Teaching the History of the Vietnam Wars: A Geographic History of the Vietnam Wars Free

Four high school teachers who were part of a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute in 2022, “Contested Territory: America’s Involvement in Vietnam, 1945-75,” reflect on their teaching of the Vietnam wars and present an ensemble of classroom activities that have helped their students understand war in new ways. Master teachers who work in diverse classrooms across the United States, they offer innovative learning activities on the Vietnam wars that explore the everyday experiences of war; the roles of ideologies in shaping conflict; soundscapes of war; and the use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) to study the complex geographies of war. Framing essays by the Institute’s co-leaders provide context on new Vietnam war scholarship and the design of inquiry-based practices that foster critical historical thinking.

Three years into the official commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the first US combat mission in Vietnam, I happened to be teaching a course on the geography of modern Vietnam. On Memorial Day 2012, President Obama had proclaimed a “13-year program to honor and give thanks to a generation of proud Americans who saw our country through one of the most challenging missions we have ever faced.”¹ In 2015, Obama’s proclamation was the first reading I assigned to twenty-four first-year students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and it prompted a lively conversation. Asked to consider whom the document remembered, students praised how it “honored” American servicemen and servicewomen, some of whom were their grandparents. But some noted that it overlooked other Americans, including protesters who, one argued, had also stood up patriotically for democratic ideals. Moreover, many quickly grasped that the proclamation focused exclusively on American actors, mentioning nothing at all about the people of Vietnam. Why were they left out? How did they remember it? What were the war’s local causes and consequences?

Evaluating the commemoration for whom it forgot and remembered introduced a critical pedagogy that integrated history with geography. First, it revealed to students fresh out of high school that not even popular, relatively progressive presidents were infallible. Their ready critique of his American-centric point of view recognized that such near-sightedness left out other points of view, especially Vietnamese perspectives. Then, their recognition opened a line of inquiry pointing to the course’s goal: to introduce a large, diverse country with long, complex histories that informed multiple perspectives on what, in Vietnam, is commonly called “the American War.” My course thus featured a bit of bait and switch: Hook students with a war, then argue for understanding it within a geographic context grounded in places and peoples too often left out of the picture. Significantly, the exercise meant it was the students who argued for shifting the gaze.

Prepared for the leap from domestic to international perspective, I paired the presidential proclamation with another reading that foregrounded one of many Vietnamese points of view. In his aptly titled essay “The United States Isn’t the Only Country Still Trying to Figure Out the Vietnam War,” political scientist Tuong Vu starts with a different commemoration.² In Vietnam, April 30, 2015, was celebrated as the fortieth anniversary of the American War’s dramatic conclusion, when People’s Army tanks crashed through the gates of the Presidential Palace in Saigon. “Ever since,” Vu argues, “Hanoi leaders have sought to capitalize on their military victory to legitimize their rule.” Indeed, official memory there, including public school curricula, cultivates a narrative whereby Vietnam has heroically resisted foreign domination for four thousand years, first by China, then by France, and, finally, by the Americans.³ The Communist Party, so this nationalist story goes, led these latter struggles, ultimately winning independence and unifying the country. But, as Vu notes, Vietnam’s people have come to question this narrative due to greater information access via the internet and foreign travel. “Much to the government’s chagrin,” he writes, “Vietnamese now view the war as a proxy war and civil war rather than one for national liberation and unification.” It is a view increasingly shared by scholars as well.

Introducing students to multiple official and popular perspectives on the Vietnam War situates a younger generation in broader conversations about a past that is also the subject of vibrant scholarly debate. Over the last twenty years or so, historians have significantly revised understandings of not just the Second Indochina War (1955–1975), a.k.a. the Vietnam or American War, but also the First Indochina War (1946–1954), when Vietnam was fighting France, as well as itself, for independence. Tuong Vu himself has argued that Vietnam’s revolutionary elite were firmly committed to communist revolution, challenging a simplistic view that they were simply patriots seeking to liberate the country from foreign occupation.⁴ His work builds on research that lifts the veil on decision-making by wartime leaders in the northern Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), exposing bitter contests within the party-state over the second war’s course, conduct, and ultimate goals.⁵ Relatedly, historians have questioned the idea that the southern Republic of Vietnam (RVN) was simply a puppet of the US, illustrating instead a divergent trajectory rooted in distinct politics, cultural mix, and environments.⁶

Contests internal to Vietnam—or between different Vietnams—did not begin with the American intervention, as more recent scholarship has shown.⁷ Rather, much like its successor conflict, the First Indochina War exhibited the escalating, internecine violence characteristic of proxy and civil wars in addition to a war of independence, at that time from France.⁸ For this reason, some scholars have reconceptualized the two wars as one, namely the “Thirty Years War,” to emphasize underlying continuities.⁹ Regardless of collegial disagreements, the new scholarship agrees that fighting in and over Vietnam took place not only against foreigners but between the Vietnamese themselves.¹⁰ Furthermore, the entanglement of decolonization struggles with Cold War rivalries amplified violence, deepened social cleavages, extended military conflicts, and prolonged popular suffering.

Although I am not a specialist on the Second Indochina War, experience teaching it enriches my historical-geographic scholarship. Teaching relevant topics beyond my expertise forced me to broaden my knowledge, which, in turn, fine-tuned my expertise. In 2015, I happened also to be turning my dissertation into a book that examined the making of Vietnam from an area studies perspective. Pivoting on an oft-commemorated battle, Contested Territory examines Vietnam’s territorial production during and after the First Indochina War. Its focus is Dien Bien Phu, an out-of-the-way town in the mountains that hosted one of the twentieth-century’s most important battles. There, after months of preparation and sixty days of brutal siege warfare, the People’s Army stormed the headquarters of France’s elite Expeditionary Forces on May 7, 1954, capturing senior officers and clinching victory.¹¹ The battle’s denouement coincided with diplomatic negotiations at Geneva, where, in July 1954, the warring parties agreed to a ceasefire, effectively winning the war for Vietnam, rolling back French Indochina, and securing independence for Vietnam as well as Cambodia and Laos. But the Geneva Accords also partitioned Vietnam into North and South, sowing the seeds of subsequent conflict.¹² Ever since, the battle at Dien Bien Phu has tended to eclipse the place in popular memory, official commemoration, and scholarly accounts. For this reason, I opened my book by repurposing a phrase often used by scholars of Vietnam: “Just as scholars must often remind readers that Vietnam is a country, not just a war, so too is Dien Bien Phu a place, not just a battle.”¹³

Even if I did not really know it at the time, thinking with geographic concepts about Vietnam’s history guided my writing and teaching alike. Trained as a historical sociologist, inspired by the spatial turn, and employed as a geographer, I was finding new ways to conceptualize what was intrinsically a geographic-historical project. My starting point was geographer Doreen Massey’s idea of place as “a particular constellation of social relations” specific to moment and site yet woven out of larger spatial relations, longer temporal trajectories, and malleable environmental conditions.¹⁴ Composed as much of mountains and valleys and rivers and fields as the polyglot peoples who inhabited them, the place in question preceded, endured, and outlasted the 1954 event that took its name. The battle at Dien Bien Phu was but one of many contests over its resources, rule, and meaning—even as it transformed them all.

As in Dien Bien Phu, I came to realize, so too in Vietnam over a larger spatial scale and longer temporal period. To understand the town and its wartime situation I dug deep into the local cultures, polyvocal histories, and extralocal connections characteristic of the encompassing Black River borderlands, a region located at the crossroads of China, Laos, Siam (Thailand), and Vietnam.¹⁵ Part and parcel to highland Southeast Asia more broadly, the rugged region was and remains home to Tai, Hmong, Dao, Khmu, and other ethnolinguistic groups who are culturally distinct from but economically and ecologically linked by the Black River to the Red River delta, known as the cradle of Vietnamese (ethnic Kinh) civilization.¹⁶ Claimed as Northwest Vietnam by the DRV in 1952 and hotly contested by France and its local Tai allies, the Black River region’s demographic profile cast revolutionary politics in sharp relief, especially the unfolding relations between a Kinh “national majority” and so-called “ethnic minorities” (i.e., the aforementioned ethnolinguistic groups, many of whom had joined the independence struggle). Understanding place and region, in other words, helped contextualize how Vietnam and France alike were staking claims on the same strategic borderlands and recruiting local allies for rival political projects. Furthermore, coming as the battle did on the heels of the Korean conflict, the parties relied increasingly on foreign aid distributed along Asia’s emerging Cold War fault lines: the DRV on the People’s Republic of China, and France on the United States. Although France would bow out of Indochina after its 1954 defeat and the US would step into Vietnam’s south, these ideological and material fault lines only deepened through the 1960s over the Second Indochina War.

Meanwhile, reading geography informed my conceptualization of territory as a political technology and a contested, ongoing process that produces outcomes contingent on mass politics.¹⁷ While fighting French forces on the front, Vietnam’s army and state were actively creating territory in the rear through social mobilization, logistics work, and political education. The diverse peoples in and around Dien Bien Phu thus learned to identify as Vietnamese citizens—and, not coincidentally, to read, write, and speak the Vietnamese language through DRV-sponsored literacy campaigns—during the militarized construction of a Vietnamese nation and its coeval space.¹⁸ In short, Vietnam was violently in the making during the 1950s, if especially so in the 1954 battle that decided the First Indochina War. And so it was again from 1955 through 1975. Gleaned from research and writing, these insights into geographic concepts of place, region, scale, and territory enriched my historical imagination—and vice versa.

 

Around the time when I was teaching first-year students and writing a book about Vietnam, I happened to meet people with the skills, interests, and capacities to create a larger pedagogical platform stemming from the research underlying Contested Territory. Courtesy of a mutual friend and colleague, I met Andy Mink, a former middle school teacher turned education project manager who was developing a proposal that combined geospatial technology with the history of Vietnam.¹⁹ A talented teacher of teachers, Andy introduced me to Chris Bunin, an award-winning high school geography teacher, expert cartographer, and practitioner of geographic information systems (GIS). Long story short, we decided to try our hand at a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Institute for K–12 Teachers.²⁰ The curriculum drew on our complementary backgrounds and skills: Andy’s capacity for organization and gift for adult education, Chris’s expertise in geospatial technology, cartography, and pedagogy, and my scholarly network and area studies approach to Vietnam and Southeast Asia.

We held a pair of institutes at the National Humanities Center (NHC) in 2018 and 2022. In all, over sixty elementary, middle, and high school teachers from around the US convened in Durham, North Carolina, for the pair of two-week sessions. Assisted by a talented support staff, the center was well suited to hosting public presentations, facilitating group discussions, and sustaining mealtime conversations. Participating teachers interacted on a daily basis with leading scholars on Vietnam, Vietnam-US relations, as well as Asia’s history, culture, literature, and geography. In addition to lectures on relevant topics, the scholars assigned readings, shared meals, and chatted informally with participants. Along the way, the teachers incorporated what they learned by developing lesson plans to enrich their teaching portfolios, some of which we share below.

Even as integrating the geography of Vietnam with its history was our lodestar, teacher input guided curricular construction on content, resources, and application. The NHC conducted two surveys of secondary school teachers in 2017 (n = 511) and 2018 (n = 417) to gauge background knowledge and access to materials about US involvement in Southeast Asia during the twentieth century. Regarding content, a majority of teachers reported “none” or “basic working knowledge” of how and why the US became involved in Vietnam in the 1960s; 82 percent identified the Domino Theory and America’s intent on stopping communism as the sole factor. As a result, our periodization began in 1945, emphasizing that the First Indochina War, like independence struggles next door in Indonesia and the Philippines, grew out of longer histories of colonialism, anticolonial organizing, Japanese occupation during World War II, and popular nationalist movements. Because nearly half of teachers reported using Google as their primary means of generating resources, we led lessons in building the critical skills to search and curate classroom materials. Nearly 90 percent identified maps, site-based content, and emerging technologies as valuable applications for visualizing and interrogating source content. Exercises in how to use maps as primary sources and how to access online photographic archives introduced instructional tools that would provide students with an inquiry-based approach to human and cultural geographies.

Our experience and teacher evaluations of the inaugural institute enhanced the next one’s time management, interdisciplinarity, and sense of context. The back-to-back scheduling of speakers in 2018 did not leave adequate time for reflection. Thus the 2022 institute devoted more time to digesting new content through group discussion and individual lesson planning. Teachers responded enthusiastically to the interdisciplinary approach, embracing a broad interpretation of the humanities to flesh out a history of foreign relations. According to one participant, the institute served as “an excellent reminder [that] the arts, literature, [and] other forms of primary sources besides solely documents can be powerful for my students learning” (#26427). For example, poet John Balaban’s presentation on Vietnam’s rich tradition of oral and written poetry stimulated discussions of Vietnamese language and literature, its writing systems, and poetry’s political significance.²¹ Asked why poetry was used for political purposes, Balaban responded, “Because composing poetry is part of the thinking mind.” The early institute led another participant “to see the Vietnam War in a much larger context both through space and time … My lessons will no longer focus on the American protest and politics of the conflicts in Southeast Asia” (#26441). Accordingly, we expanded the conversation from Vietnam to include the war’s impacts on neighboring countries, especially Laos and Cambodia. Literary critic Ben Tran screened a short video titled “Bombing Missions over Laos, 1965–1973” to illustrate the intensity of American aerial bombardment there and the unexploded ordinance it left behind.²² Historian Mai Na Lee analyzed the so-called Secret War in Laos, in which the CIA mobilized Hmong peoples to form anti-communist militias and disrupt the Ho Chi Minh Trail’s transnational network, expanding the war’s scope and ultimately generating a diaspora reaching back to the United States.²³ Historian Mark Bradley discussed postwar situations in former Indochina, asked how people made meaning out of their earlier experiences, and pointed to Cambodia, where war was layered with genocide.²⁴

Technology worked best when integrated into an encompassing narrative. We thought in 2018 that cell phone–based, digital location technologies would create site-based tutorials using crowdsourced information gathering. But the technology was buggy and complex, and learning it took time away from more relevant content. So the latter institute dropped cell phone apps in favor of more emphasis on ARC-GIS story mapping, a computer-based technique that renders maps, photographs, and other visual data into narrative form.²⁵ Participants used story maps, for example, to illustrate how the territories of mainland Southeast Asia changed in the wake of European, Japanese, and American empires, to plot the routes blazed by Vietnamese, Hmong, Cambodian, and other refugees in creating overseas diasporas, and to trace the path of individual Americans, including alums of high schools where the teachers taught, from draft to war zone—but not always home again. Insightfully, one 2018 respondent advised that it would be helpful next time “to provide a clearer narrative overview of the institute” in order to explain the order of participants, situate them in context, and help assimilate all the new information (#26438). To that end, we refined our approach, tested it in 2022, and share some lessons here.

 

A geographic history of the Vietnam wars responds to teachers’ calls for more explicit narrative logic and draws from our experience teaching and writing across multiple disciplines. Presenting Vietnam as a global place integrates history and geography. It invites students to unpack an accumulated history, to examine what Massey called “layer upon layer of different sets of linkages, both local and to the wider world.”²⁶ It locates the Vietnam (or Indochina) wars in the generative context of Southeast Asia after World War II, when Vietnam’s struggles for independence became entangled in larger geopolitical contests, including the Cold War after 1950. The histories vary according to region: North and South as well as upland and lowland. Layered linkages connect a divided Vietnam—or multiple Vietnams—to a wide cast of international actors. Those actors initially included a defeated Japanese Empire and a resurgent French one. Later, the cast grew to include Cold War rivals, especially China and the United States, as well as neighboring countries, particularly Laos and Cambodia but also Thailand, the Philippines, and South Korea.

Asking students to think about periodizing the war(s) offers another way to think geographically about Vietnam’s worldwide connections.²⁷ When do we begin a narrative of the Vietnam wars? Why 1945 or 1946? Why not simply 1964 or 1965? When do we end the story? In 1973, when the US withdrew its troops? Or in 1975, with RVN’s defeat and Vietnam’s forcible unification? I have found it useful to push students to consider even later dates that include the aftershocks of thirty years of warfare. Do we include the Cambodian genocide (1975–1979)? How about Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia that ended the genocide but started the Third Indochina War (1978–1991)? Even if introducing these topics is beyond the scope of a teaching unit, thinking critically about the story’s endpoint incorporates a necessary human dimension: the production of refugee communities in the independent nation-states—Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam—of former French Indochina.

In other words, a historical emphasis on the peoples and places caught up in the Indochina Wars starts in Vietnam but ends somewhere else entirely: in the lives of students, some of whom are members of diverse and growing Asian American communities. In Vietnam and in the United States alike, a generational change is afoot. Historical actors have given way to younger people who have no lived experience of the war and cite very different cultural touchstones. When asked what movies they have seen about the Vietnam War, few if any of the students in my classrooms have seen the movies that I saw growing up—Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, First Blood and the Rambo series, Deer Hunter, Platoon, etc. Rather, they respond with Forrest Gump and Tropic Thunder. As a result, I have less work to do pushing back on stereotypical representations of Vietnamese people and one-sided portrayals of a multidimensional conflict. They pose different questions too, often phrased in terms of what origin stories they heard from elders or where their grandfathers served in the military. Our conversations carry into the present as well, and they are eager to learn how the Vietnam wars continue coursing through diaspora, family, and memory.²⁸ Woven out of familial memory and historical narrative, Thi Bui’s illustrated memoir The Best We Could Do serves this purpose beautifully.²⁹ Its graphic art animates complex histories, overseas journeys, and richly realized characters, capturing student imaginations. With this new generation of students, it is now possible to talk about “just memory,” what literary critic Viet Thanh Nguyen holds up as a form of ethical remembrance that does justice to a fractured, violent past while still caring for its presence in everyday lives.³⁰

In retrospect, my experience teaching first-year college students, writing a book, and leading summer institutes coincided with a longer period of normalizing bilateral relations and reckoning with the Vietnam War. The US ended its trade embargo on Vietnam in 1994, and the normalization of diplomatic relations between the two countries has resulted in strong cultural, economic, and political ties.³¹ Even as these ties grow stronger by the day, the war and its effects are still present. President Obama’s 2012 proclamation introduced an important conversation about how to remember them. As teachers and students and scholars, however, we can and should be more capacious in our understanding of the conflict, expansive of where it took place, and inclusive of whom it affected. The same goes for Vietnam, where official commemorations in Ho Chi Minh City—culminating on April 30, 2025, to celebrate fifty years since “liberating the south” and “unifying the country”—will no doubt continue to toe the party line.³² Not surprisingly, those who still call the city “Saigon” and now live in the US remember the war very differently, preferring to call the date “Black April” and ruing the “fall of Saigon and of South Vietnam.”³³ Thinking geographically and historically makes connections across these old divides and continues a meaningful conversation. Although it rarely generates simple answers, the interdisciplinary approach encourages us to ask richer questions, draw on new sources of evidence, and incorporate perspectives too long left out of the story.

 

By way of conclusion, allow me to underline the value of a geographic-historic approach more generally and to introduce practical examples of how to teach with it. To audiences unfamiliar with geography, I present it as an ur-discipline that shares ancient, intertwined roots with history: whereas the latter tends to work through time and temporality to explain what happened and how, geography does so with space and spatiality to explain where it happened and why. Or, as the great Vietnamese historian Phan Huy Lệ put it to me on the sidelines of a 2014 conference in Hanoi, “History and geography: they are one.” Smiling with encouragement, he held up his hands and interlocked his fingers, imparting a lesson with enduring significance for students, teachers, and scholars.³⁴ As Professor Lệ reminded me, integrating spatial and temporal modes of inquiry generates deeper understanding of events, processes, and environments; connects places, peoples, and movements over physical distance and across cultural difference; and facilitates comprehension and investigation of context.

What follows includes short essays and lessons by four teachers who participated in the 2022 summer institute as well as concluding remarks by the 2018 and 2022 institutes’ codirector, Andy Mink. A high school teacher based near Fort Liberty, North Carolina, Elena Samkin, explains how she inserted Vietnamese perspectives into an overloaded schedule teaching the children of active-duty personnel and migrants from Latin America. Vincent Pham, who teaches social studies to eleventh- and twelfth-grade refugees in Brooklyn, describes how he uses Vietnam as a case study to encourage critical understandings of power, ideology, and inequality. Duyen Tong reflects on her position in Orange County, California, where a politically charged landscape shapes her approach to teaching language, culture, and meaning in a Vietnamese diasporic community. Chris Bunin, the high school teacher who led a GIS study in both institutes, discusses how conceptualizing spatial data in terms of layers helps his students in rural Virginia think analytically about context, relationship, and distribution. In addition, each teacher offers a classroom activity drawing creatively on institute materials that they have since tested with their own students. Concluding this collection, Andy Mink draws out the characteristics in these essays that constitute what has been called “History’s Habits of Mind,” or a way to think historically and, I would add, geographically. However much our work is grounded in Vietnam, the habits, skills, and lessons we discuss enliven a historical and geographic imagination that teachers and students can take anywhere.

Supplementary Data

An annotated further reading list can be found in the supplementary data for this article.

Christian C. Lentz is associate professor of geography and the environment and adjunct associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His Contested Territory: Dien Bien Phu and the Making of Northwest Vietnam won the 2021 Harry J. Benda Prize from the Association of Asian Studies for outstanding first book in Southeast Asian studies.

Rethinking How We Teach the Vietnam War

One High School Teacher’s Journey

Elena Samkin

Teaching the Vietnam War in a US high school history class within a limited timeframe and a charged political climate poses significant challenges. With only two days to cover such a complex historical event, educators face the daunting task of condensing decades of geopolitical, cultural, and social dynamics into only a couple of hours in the classroom. The compressed schedule restricts the depth and breadth of exploration. Furthermore, the political undertones in the teaching of American history today add an additional layer of difficulty: educators may face pressure to present a narrative that aligns with prevailing national sentiments, potentially sidelining an examination of the war from a global perspective. The conventional curriculum often reflects a predominantly American-centric viewpoint, emphasizing US involvement in the war and impeding students’ ability to comprehend the war’s complexities. In short, a rushed schedule, a circumspect political climate, and a prevailing standard narrative make it all too easy to overlook the nuanced experiences and perspectives of the Vietnamese people.

Working in a school situated in a military community only exacerbates the dual challenge of time constraints and political sensitivity that shapes instruction of the Vietnam War. I teach just minutes away from Fort Liberty (formerly known as Fort Bragg). More than two hundred US Special Forces teams served in Vietnam alongside thousands of soldiers from units of the famed 82^nd Airborne Division. Proximity to the base means that the community has a higher concentration of families with military backgrounds, including veterans who served in the Vietnam War. Teaching about a conflict that holds personal significance for these individuals requires careful consideration. An emotional connection to the war within the community influences how the subject is approached in the classroom, generating additional pressures to present a narrative that aligns with local sentiments and perceptions.

Balancing the need for a comprehensive and unbiased historical education with the sensitivities of a community closely linked to the military and Vietnam War veterans requires me to navigate a delicate path. As an educator, I must strike a balance between fostering a respectful and inclusive learning environment while acknowledging diverse community perspectives and experiences.

As I reflected on my teaching of US history, I became aware that I had inadvertently minimized the narrative of Vietnam to a mere backdrop for US involvement. So, I decided to embark on a personal journey of enrichment. My decision to invest this time was fueled by a desire to provide students with a more comprehensive study of Vietnam—one that extended beyond the narrow lens of war and conflict. Indeed, the 2022 institute’s aim was to break free from the disciplinary constraints and narrow periodization that had long confined the teaching of the Vietnam War era within US history. Teachers like me had a chance to give students an appreciation of the fissiparous nation’s historical depth. Required readings challenged me to recognize that Vietnam’s history spans millennia, encompassing indigenous dynasties, resistance against external powers, and a rich cultural tapestry that had evolved over centuries. Lectures further broadened my understanding, shaping my conviction that these perspectives were indispensable for my students.

Returning to my classroom, I was determined to impart this newfound perspective to my students. The challenge to my preconceptions had not only deepened my knowledge but ignited a passion to inspire critical thinking and a broader worldview. Through primary sources, personal narratives, and a commitment to a more comprehensive understanding, I aim to reshape the narrative of Vietnam for my students. My goal is to offer a more nuanced and respectful depiction of Vietnam, not as a war-torn landscape but as a resilient and culturally vibrant nation with a multifaceted history.

The source that affected me most was the graphic memoir The Best We Could Do, by Thi Bui.³⁵ A deeply personal narrative of her family’s journey as refugees from Vietnam, it provides a window onto the challenges, sacrifices, and triumphs that characterize the immigrant experience. In addition to living in a military community, I also live and teach in a rural, agricultural region with many immigrants from Mexico and other Latin American countries. Although Bui’s graphic memoir is rooted in the Vietnamese refugee narrative, it resonates with universal themes of displacement, adaptation, and the pursuit of a better life—themes that parallel the experiences of immigrants in diverse contexts, including those working in North Carolina’s agricultural sector. Because curricular time constraints challenge full exploration of these comparisons, I prioritize key themes and moments for discussion, encourage engagement with supplementary materials, and facilitate discussions that stimulate critical thinking and empathy. Using The Best We Could Do creates space for students to appreciate the diversity of immigrant experiences and confront stereotypes or misconceptions. It encourages a positive and appreciative perspective on the contributions of immigrants to the cultural mosaic of the United States.

My revised unit began by providing context on Vietnam’s history and a timeline of major events leading up to US involvement. This foundation helped students understand the complexities that preceded the war. Part of the first day of the unit included Bui’s graphic memoir. I focused on the part where Bui’s father narrates the family history, detailing their experiences and explaining the reasons they fled to the United States. This personal perspective resonated with my students, who thoroughly enjoyed the graphic novel. I also incorporated a memorandum from Undersecretary of State George Ball, who expressed skepticism about US involvement in Vietnam in early 1965.³⁶ The primary source provided students with insight into the differing viewpoints within the US government at a key moment just prior to President Johnson’s commitment of ground troops.

Through these diverse materials, my students gained a comprehensive understanding of the Vietnam story—one encompassing more than just the war itself. They learned about the historical context, personal refugee experiences, and the political debates surrounding US intervention. My own confidence in teaching this subject has been bolstered by student feedback after the lesson. Ultimately, my goal was to empower students to critically examine the past, engage with differing perspectives, and cultivate a deeper understanding of the world around them. Armed with these new teaching tools, I believe I met that goal.

Using Graphic Novels to Teach Agency and Critical Thinking

Overview

Students will examine a timeline of significant events and critically read Thi Bui’s memoir The Best We Could Do. Students will explore how individuals and groups exercise agency in times of conflict.

Learning Goal

To challenge students to think critically about the impact of war on both national and personal levels, while also encouraging them to consider how history is shaped by the choices and experiences of ordinary people.

Sources Needed

1. Timeline of Major Events: A visual timeline highlighting key moments leading up to US involvement in Vietnam.³⁷

2. The Best We Could Do, by Thi Bui: Copies of the graphic novel, with a focus on the excerpt where Bui’s father narrates the family’s experiences in Vietnam and their reasons for fleeing to the United States (pages 150-210).³⁸

Guiding Prompts

• 1. Historical Context and Agency

  • How did the key events leading up to the Vietnam War influence the decisions made by both Vietnamese and American leaders?

  • In what ways did individuals and groups exercise agency during this period?

• 2. Critical Reading of the Memoir

  • How does Bui’s father describe the family’s experiences in Vietnam? What choices did they make in response to the circumstances they faced?

  • How does the memoir provide a different perspective on the Vietnam War?

• 3. Connecting Personal and Historical Perspectives

  • What can we learn from Bui’s story about the impact of war on civilians and their families?

Assignment

Create a visual timeline or storyboard that combines key events from the Vietnam War with significant moments from Bui’s family history as depicted in The Best We Could Do. Include captions that explain how these events are connected and reflect on the role of agency in shaping both personal and historical outcomes.

Elena Samkin began her teaching career in 2004 at a large urban high school in Miami, Florida, before transitioning to a middle school in San Antonio, Texas, in 2006. Since 2015, she has been teaching US history in a public high school in Southern Pines, North Carolina, with a strong focus on the Cold War and Vietnam. Living near Fort Liberty, Elena maintains direct ties to the military, which informs her passion for teaching about the impact of these conflicts.

Teaching Vietnam’s Ideological Conflicts

Migration and Contested Narratives of the Vietnam War

Vincent Pham

For the past six years, I have taught eleventh-grade US history and politics and twelfth-grade government and economics at International High School at Prospect Heights, New York City. An urban, under-resourced public school, it serves immigrant Multilingual Language Learners (MLLs) who recently arrived in the United States.

MLLs have different development needs within the language domains of reading, writing, listening, speaking, and visual literacy. Our school’s educational history interview process classifies many as Students with Interrupted/Inconsistent Formal Education (SIFE). I categorize my MLL students in terms of their English-language proficiency, from “Entering” (Pre- to Early Production), to “Emerging” (Speech Emergent), to “Transitioning” (Speech Emergent to Intermediate Fluency), to “Expanding” (Intermediate to Advanced Fluency). Consequently, my curriculum emphasizes collaborative posters, political cartoon analysis, and videos so that my MLLs can access the material before formal readings. In turn, my teaching practices emphasize the effective use of multiple media to reach students with diverse learning styles and capacities.

As a social studies educator, I embrace the position that the classroom is not an escape from the politics and injustices of the world. Instead, it is a space in which students and teacher(s) collaborate to develop their worldviews, skill sets, and self-affirmations to confront these challenges. For instance, my twelfth-grade class focuses on imperialism and US foreign interventions. Given the complex and highly personal nature of this subject matter, I elected to interweave the academic and personal stakes of my family’s history. My parents are Vietnamese boat people who came to the United States in the late 1980s through the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ resettlement initiative. They lived through decades of conflict as Vietnamese forces fought against the French, the United States, and even among themselves.

With this context, I wish to present how my participation in the 2022 NEH Summer Institute has influenced my twelfth-grade curriculum. I gathered primary sources and other resources that now expand beyond typical classroom discussions of Vietnam. Although concepts such as the Domino Theory are relevant for understanding why the United States intervened in Vietnam from the 1950s to the 1970s, this conventional narrative ignores Vietnamese agency. Instead, for instance, Vietnam’s pursuit of nationhood should be explored through the clashing visions of communism (led by Hồ Chí Minh) and capitalism (led by Ngô Đình Diệm). With this framework, students can ascertain how the international and intranational conflicts of the Vietnam War created a complex Vietnamese diaspora in the United States. Furthermore, this unit echoed my students’ experiences of war, politics, and displacement.

My lesson plans and curriculum provide multiple entry points to build new schema about Vietnam, thus empowering students to engage in deeper critical reflection. Furthermore, my teaching principles seek to humanize the Vietnam War and push students to consider the clashing narratives of liberation and displacement. Note that my material is designed to contextualize and supplement how we teach the Vietnam War, because educators still need to teach the basics, explaining the key stakeholders and presenting the historical sequence of events. One concrete recommendation would be to cover Vietnam’s fight for liberation against the French, or the First Indochina War (1946–1954). Had I done this in my own teaching, my students would have had an easier grasp of how the Vietnam-US conflict was, in fact, a continuation of Vietnam’s historical pursuit of independence. Additionally, I modified readings (such as the text length, sentence structures, and vocabulary) to suit the needs of my Multilingual Language Learners. Several of these documents are available in the supplementary data for this article, should my students, or the readers of this essay, wish to consult them.

Let me give a brief overview about a mini unit I developed for my classroom. Lasting between two to three weeks overall, the first three lessons frame the conflict in Vietnam as the manifestation of clashing economic ideologies. The fourth and fifth lessons examine the immediate and long-term repercussions of April 30, 1975 (when the Vietnam War finally came to its conclusion). The sixth lesson (outlined in the following classroom activity) is a scaffolded Socratic seminar for students to reflect on how different stakeholders construct their respective narratives of Vietnam’s pursuit of nationhood. Finally, the summative assessment is an essay prompt whereby MLL students both analyze how the Vietnam War is remembered by the global Vietnamese community and reflect on their own migration and memories of home country.

Although none of my students come from Vietnam, my unit’s themes of sociopolitical upheaval, family separation, and starting anew in a foreign land resonate with them. Examining the diasporic legacy of the Vietnam War is especially relevant for my MLLs, because they come from countries that have also experienced US intervention. Thus, studying Vietnam provides them with a template to reflect on how foreign intervention in their own countries resulted in widescale migration. Many students come from nations that are or were recently impacted by wars and conflicts stemming from US foreign policy decisions, including El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Venezuela, and Yemen. Many arrived in the United States as unaccompanied minors. For instance, after analyzing excerpts of Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do, a graphic memoir about a family’s experiences fleeing Vietnam and arriving in the US, some students privately shared stories about how lost they felt when they first came to this country. Discussing Vietnam in this way engages MLLs in a topic that is close to their lives (e.g., war, asylum, US intervention) while creating enough distance to avoid re-experiencing their traumas. I see this unit as a means of deepening my relationship with the students, especially since I aspire to help them navigate the US much like my parents did forty years ago.

Vietnam’s Ideological Conflicts

Interrogating Sources

Overview

This Socratic seminar will serve as this unit’s first component of a culminating assessment in which students are tasked with the following:

• Identify how ideologies of capitalism and communism intensified the conflict in Vietnam.

• Explain how the Vietnam War is remembered by the larger Vietnamese community in the world today.

Students will be given the chance to review their past classwork in order to produce a written response to the seminar questions and cite relevant textual evidence. From there students will have multiple opportunities to articulate, clarify, and expand on their thoughts and questions regarding Vietnam’s ideological conflicts.

Based on my experience teaching multilingual learners, I understand that best outcomes are produced by giving students time in class to prepare for the seminar. Consequently, the first ten to fifteen minutes of class should be reserved for students to respond to the seminar task while also looking through their classwork to find key quotes (see Seminar Worksheet). During this time, the teacher can circulate to support students.

To begin the seminar, each student will have a chance to read aloud what they wrote during prep period. This is a far more structured Socratic seminar, but it is necessary for multilingual students to participate at least once. In turn, this process will lower the “affective filter,” which is a hypothesis about how learning anxiety can hinder and obstruct language learning. Once each person has said their piece, the seminar can proceed in open discussion.

Guiding Prompts

1. How are capitalism and communism different? (Think about Hồ Chí Minh and Ngô Đình Diệm.)

2. Why did the United States involve itself in the conflict between North and South Vietnam? If the US did not interfere, could peace have been achieved in Vietnam?

3. What are the psychological and social effects of people escaping from a country?

4. What are the best ways to address historical trauma in our families and communities?

At the end of the seminar, students will respond to reflection questions that task them with citing a compelling point made by a classmate, summarizing the overall seminar discussion ideas, and self-evaluating their performance.

Supplementary Data

The Seminar Worksheet and relevant sources can be found in the supplementary data for this article.

As the son of Vietnamese refugees, Vincent Pham honors his parents’ experiences of coming to the United States through teaching English as New Language (ENL) and History to recently arrived immigrants. Now based in New York City, he has also lived abroad in Vietnam, Chile, and China. He has received notable teacher fellowships, such as the NEA Global Learning Fellowship (2023) and the Fund for Teachers grant (2024).

Teaching the Vietnamese Lunar New Year (Tết) in the Diaspora

Duyen Tong

Located in the heart of Little Saigon in Orange County, California, I teach Vietnamese as a world language to a student population that is 75 percent Asian. I am inspired to teach both to help students learn the language and to deepen their understanding of Vietnamese culture and history. My students and I share similar experiences, since my father was a Republic of Vietnam Navy lieutenant and was imprisoned for five years in a re-education camp after the 1975 Fall of Saigon.

I face challenges in my work, some political and others topical, that I have turned into strengths. Through persistence and dedication, the efforts of my county’s large Vietnamese American diasporic population has enabled many districts to offer Vietnamese as a world language. As a result, the diaspora here is very concerned about the politics of what I teach. Topically, when we learn about any culture, it is important to look beyond the so-called 3Fs: Festivities, Food, and Fashion. Although this unit is nominally about Tết (Tết Nguyên Đán, the Lunar New Year), I show how exploring its multiple facets can strengthen student understandings of the Vietnamese diaspora in the United States. It is important for my students not only to learn the language but also to develop relationships with their family and community by deepening their global competency and cultural literacy.

The 2022 NEH Summer Institute changed the way I teach. In my World Language–Vietnamese 1 class, I used to only teach Tết and how we celebrate this holiday. At the 2022 institute, I learned to make my content richer and embed historical and cultural context in language learning, in part by thinking about who “we” are in terms of a globally dispersed Vietnamese community. How do students not just learn about Tết but also grapple with diverse definitions of culture, identity, community, history, and geography? And how do we contribute to understanding Vietnamese identity in America? My approach must strike a balance between teaching the Vietnamese language and making the content come to life through culturally relevant strategies. One of the sources I assign examines the Tết parade float at the Asian Garden Mall in Westminster, California.³⁹ Decorated with messages about freeing prisoners of war and fighting for human rights, the float is politically motivated. Oftentimes, booths at the Tết festival in Little Saigon host organizations that advocate for religious and political freedom. This messaging clearly shows the attachment Vietnamese people abroad still feel for their country.⁴⁰

In addition to attachments to their overseas country of origin, anti-communist feelings are prominent in Orange County’s Vietnamese community. For example, in 1999, when a Hi-Tek video store displayed a picture of Ho Chi Minh and the Communist Party flag, its owner was met with popular outburst and immense resistance. What ensued was a fifty-three-day demonstration that drew protesters from both inside and outside California.⁴¹ Simply showing a photograph of Ho Chi Minh and the associated flag triggered intense emotions and trauma. The event clearly demonstrated the passion and anger that many of these refugees still feel about the day they “lost their country” (Ngày Mất Nước, as it is commonly called). Indeed, many in the Vietnamese diaspora still refer to April 30, 1975, as Black April. In Vietnam, by contrast, that day is referred to as Ngày Giải phóng Miền Nam (The Day When Southern Vietnam Was Liberated) or as Ngày Chiến Thắng (Victory Day) and celebrated as a holiday. Therefore, as we consider teaching what may seemingly be a New Year’s celebration, it is important to examine what the diaspora has gone through as they formed a community.

Language is powerful, and the Vietnamese language in the Vietnamese diaspora has remained loyal to pre-1975 sensibilities. Teaching Vietnamese in the United States means neither using terms that are “pro-communist” nor embedding any type of media seen to promote or encourage communism. In 2015, Orange County’s Westminster School District changed their Vietnamese-language curriculum due to what the community deemed “pro-communist wording inappropriate for the classroom” and for “document[s] bearing a communist stamp, as well as discussing travel to the communist country.”⁴² A year later, while working as a Teacher on Special Assignment, I served as the host for Radio Bolsa; the show included time reserved by the district to discuss different educational topics and events as a way to reach out to the Vietnamese community, including to parents who did not speak English well. Before all the shows, including my own, a translation department at the district level vetted scripts and reviewed translated documents to ensure appropriate word choice. The scrutiny demonstrates how politics plays an important role in our community—down to the very words we are allowed to use.

Despite these fraught and potentially divisive politics, all Vietnamese agree on one thing: Tết is their most important celebration. Translated into English, the lines of poet Tu Xuong underline this inclusivity:

Even not well-off, all the same, I’ll celebrate three days of TET.

Even poor, little anybody else, I’ll drink wine and tea!⁴³

These two lines mean that regardless of where you are and the wealth you may or may not have, every single person can celebrate Tết and say goodbye to the previous year on New Year’s Eve (Giao Thừa). It is a time to honor and show fidelity to the living, to ancestors, and to the land. A famous saying reads, “Trees have roots, water has a source” (“cây có cội nước có nguồn”).⁴⁴ Taught to all Vietnamese children, the saying encourages them to always honor their forebears and their environment regardless of where they are.

Just as language cannot easily be disconnected from culture and history, so too must a holiday like Tết be accompanied by broader discussions of community, tradition, and family. The challenge is twofold: First, discussion must stretch those experiences of Tết so they encompass still-broader experiences that have a lasting impact on the community. Second, it is critical to investigate how this broader experience helps Vietnamese Americans frame their identities in the United States. I have found it effective to introduce students to the importance of Tết, explain how Vietnamese people traditionally celebrate it, and then add layers of geography and history. Students may bring artifacts to class and share how they celebrate the holiday with their families. To deepen the lesson, students learn about how refugees still formed communities and celebrated Tết even under dire circumstances at refugee camps. They study the different ways the Vietnamese diaspora continues to pass this holiday on to younger generations. My work means moving beyond what students think of celebrating the new year—as simply receiving red envelopes of money—to exploring the challenges and hardships people have faced in leaving their country, trying to build a community somewhere else, and maintaining traditions of homage to homeland and ancestors.

In a very concrete way, tracing the voyages of Vietnamese to the United States offers a creative learning opportunity to build skills in geoliteracy and historical research. The Fall of Saigon, on April 30, 1975, prompted an international exodus of Vietnamese people. Many migrants in the second wave, from 1975 to 1977, stayed at refugee camps while waiting for sponsorship in a new country.⁴⁵ Nearly fifty years later, students can map the locations of refugee camps and detention centers and answer questions about them: What were some of the difficulties Vietnamese refugees faced in asylum countries? What were some ways in which refugees responded to difficult circumstances, and how did they build a community in spite of them? Teachers can also highlight the agency and resilience of refugees as they navigated multiple systems of oppression not only in Vietnam but also in America, given its complex immigration process and the other barriers it poses to resettlement. Students can map out the different pathways refugees traveled to find their permanent homes in the United States, demonstrating how the diasporic community came to be.

Significantly, people in the camps and on these long journeys nonetheless celebrated Tết with music and entertainment. Using primary sources such as oral history recordings and photographs of Tết celebrations in Vietnam, in the camps, and in different communities abroad can demonstrate how Vietnamese people all over the world have tried to retain their identity and traditions in new homelands. My students practice singing a traditional Tết song, titled “Ngày Tết Quê Em,” by Từ Huy, which was composed in 1994; it is a song that is played both in Vietnam and among diasporic communities. They also look at another song, titled “Ly Rượu Mừng,” by Pham Dinh Chuong and composed in 1952. One exercise asks them to analyze the song’s lyrics, diction, and imagery and make some conclusions about why it was banned up until recently.

Depending on pacing and available time, a lesson on Tết and its broader significance can be more comprehensive or shorter in duration. I usually teach my unit on Tết in January, around when it often falls. I now extend the lessons to cover refugee experiences and the Vietnamese diaspora to help students map out the journey that many Vietnamese people have taken, including their family members in the United States.

In conclusion, although I teach Vietnamese, and while this lesson focuses on Tết, teachers of all subjects can extract resources and information from this lesson to focus on a variety of key insights. In teaching students about the Vietnam War, for example, they could expand a lesson to cover the effects of the war, resettlement, and rebuilding, also sharing Vietnamese American experiences. If teaching students about diaspora, they could create a compare-and-contrast exercise to trace the voyages of Vietnamese people and another group of interest. Additionally, as we continue to embed social-emotional learning techniques in our classrooms, teachers could also think about how intergenerational trauma and the scars that people carry from war could affect family members. After all, community is a work in progress—one that requires all manner of labor, including emotional labor. Teaching the Vietnamese holiday of Tết helps show how a community can span worlds and endure hardship but find time for joy and celebration nonetheless.

Soundscapes of War and Memory

Impactful Knowledge for Students

Overview

Students will listen to Phạm Đình Chương’s song “Ly Rượu Mừng,” analyzing its lyrics, diction, and imagery to understand why it was banned up until recently in Vietnam.

“Ly Rượu Mừng” was banned for forty years in Vietnam. The song referenced đời lính (the life of a soldier) and binh sĩ (soldiers), but questions arose about whose soldiers and which side the song referred to, especially after the Fall of Saigon in 1975. Were they Northern or Southern? Additionally, some media was banned if it was interpreted as supporting the Southern government; most people at that time associated the song with South Vietnamese culture and soldiers. In fact, after much investigation into the history of the song and the composer, the date of publication was determined to be 1952; the references to soldiers were references to those soldiers coming home after defending Vietnam from French colonizers in the First Indochina War.

Students will practice singing “Ly Rượu Mừng.” Share the song’s text and show a video.⁴⁶ Ask students to visualize what is happening and ask them how they would build a set and create a music video for the song, as if they were a director.

Guiding Prompts

1. Are there any notable patterns in the lyrics, such as rhyme scheme or repetition? How do these patterns contribute to the song’s overall effect?

2. How does the song use language and word choice? Are there any specific words or phrases that stand out? Why?

3. What is the significance of the song’s title? How does it relate to the content and themes of the song?

4. What emotions does the song evoke?

5. Are there any references or allusions that provide insight into the period or culture?

6. What personal connections or interpretations can you draw from the lyrics?

7. How does your own experience or perspective influence your reading?

8. What is the central theme or message of the song? How does the composer convey this theme throughout the song?

Assignment

Write a short essay about why the song “Ly Rượu Mừng” was banned for forty years in Vietnam. Make sure to include an analysis of the song’s diction and imagery.

Supplementary Data

The lyric translations for Ly Rượu Mừng can be found in the supplementary data.

Duyen Tong has taught Vietnamese, English, and English-language development for over sixteen years in Garden Grove Unified School District in Southern California. She also develops curricula and reviews instructional materials for Orange County and the State of California. Duyen enjoys traveling and learning about other cultures and trying different types of food.

Teaching Space, Place, and Time in Southeast Asia

Chris Bunin

This article highlights the power of geographic information systems (GIS) and the ways a team of scholars and educators used the technology to evaluate, analyze, and better understand the culture, geography, and history of Southeast Asia. It also argues for thinking spatially about the past, in line with what pioneer of spatial history David Bodenhamer emphasized: “In history, we usually know when something happened with a high degree of certainty. We may have less precise knowledge of where it happened.”⁴⁷ Bodenhamer’s statement captures a challenge facing history and social studies teachers: How do we teach students the dynamic interplay between geography and history? One cannot understand one without the other.

According to Zippia, a website popular with teachers looking for jobs, the most common majors for social studies educators are history (19 percent), elementary education (14 percent), education (14 percent), and political science (8 percent).⁴⁸ Note the paucity of geographic education. In other words, most social studies teachers do not have the formal training and content knowledge to teach students how to understand and appreciate geography’s role in explaining how and why historical events unfold.

GIS is an evolving tool that has heightened geography’s ability to understand—and even influence—society. It is a system of technologies designed to visualize, evaluate, and analyze locational information. A simple way to define GIS and make it less technical is to think about the words behind the letters:

G is for geography—it represents the map.

I is for information—it represents a spreadsheet of information.

S is for system—it represents how the map and the spreadsheet interact to visualize and analyze geographic information.

What distinguishes maps made with GIS from the traditional sort is the kind of data that the technology incorporates and analyzes. Geospatial data is geocoded, meaning that this data includes information connected to a location that can be represented as a point, line, or polygon. The term “layers” is typically used to describe map features, because when constructing a GIS map, the pieces of information are literally stacked one on top of another, like layers of a cake.

To make GIS more accessible to workshop participants during our NEH Summer Institutes, we used Esri’s ArcGIS Online (AGO) software and framed our professional development curriculum around the five themes of geography: location, place, human-environment interaction, movement, and region.⁴⁹ These themes are commonly referenced in textbooks, cited in state-learning standards, and applied in classrooms.

The theme of location refers to a place where a particular point, area, or object exists. It can be explained in absolute (latitude, longitude) and relative (social) terms. Workshop participants learned how to use AGO to search for locations using coordinates, place names, and relative locations. Participants then completed an activity that tasked them with creating dynamic spreadsheets that utilized latitude and longitude to place points on a map. In an exercise specific to Southeast Asia, we created a point layer of US military bases. Below is an excerpt of the military base information tagged by location:

The theme of place refers to the material and nonmaterial characteristics of a location. This may include physical geography, architecture, sounds, scents, clothing, and other physical features. Using GIS to teach this concept, we modeled how to overlay the boundaries of French Indochina with maps from the CIA’s 1970 Indochina Atlas of vegetation, language, and ethnicity.⁵⁰ These teacher-made maps helped contextualize the complex cultural geographies of the Black River region in the northwest highlands of Vietnam. Participants also learned how to add map notes to a location to share videos, photographs, and sound recordings. One participant chose to use this technique to map the physical and cultural characteristics of the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

The theme of human-environment interaction explores how humans shape and are shaped by their environment. To better understand Southeast Asia, we focused on three topics: agriculture and farming techniques, physical geography’s role in the battle of Dien Bien Phu, and the lasting impact of unexploded ordnances throughout Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Participants learned how Vietnamese communities are using AGO Survey123, a simple GIS application, to map unexploded cluster munitions. Once pinpointed cartographically, local and international organizations work to clear the munitions.⁵¹ To show teachers how to use AGO Survey123 for instruction, we completed an activity that tasks students with researching hearth areas for ingredients of a culinary recipe and plotting the locations on a webmap. This activity is useful in helping students understand the geography of food and how many ingredients originated in South and East Asia.

Geography’s last two themes are movement and region. Movement refers to the mobility of people, goods, and ideas across various locations. Region is concerned with how areas are similar or different based on their physical or cultural characteristics. To learn about these concepts, we introduced participants to Esri’s GeoInquiry Collection activities relevant to Southeast Asia, including Language and Religion; Borders, Boundaries, and Barriers; The Great Exchange, Hotspots in a Cold War; and Silk Roads: Then and Now.⁵²

Woven into many of these GIS-based activities are opportunities to conduct simple geospatial analysis. The tools we considered most useful for class instruction are filtering, styling, and summarizing data. The filter tool allows the map to present a focused view of features within a layer. On a layer that shows US military bases, for example, you can apply a filter by the year a base was established to visualize the US military presence both at a moment in time and over the steady escalation between 1963 and 1971. The style tool allows users to fashion data using symbols, color ramps, line widths, and themes. For instance, a user can color-code the territories of French Indochina’s administrative subdivisions or categorize urban populations by size based on graduated symbols. A summarization tool calculates statistics in areas. For instance, when learning about the Second Indochina War, students can tally the number of US military bases by province. The final aspect of the GIS training focused on creating AGO StoryMaps. StoryMaps are web-based applications that allow users to tell a story using maps, data, text, images, videos, and voice recordings.

Once familiar with the technology, participants were provided with time during later days at the institute to conduct team-based research on a shared question. Scholars offered support with research, data analysis, and map creation. Their topics included:

Repatriation of Cambodian Cultural Artifacts. In the 1970s, during Cambodia’s civil war and with the nation facing instability under the communist Khmer Rouge regime, thousands of sacred artifacts were looted from religious sites across the country. This StoryMap visualized the geography of the location of some of these artifacts, including fourteen that were recently repatriated to Cambodia from the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Vietnamese Refugees and Their Lifeworlds. An estimated fifty thousand Vietnamese refugees settled in California after the Vietnam War ended in 1975. This StoryMap explored the local impact that Vietnamese immigrants and Vietnamese Americans have had on local communities.

Casualties of the Vietnam War—Focus on Chicago. The Vietnam War US Military Fatal Casualty Statistics database from the US National Archives contains records for all US states. This StoryMap visualized casualties in Vietnam for residents in Illinois by county, with a local emphasis on casualties from the Chicago area.

Bombing of Southeast Asia During the Vietnam/American War. In 2016, the United States Department of Defense publicly released records of almost every bombing and ground-attack mission flown during the Vietnam War. Using this public domain data, the StoryMap analyzed and discussed US bombing patterns between 1966 and 1968.

Germane to the field of history, spatial thinking and geoliteracy are problem-solving skills with career- and even life-long significance. Thinking through the complex geographies of Southeast Asia offers a useful example of how to think both historically and spatially, endowing students and teachers alike with important skills. WebGIS proved to be a useful tool that enabled us to collect and design resources and activities. Creating historical GIS data layers contextualized the region’s geographies of language, ethnicity, religion, politics, and US military presence. Participants parlayed these skills into StoryMaps that, in turn, can help students learn about historical and contemporary influences in and from Southeast Asia. We hope that you find these resources as useful in your teaching and professional development as we do in ours.

Geographies of the Second Indochina War

Enhancing History Instruction Using GIS

The easiest way to get started using ArcGIS Online is to use one of Esri’s GeoInquiries. These are short, standards-based inquiry activities for teaching map-based content found in commonly used textbooks. A number of states have created GeoInquiries that align with their state learning standards. Each activity is designed as a twenty-to-thirty-minute activity that can be presented quickly from a single computer and projector or modified to be used individually by students.

This classroom activity is designed to help teachers use a GeoInquiry module on geography and the Second Indochina War in their classrooms.

Steps for Accessing and Preparing to Use a GeoInquiry

1. Go to https://www.shiftgeo.org/mappingseasia.

2. Under the header “Mapping Southeast Asia Resources,” note “Geography and the 2nd Indochina War Teacher Guide (.docx)” and “Geography and the 2nd Indochina War Student Worksheet (PDF).”

3. Click the “Geography and 2nd Indochina War Teacher Guide” link to open the resource details landing page. The page contains a two-page teacher guide with an overview of the activity and directions on how to use the map with students. Other tools available on the landing page include links to an example of a finished basemap, introductory videos, Esri GeoInquires, ArcGIS StoryMaps, and other resources.

4. Download the teacher guide and familiarize yourself with the directions, the webmap, and the main patterns that the map and layers reveal.

5. Print out a classroom set of the student worksheets.

On the Day of Classroom Instruction

1. Distribute the worksheet and provide a web link to the “Geography and 2nd Indochina War WebGIS Map.” For accessibility, that link can be provided to students using your school’s learning management system (Canvas, Schoology, etc.).

2. Collaboratively work with the students through the “ASK” section of the GeoInquiry. Model how to describe observed geographic patterns (dispersed, clustered, and relative global and regional locations).

3. Direct the students to work independently through the rest of the GeoInquiry. Set your timer for twelve to fifteen minutes. Move around the room and provide support as needed.

4. After fifteen minutes, bring the class back together and lead a conversation about the surprises and patterns students noticed regarding the geography of the Second Indochina War. Interact with a projected version of the map as needed to highlight, reinforce, and correct the patterns students note. (Note that I typically do not review the GeoInquiry verbatim but rather highlight and reinforce the information and patterns I want my students to gather from completing the activity.)

Chris Bunin teaches World History, AP Human Geography, and geospatial technologies at Albemarle High School in Charlottesville, Virginia. He earned a BA in History (1995), an MA in Curriculum and Instruction (1998), and an MS in Geography (2000) from Virginia Tech.

Cultivating History’s Habits of Mind

Andy Mink

In 1959, Jerome Bruner’s Woods Hole Conference assembled physical, biological, and social scientists to discuss ways in which they could improve the nation’s educational system as a response to the Soviet Union’s launch of the Sputnik series of satellites. The major recommendation to emerge from that meeting was that the intellectual inquiry on which scientists based their academic research needed to find its way back into the classroom: “The schoolboy learning physics is a physicist, and it is easier for him to learn physics behaving like a physicist than doing something else.”⁵³

The central notion of that conference has become an underlying assumption in the education of teachers and students alike: Teaching and learning rests on providing students with opportunities for inquiry and with access to the deep disciplinary structures that, until then, had been the sole province of experts. Even as history professors commonly describe history as a “problem-solving” discipline, rarely still do students or teachers see, let alone practice, the processes with which they solve historical problems. These historical processes have been invisible to most history students and teachers. Motivated by good scholarship on a timely topic, our institute aimed to turn this underlying assumption and hidden process into an explicit agenda.

Effective pedagogy offers opportunities for inquiry and practice, engaging both students and teachers in the processes of combining evidence to argument. History students can and should be immersed in the same academic approach that a university scholar uses to research and publish historical content. Identifying a historical problem, discovering primary sources, and drawing conclusions based on that evidence are concrete steps that build scholarly work. Bringing students into this act of “doing history” fosters a sense of the discipline that goes beyond mastering a body of knowledge to strike at the epistemic core of history as a way of knowing.

Just as we would never consider putting science teachers with no laboratory experience into classrooms, we must also consider laboratory experience for humanities teachers as essential to their training. Humanities laboratories are not filled with beakers and vials of bubbling chemicals, nor are they limited by disciplinary guardrails of curriculum and teaching assignment. An inter- and cross-disciplinary approach amplifies key instructional tenets by reinforcing what the National Council for History Education has called “History’s Habits of Mind.” As stated on the NCHE website:

Historical thinking develops a unique capacity to comprehend human situations, challenges, and interactions. Thinking historically introduces students to the wonders of the past and fosters the ability to make judgments about the present. History’s Habits of Mind articulates this distinctive approach, one that leads towards engaging with and understanding the contemporary world and serves as a foundation for life-long, productive learning and active citizenship.⁵⁴

Although we did not teach them explicitly, these Habits of Mind feature in the instructional vignettes presented herein. Each vignette models one or more of these practices, underlining their importance in both design and practice. The teacher testimonials demonstrate that these habits are not simply aspirational but also stand as an essential approach to understanding place, person, and the relationship between communities of all forms to one another. The vignettes shift from an approach that simply spotlights place and time to one that also informs all inquiry-based work, regardless of discipline. More than understanding Southeast Asia per se, this practice sets up students for a deeper understanding of their own agency in understanding the world around them.

As Elena Samkin underscores in her essay, educators always allocate their most valuable currency—time—to finding the delicate balance between coverage and critical reading. Curricula are often presented as disconnected bodies of knowledge. Furthermore, the slow, patient reflection of historical inquiry is often at odds with the pace of the modern school year. Each instructional resource and lesson must strike a balance between breadth and depth, pace and patience.

Vincent Pham models the best practice of interdisciplinary humanities instruction. More than offering a historical narrative, Pham provides connected layers using literature and poetry, anthropology, political science, economics, as well as world history and global studies. In his lesson, students receive guided practice on the ways in which they should interrogate sources, investigate places, and interact with different kinds of resources and materials.

Duyen Tong emphasizes the importance of having her Vietnamese American students stretch their own experiences and draw connections to broader experiences that have lasting impact on a community. As such, she encourages her students to reflect on how they, too, frame Vietnamese identity in the United States. A marker of culture and a bearer of identity, language offers a window and a mirror onto their individual relationships in a complex world.

An award-winning teacher, Chris Bunin, uses accessible language and user-friendly exercises to introduce a powerful software package that helps users understand this same complex world. Beyond the intricacies of geographic information systems (GIS) and geocoded data, however, his message is straightforward: In addition to thinking about how an event happened, we must also think about where and why it happened there. As such, he integrates geographic with historical approaches, encouraging students to grasp how past shapes present.

Samkin expands on the challenges she faces when teaching historical events and relationships within the context of the present. America’s complicated relationship with Southeast Asia is still evolving, particularly in Generation X military families. The culture of her classroom and the focus of her lesson recognize that history is an evolving narrative constructed from available sources, cogent inferences, and changing interpretations. By steering students toward the decisions and choices of individuals, she places emphasis on the agency often obscured by abstract entities and bureaucratic camouflage.

Created within a humanities laboratory environment similar to the one imagined by Bruner, all of these exemplars began with scholarly work. Christian Lentz’s Contested Territory reframed understandings of Vietnamese territory by grounding its construction in a region where diversity of cultures is, if anything, an understatement. Tracing territorial construction through the 1954 battle at Dien Bien Phu, its narrative provided fertile ground for rethinking the Indochina Wars, inspiring instructional resources, and motivating broader inquiry. The text stands for the value of scholarship when applied to public and educational purposes.

To bring the humanities lab into being in 2018 and 2022, scholars offered more than simply lectures. In a format that toggled presentation of historical-geographic scholarship with doing historical-geographic work, scholars guided professional educators in developing curricular resources and team-based projects. Significantly, the format afforded educators the necessary time and support to read primary and secondary sources closely. They analyzed the traditional K–12 textbook narrative of America’s role in Southeast Asia outside of the timebound and political constraints of the Vietnam War. Doing so, they redefined the conventional boundaries of Southeast Asia to recognize the linguistic, literary, economic, and generational influences that constitute its dynamic geography and ongoing history.

Many teachers commented on the approach to understanding “territory” as a concept that completely changed their outlook on America’s role in Asia. “This was a fantastic seminar, incorporating many different disciplinary approaches to the study of territory in Vietnam and Southeast Asia,” offered one teacher, who continued, “I feel much more able to model and encourage historical empathy in a topic that previously was overshadowed by stereotype and misunderstanding.” The application of territory and other concepts to instructional resources gives us optimism regarding the value of approaching a conflicted event historically, geographically, and, above all, interdisciplinarily. Our optimism springs from a realization achieved through practice: that History’s Habits of Mind can be cultivated through a humanities laboratory that models the actual processes of doing history.

Andy Mink, Smithsonian Institution, US

Andy Mink is the Director of Rural Initiatives at the Smithsonian Institution. He has degrees in history from the University of Virginia and the University of South Carolina.

Funding support for this article was provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed herein do not necessarily represent those of the NEH. (ES-267025-19, ES-256907-17)