The Public Schools of Brookline (PSB) has had for many years a significant Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI)-identifying community. According to the Class of 2024 Profile, 16 percent of the graduating class identified as Asian. However, some AAPI students have felt that PSB has been missing adequate representation in the curriculum.
The Supporting Educators with Asian American Pacific Islander Curriculums (SEAAPIC) program was founded in 2023 by Lily Lockwood ‘22 through the Millennium Fellowship, a leadership development program run by the United Nations and the Millenium Campus Network. It was created as a toolkit to give teachers access to AAPI lessons and promote diversity in lessons. According to its founders, SEAAPIC has the potential to improve representation for the AAPI community in the PSB’s curricula.
SEAAPIC member Vi Lee ‘23 was introduced to Lockwood and the AAPI club out of a desire to create positive change after the series of 2020 anti-AAPI attacks.
“I was home all of my sophomore year, just watching everything that was happening around the country with anti-Asian hate,” Lee said. “So I went to Dean [of Student Support Brian] Poon, and I was like, ‘I feel like I’m going crazy. Like, everything is horrible in the world. I don’t want to just sit here and do nothing.’”
Dean Poon responded by putting Lee in contact with Lockwood, who, at the time, was the president of Asian Pacific American Club. From there, they began working to get the high school to teach more AAPI content.
Lockwood, a student then in the Social Justice Leadership class, decided to create lessons for fourth graders at the Florida Ruffin Ridley school as a part of a project. Later, Lockwood was given more opportunities to further grow the initiative.
“I was very happy about the success of it at the time. Once I got to college, I got into a fellowship that allowed me to expand on it. This is when it grew a little bit more into a fully-fledged idea that brings all the resources that we have now to teachers,” Lockwood said.
According to Lockwood, SEAAPIC is meant to act as a resource for teachers to use for more inclusive AAPI lessons if they don’t know how to.
“What I envision is that SEAAPIC is able to provide whatever educators need in the moment,” Lockwood said, “whether that is actually the lesson plans that they could just toss in here and there to make their content a little bit more inclusive or resources that relate to how to actually teach culturally inclusive content in a classroom.”
SEAAPIC is also working on expanding their influence to other areas. Volunteers in the program are reaching out to other school systems to ensure that AAPI representation is achieved widely.
“One of our team members, they work with [Kevin] Wang, who created the Asian American Literature curriculum, and over the summer, they basically wrote all of [the curriculum] out in a way that was shareable with the Boston Teachers Union,” Lockwood said.
Lockwood said that although it may take time to fully reap the benefits of SEAAPIC, this program holds promise of getting more AAPI-related content in classrooms.
“We’re focused specifically on K through 8th,” Lockwood said. “So I hope that there will be a big ripple effect once people start seeing the effect that being inclusive has on students in particular and the school culture that this curates.”
