nwasianweekly.com
Jan. 12, 2008

Photo provided by Julia Kang

The Japanese American teachers who met to discuss their lives and their work with UW researcher Nathalie Gehrke: (top row, from left) research assistant Julie Kang, Lily Takasutka, Bette Inui, Sharon Aburano, researcher Nathalie Gehrke, (bottom row, from left) Miyoko Kaneta, Mako Nakagawa and Lily Shitama.

Teachers remember life lessons

UW researcher uncovers treasure of memories

By Eric Wagner
Northwest Asian Weekly

Last Nov. 16, six retired women and a few of their husbands met for lunch at the University of Washington Club on the UW campus in Seattle. All of the women were Japanese American teachers who had spent much of their careers in the Seattle Public School system. For them, the lunch was, in a way, a reunion.

They had been brought together by Dr. Nathalie Gehrke, a professor of education at UW, and Julie Kang, her graduate assistant. In 2005, Gehrke had received a small grant from the University of Washington’s Institute for Ethnic Studies. She and Kang wanted to take oral histories of K-12 teachers of Asian descent. These women had been their subjects.

“There’s been a lot of interest broadly in the Asian American experience,” said Kang in an interview. “But in (the field of) education, there’s been almost no interest, outside of a few articles here and there.”

As it happened, one of the first teachers who agreed to be interviewed had been Japanese American. So, for the sake of expedience, Gehrke and Kang decided to focus on the experiences of Japanese American women. And after some diligent searching through old yearbooks, 50 years of teacher directories and even a yoga class, they found 11 subjects who were willing to be interviewed.

Gehrke and Kang wanted to study how the subjects’ cultural and racial background informed their teaching methods. They also wanted to know how major life events, particularly ones where race was a factor, influenced a subject’s teaching persona. But oral histories can be funny things, and they don’t always adhere to their intended topics. Instead, they stray and meander, until they become more than a rote progression through a series of research questions.

Such was the case for Gehrke and Kang. “We were looking to get whole life histories,” said Gehrke. “We welcomed as much information as the women were willing to provide.”
They were willing, it turned out, to provide quite a lot. As the researchers listened, they heard stories of the women’s inadvertent, understated courage and perseverance.

Many of the women had taught either during or after World War II. Some had stories of internment camps, of relocating across the country to get away from the camps, of being turned away from teaching jobs because of their ethnicity. But they also told of Quakers who tried to get women who were interned into colleges so they could leave the camps, and other small kindnesses.
For the teachers, the ordeal was no big deal, a mere product of a time and place and their own coincidental roles. “When you interview these women,” said Kang, “they all say, ‘There’s nothing special about me.’ But you listen and you hear about their leadership, their innovation. They’ve done quite a lot in life. Talking gives them a chance to reflect on that.”

“I think it’s satisfying for them,” added Gehrke. “And that makes it all the more pleasant for us. You feel like you’ve given them a gift.”

Although they have finished with this round of research, Gehrke and Kang are now looking to expand the study even further. They have approval to collect 14 more interviews. They want to include Chinese teachers, Korean teachers and even male teachers. “This project has opened a door to an area of research that has not been examined,” said Gehrke.

And so, recorders in hand, she and Kang will ask some of the same questions, probe similar veins of the past, and see where it takes them. “We say, ‘Tell us, what do you remember about this?’” said Kang. “Then we just let them talk. They’re so vivid in their memories.”

Eric Wagner can be reached at info@nwasianweekly.com.

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