On Feb. 15, the Association for Asian Studies announced Brown’s Choices Program curriculum “The Vietnam War: Origins, History and Legacies” as the 2024 winner of its Franklin R. Buchanan Prize for Curricular Materials.
The Buchanan Prize aims to “recognize an outstanding pedagogical, instructional, or curriculum publication on Asia designed for K-12 and college undergraduate instructors and learners,” according to their website.
The award-winning curriculum was developed in a span of two years by the Choices Program’s Assistant Director of Curriculum Development Kevin Hoskins, Associate Director of Digital Curriculum Susannah Bechtel and Curriculum Developer Sarah Kreckel. The team will receive the award at the AAS annual conference in mid-March.
The Choices Program, hosted by Brown’s department of history, was originally established in response to tense U.S.-Soviet relations after the Cold War to “increase civic participation among people” and educate the public on current issues, explained Andy Blackadar, the Program’s director of curriculum development.
Since its inception in 1988, the Choices Program has been awarded two other Buchanan Prizes, according to a Brown press release — one for a curriculum on U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, and the other for a curriculum on Indian independence.
The Program has since evolved to feature in-depth curricula for high school students on both recent events and U.S. history by working with experts in different departments of history.
“That’s the role we play: to take all the scholarship that’s produced at Brown and other universities, and think about ways to make that readable for … young readers,” said Hoskins, who was the lead developer of the Vietnam War curriculum.
A reason for developing a curriculum on the Vietnam War stemmed from a noticeable lack of educational materials featuring the Vietnamese perspective. “These gaps affect interpretation, and they affect the way we look at history,” Hoskins said. “It’s been too U.S.-centric in the way we talked about this war, when this war affected, more so than anyone else, the Vietnamese.”
Advances in Vietnamese studies over the past two years have worked to “correct errors, and to provide a more thorough and three-dimensional perspective of Vietnamese politics, society and culture,” Hoskins added.
To develop the course, Hoskins and his colleagues tracked down primary sources, some of which had to be translated from Vietnamese into English for the first time. “I think I must’ve read 80 books just to find the (primary) sources that we’ve included,” Kreckel shared.
The developers also rely on the research of many Brown scholars, such as Professor of History Robert Self and Postdoctoral Research Fellow Cindy Nguyen. University graduate and undergraduate students were also involved: Brown-RISD dual degree student Caroline Zhang ’25, for example, worked with the Choices team to develop unique maps of the Vietnam War.
The curriculum is designed to focus on the war’s origins and aftermath to thoroughly define the effects of the war on the Vietnamese people.
“It’s important to consider the experiences of the Vietnamese people, both from the North and the South, and other diverse experiences within the U.S., like experiences of women during the war, and people of different cultural backgrounds,” Blackadar explained. “We’re really trying to tell a more complicated story.”
Students learning the curriculum explore personal narratives and firsthand testimonies to understand the enduring impacts of the war on Vietnam, Vietnamese refugees and the United States. By analyzing diverse primary sources often overlooked in traditional U.S. accounts, students gain insight into the war’s human toll, the post-war refugee crisis and the various ways in which the conflict is commemorated.
“What we’re trying to do is present information in a way to students that they find interesting and stimulating,” Blackadar said. “It’s not memorizing a series of events and dates, it’s rather understanding the experiences of human beings and governments and places and how they all shape each other.”
Hoskins noted that for youth in a globally connected world, “understanding people and seeing them through their own eyes” is essential to developing empathy for other cultures.
Upon receiving news of their win of the 2024 Buchanan Prize, the developers felt proud to have made a meaningful contribution to American education. According to Hoskins, combined with positive feedback from teachers, the recognition of their efforts is what keeps them going.
“I’m pretty happy,” Hoskins said. “It makes you feel good when what you set out to do comes to fruition.”
The Choices Program is already working on their next set of projects. When asked about future projects, Blackadar said: “Bringing new perspectives about history and current events to teachers and building on the scholarship from Brown, that would be a great thing to be doing in a few years. And I think we will be.”
