Engaging K–12 Audiences in Archival Studies and Memory Work
BY JOANIE HARMON
W Below: Vietnamese refugees from the First Indo-Chinese War, 1955. Image is called “Prayer for Refuge.”
hile speaking to middle and high school students as the co-author of the 2022 book, “A People’s Guide to Orange County,” Thuy Vo Dang has found that young people are interested in archives as a concept, even if they don’t exactly know the pre-digital meaning of the word. “They hear the word ‘archive’ and they usually think it means putting a couple of photographs on your computer and putting it in a folder,” says Vo Dang, an assistant professor in the UCLA Department of Information Studies. “They don’t really understand the nuance and complexity of what archival studies is and what memory work really means, like the stakes of that work for your community … empowering your community to have a voice in history books and in narratives that we tell in public about ourselves, our families or communities.” Professor Vo Dang is currently working on a project funded by the Wallace Foundation to assess the needs of BIPOCserving arts organizations in preserving their history, with UCLA colleagues Michelle Caswell, professor of information studies, and Tonia Sutherland, assistant professor of information studies. “So much of community history is located in these arts institutions, and they are even more underfunded than the mainstream arts organizations,” Vo Dang says. “They’re usually small in capacity. Their operating budgets are so small that they sometimes don’t qualify for these larger grants, and so to really understand and address their needs, we needed to do field research. “This past year, we surveyed 113 arts organizations across the country that serve Black, Indigenous, People of Color communities, from dance to visual arts,” she says. “They are led by BIPOC folks as well. Our survey results weren’t very surprising. A lot of these organizations felt like when they [worked] with universities, academic researchers, or students who are sent to intern with them, they often wouldn’t support anything that was sustainable for these organizations in preserving their histories in the long run. It was always a one-and-done situation, so there’s a lot of mistrust of institutions that continue to inform the way that BIPOC arts organizations operate.” Professors Caswell, Sutherland, and Vo Dang are co- directors of the UCLA Community Archives Lab, which matches students with community archives such as the Chinese Historical Society, the El Monte La Historia Historical Society and Museum, and the Texas After Violence Project. The students, who are trained in community archiving principles, work on projects to help catalog, preserve, and exhibit the holdings of these archives.
32 UCLA Ed&IS WINTER 2024
Thuy Vo Dang, assistant professor in the UCLA Department of Information Studies, discusses how an understanding of memory work and archives will enhance K–12 learning, with ways to preserve and empower marginalized communities with a commitment to teaching about identity based on primary sources such as refugee art.