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Immigration and Ethnicity across the History Curriculum
JOHN RADZILOWSKI
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MY APPROACH TO teaching immigration and ethnicity stems from my view of these subjects as ones that touch nearly every aspect of the human experience. It is therefore both easy and rewarding not only to teach immigration-ethnic history as subjects themselves but to expose students to these subjects in a wide variety of classroom contexts. Indeed, in many instances as an instructor I have gained as much or more satisfaction from introducing immigration and ethnicity to students in survey courses than in specific immigration classes because in the former it is easier to show how immigration connects with so many aspects of the past, from foreign policy to industrialization to westward expansion to race relations and cultural change. |
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I teach at a small regional public liberal arts institution, the University of Alaska Southeast (UAS), that serves a large, diverse, and widely dispersed population of students through both traditional classroom and distance methods. Prior to this I taught as an adjunct at several public, private, and for-profit institutions, mainly in Minnesota. I teach U.S. and world history, upper-division courses in U.S. and European history, and geography. UAS offers a bachelor of liberal arts degree with concentrations in a number of areas, the most commonly chosen of which are anthropology and history. We do not have history majors as such, and the majority of our history-concentration students intend to become K–12 teachers. One significant factor in teaching in this setting is an almost complete lack of regional immigrant history research. |
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GENERAL APPROACH TO TEACHING U.S. IMMIGRATION | |
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I never took an immigration history course as an undergraduate. As a graduate student my immigration-related courses were small-group discussion seminars, so I have no real basis for comparing how my approaches differ from those used by others. Any course on immigration must begin with consideration of the home-country context, so I spend some time discussing developments within nineteenth-century Europe, the demographics of migration, economic change, and peasant emancipation. Because most migration is motivated by economic considerations, the basis for immigrant decision making is an important factor. Therefore, issues related to large socioeconomic processes have to be introduced, but more important is the need to familiarize students with the concept of the family economy. |
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Immigration is often seen as a mass or collective topic with large, undifferentiated throngs of otherwise nameless folk moving to and fro at the behest of impersonal forces. Although some sense of the massive character of immigration is important to convey, I use the family economy focus so that students can consider the personal and family choices and options faced by individual immigrants. Most immigrants in the past, as well as contemporary immigrants, live in "small worlds" of family and community bonds. Although migration often transcends these worlds, they inform the choices of immigrants and thus profoundly shape the character and results of immigration in both home and receiving countries. This theme ties in well with using immigrant letters and memoirs as student reading material. |
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This micro approach opens rich veins of discussion that may include the differing effect of immigration on men and women, as well older and younger members of a community. It can help to illustrate such topics as the essential differences between settler and labor immigrants, the mechanics of chain migration, and the relationship between old country conditions to choices made in the new country. It is also a good place to begin discussion of topics such as return migration or a comparative examination of immigration's effect on various receiving countries. |
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