This guide is the result of a unique educational partnership between one of the nation’s foremost advocates of civil rights and social justice for Asian Americans and others, Advancing Justice - LA, and the nation’s leading research center and department on Asian Americans, the UCLA Asian American Studies Center (UCLA AASC). 

In schools and classrooms, Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month is an excellent time to explore the rich history and culture of people who are AAPI as well as analyzing the bias and discrimination faced by them. As with other similarly themed months, it is important not to isolate exploration of AAPI history and culture into one month during the year. Asian American Pacific Islander history is American history and should be integrated into the curriculum throughout the school year.  

Join the Share My Lesson community in celebrating the generations of Asian and Pacific Islander Americans who have enriched global society, playing a critical role in its development and success. With our wealth of prek-12 digital resources, you and your students can explore the remarkable contributions that AAPI Americans have given to history, culture, the sciences, industry, government and more.  

The Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center has new resources available for you to connect with and learn from Asian American educators who have created materials you can use in the classroom, and workshop opportunities for educators to practice teaching Asian American stories. 

This toolkit represents the work and thinking of 15 grassroots organizations with Asian American bases living in the most precarious margins of power: low-income tenants, youth, undocumented immigrants, low-wage workers, refugees, women and girls, and queer and trans people. It reflects their experiences with criminalization, deportation, homophobia, xenophobia and Islamo-racism, war, gender violence, poverty, and worker exploitation. All of the modules are designed to begin with people’s lived experiences, and to build structural awareness of why those experiences are happening, and how they are tied to the oppression of others. By highlighting the role of people’s resistance both past and present, the toolkit also seeks to build hope and a commitment to political struggle. In these perilous times, it is an intervention by today’s Asian American activists to restore our collective humanity across our differences through a practice of deep democracy, by looking first to history and then to one another to build a vigilant and expansive love for the people. 

In this series of virtual workshops, the Asian American Education Project will be showcasing our curriculum on the Asian Pacific Islander Desi American (“APIDA”) experience. These workshops are divided into various themes to make it easier for educators to adapt the entire or part of the curriculum into their own teaching practice. Workshop participants will: