After nearly two years of advocacy, petitions, and board meetings, a new course — Eastern Perspectives on Global Events Through Literature — is coming to our school.
The idea began when students began noticing a discrepancy within our school’s curriculum: global history was often taught primarily through Western perspectives. Olivia Huang, an officer for the HHS Affinity Club, noted that she “never really learned about [her] own culture in school throughout elementary or middle school.” Huang added, “not seeing your own culture represented in school can really impact students. If you’re constantly learning about everyone else but yourself, you start to think, ‘oh, maybe my history is not that important.'” However, she is not alone. Affinity Club officer Maya Ganeshananthan had a similar experience, feeling as though not all cultures and perspectives are equally represented within the Hastings High School curriculum. Ganeshananthan added that “we’re all supposed to be learning in an environment where all perspectives are valued, but if only some perspectives are taught in school, people are going to learn to be biased and only value those same perspectives.”
Stemming from injustices found within the HHS curriculum, members of the Affinity Club have worked for nearly two years to advocate for the implementation of a new, more diverse course. From the start, according to Grace Smith, they “were open to really anything” — an Advanced Placement (AP) College Board course, a State University of New York (SUNY) course, or an elective — yet ultimately settled on an honors course. The club even created a petition with over 100 student signatures in support of an earlier AP course proposal at HHS, helping convince administrators that “this course is important and interesting,” as Huang put it. While the option of AP African American Studies was initially discussed with Dr. Tesfa Stewart, students say they were “subtly discouraged because of the rigor and the difficulty of finding a teacher.” Ultimately, the school decided to create an honors course instead, which Olivia Huang described as “a good middle ground,” because it’s a somewhat “boosted elective because of the honors credit.”
Last year, according to Mrs. Walters, “a number of English teachers met with members of the Affinity Club who mentioned wanting to have greater representation of authors of color in the English curriculum.” Following their conversation, the middle and high school English departments reviewed the curriculum, and “were able to see some holes and also to see some cohesion as well.” From there, they began designing the course which Mr. Cid Greenberg is set to teach next year. The class is set to focus on pivotal events in contemporary world history, like the Vietnam War, the AIDS/HIV Crisis, and 9/11, to facilitate conversations and analysis about how these events were experienced in non-Western cultural contexts and how literature reflects those often overlooked realities.
At its core, the motivation behind the class is personal and urgent. Olivia Huang reflected that “the curriculum tends to focus on a narrow portion of Asia, and it often overlooks the rich diversity within Asian cultures and identities,” mentioning how school “only really talked about China a couple of times, and never really talked about Korea and Taiwan.” The lack of representation,” especially at a younger age. She notes that learning about topics like the Chinese Exclusion Act for the first time at 17 years old is exactly the problem the implementation of the course aims to fix. Learning about important aspects of her culture as a junior in high school underscored for her how these topics could have been introduced much earlier, as she noted that “there are so many important parts of their own cultures that students don’t get to learn about until later grades.” In the new course, additionally, she hopes for there to be a greater emphasis on the positives of diverse cultures through Eastern perspectives, and moments or traditions that are talked about less frequently.
Others described the broader impact of a Eurocentric curriculum. Maya Ganeshananthan notes that for younger students especially, “their perspectives are heavily shaped by what they learn in school, whether they realize it or not,” and adds that “all opinions and ideas of history should be valued in order to create a stronger sense of the world for these students.” Ganeshananthan makes the point that only learning about certain perspectives or events can “sometimes end up with [younger students] mistreating fellow students” due to internalized stereotypes and incomplete historical narratives that school curricula may unintentionally promote. In her eyes, creating a class centered around Eastern perspectives on global events may allow students to “start to realize that some of the things they’ve learned in school have been from a biased point of view,” and that by broadening their perspectives, students can “start to value learning about different ideas, thoughts, and experiences.”
Importantly, they see this as a class for everyone. “I think that this class can be really beneficial for all students — students of color and those who are not. It will prompt people to reflect on biases within themselves and within society as a whole, and I think that’ll be really valuable.”
Looking ahead, students hope that this is only the beginning. Ideally, the ideas behind this course would extend beyond a single high school course, and shape a more diverse curriculum earlier on in life. They reference the New York State “Hidden Voice” curriculum, an initiative by the New York City Department of Education that aims to bring the histories and contributions of underrepresented communities into classrooms, and suggested that bringing more of those materials and conversations into younger grades could make inclusion “more systemic and ingrained into the curriculum.”
When asked what this course says about the kind of education the world needs right now, Olivia Huang put it simply: “in an ideal world, we would learn about every single country and every single variation of people, but that’s obviously impossible.” Still, she encourages, “we should strive to get as close to that as possible.” Ganeshananthan concludes that education should “help students feel comfortable with the idea of multiple cultures interacting with one another, and valuing each other’s differences,” which is exactly the objective of Eastern Perspectives on Global Events Through Literature.
