Connections between Japanese Internment Camps and my 4-6th grade classroom

This post is in honor of the teacher who inspired me to follow in her footsteps, Ms. Chiyo Masuda. I learned life-long lessons during my three years as her student in a combined grade classroom for 4th-6th grade in Berkeley, California. As a young girl, Ms. Masuda and her family were forced to live in a Japanese-American internment camp during WWII. By teaching her students about how she dealt with this early exposure to racism and fear, she showed us to rise above injustice and prejudice in order to create a respectful learning community. (Here is a link to an excellent student-created Voice Thread about the Internment Camp experience)

In my recent studies of interior design, I have been thinking about Ms. Masuda's effective interior design of our 4th-6th classroom. Even though I was young, I have three years worth of memories of that classroom, with a wall of windows opposite the doorway, cozy nooks for game playing, low bookshelves that created a window seat area, tables for collaborative work and beautiful pieces of Japanese artwork along with featured student artwork. In the evocative terminology of Sarah Susanka, I responded to the elements of "light to walk towards", "shelter around activity", "public to private"(group work spaces and private reading spaces) and "point of focus" (the Japanese and student artwork.)

I have also reflected on how incredibly devastating it must have been to Ms. Masuda as a young child of 7 to be forcibly moved from her family home in the Bay Area to the ugly barracks of the internment camp. I can't recall which camp was her "home" nor can I remember how many years she spent there. My dear teacher passed away 16 years ago, so I am unable to talk with her about her experiences. However, during her three years as my teacher, I remember how she gathered us together in reading groups focused on books such as Farewell to Manzanar and Number the Stars so that we could learn about the heart-wrenching experiences of the concentration camps of the Holocaust and the Japanese Internment camps. The Voicethread project (in the link above) includes some thought-provoking interviews with survivors of the Japanese Internment camps. One woman recalls the shame felt by the intensely private Japanese women when they had to use public latrines without walls for privacy. Using their artistic talents to rise above their inhumane conditions, the women discovered that they could salvage and decorate large boxes, thus creating beautiful privacy shields for their personal use. I imagine that Ms. Masuda, her family and friends in the internment camps had to use all of their strength of will and artistic powers to find beauty in the desert environments of the barracks. Perhaps these experiences helped to fine-tune her sense of interior design, so that she could create spaces where my classmates and I could feel at home in the classroom.