after the Second World War, and to promote it as a topic for Canadian history curriculum. This paper analyses the Field School using theories of collective memory, place, and difficult history to consider how participants were involved in developing, sustaining, and spreading memories of the internment era. The paper also examines how historic sites of injustice raise pedagogical issues about the relationship between complicity, memory, and identity.

Author

• James Miles, Teachers College, Columbia University