MAAEA

Anh Hong 291 Adams Street Dorchester, MA FRIDAY, OCTOBER 3, 4-7pm 617-285-1489 Join us for an early happy hour at Anh Hong, a great Vietnamese restaurant in Dorchester. It's a chance to get together with Asian American educators in the greater Boston area! Light refreshments will be provided. Also, there's a great menu of Vietnamese food and alcoholic beverages. Bring a friend to introduce them to the MAAEA network! Hope to see you there!

It was a busy few days last week! In addition to the book reading by Kevin Kumashiro (see below), we participated in the Social Justice Fair organized by API Movement Boston . A few new folks stopped by our table-- hope they join us! Then the next day (Saturday, May 3), we had our monthly social gathering. There were a ton of delicious snacks, and we had some interesting discussions. We talked about the what it's like being Asian American educators in schools where most students are not Asian American. We talked about some issues particular to our own work settings and noted differences between pilot schools and regular district schools. Then Natalie Lau, one of our members, shared a slideshow of her recent educational trip to Bangladesh. One of the most valuable learnings was some tips for using PowerPoint. We hope to continue in this vein, having discussions and presentations from members for us all to be able to learn from each other. Our next meeting will be at Pam Chu...

Here's a link to a great article on some important work being done on Asian American students with special needs in schools. Spotlight on Lusa Lo, a MAAEA member and professor at the Graduate College of Education at UMass Boston! excerpts from "Asian Students Left behind on Special Education" By Tracy Jan Globe Staff / February 9, 2008 Asians make up 9 percent of students in Boston schools, but only 3 percent of those enrolled in special education, a disparity that has led to fears that many are not getting the help they need. On a recent night, after a dinner of eggrolls and noodles, a special-education professor from the University of Massachusetts at Boston lectured the parents in their native Cantonese on the importance of understanding their children's Individualized Education Plans. She passed out sample forms, translated into Chinese, along with a glossary of terms like autism, benchmarks, and accommodation. The hope is that these pa...

Thanks to those who came out to Kevin Kumashiro's book reading! It was an interesting presentation, especially with current issues such as presidential race, NCLB up for reauthorization, the economic downturn, etc. Support a fellow progressive educator by buying his book, The Seduction of Common Sense! Hope to see some folks at our next meeting, Saturday, May 3, 2008, from 5-7pm at Biba Fullon's place 345 Washington Street, Cambridge.

Please join us! Join author, educator, and activist DR. KEVIN K. KUMASHIRO as he discusses his new book, "THE SEDUCTION OF COMMON SENSE: How the Right Has Fra med the Debate on America's Schools." Date: Tuesday, April 29, 2008 Time: 6:15 PM Where: Crane Room, Paige Hall, Tufts University Medford, MA 02155 Just in time for the 2008 elections, The Seduction of Common Sense offers a powerful examination of current education policy initiatives as framed by the rhetoric of the political Right and the political Left. Critical of both sides, Kumashiro first provides a searching look at the Right and shows why it has succeeded so well in winning the debate about the purposes and possibilities of education. Here he brilliantly illuminates how the Right uses particular "frames"--appeals to conservative notions of the traditional family, free enterprise, goodness, and fear--to shape the public's common sense ideas about schooling and build support for its attacks on pu...

The next Curriculum Team Meeting, originally scheduled for 4/8/08 will be rescheduled due to some conflict in schedules. We'll keep you posted. At the last meeting, we carefully looked through Boston's USI and USII History Standards to highlight content areas that can include AA history. We plan to write AA-specific lesson plans (or gather resources for those lessons) to compile in a publication that can be given to teachers to use as a resource guide. At the next meeting, we plan to continue our examination of the USI and USII standards and identify teachers and resources that can help with the writing of lesson plans. We don't want to reinvent the wheel, so if you are a history teacher who already has lessons written, we can use your help! We can also use the help of any history buffs! Contact apa.educators@gmail.com for directions to the meeting, for more information, or if you're interested in helping in whatever capacity, large or small. Thanks, Sarah, Jessica, a...

February 12: We had a productive meeting despite being a small group. Here were some of the decisions made: We will be co-sponsoring an upcoming book talk for Kevin Kumashiro's new book The Seduction of Common Sense: How the Right Has Framed the Debate on America's Schools . It will be located at Tufts University, Department of Education, April 29, 2008 from 6-8pm. More info to come! We will also be helping to outreach the Race and Achievement series that Simmons College organizes. A few of us are going to the education advocates summit being sponsored by AALDEF and being held in New York in April. Information about it has gone out over the MAAEA listserve. We will be moving on building a curriculum resource on Asian American studies that we can eventually submit to the history chair of the Boston Public Schools. If anyone wants to contribute lessons they've used, please contact us: apa.educators@gmail.com. That's it in a nutshell. Our next meeting will be a mid-w...