In this post, Dr. Elaine Andres reflects on her recent workshop at the Teaching Music History Conference about teaching Asian American music. In addition to the “Asian America in 25 Songs” playlist discussed below, you can find pedagogical resources from Dr. Andres linked here.
We are the children of the migrant worker
We are the offspring of the concentration camp
Sons and daughters of the railroad builder
Who leave their stamp on America . . .
These lyrics open “We Are the Children,” a song released in 1973 by Chris Kando Iijima, Joanne Nobuko Miyamoto, and William “Charlie” Chin. Throughout, the song tunes listeners into the diverse histories and experiences of Asian immigrants in North America—from migrant Filipino farmworkers and the Chinese laborers who built the Transcontinental Railroad, to Asian immigrant restaurant owners and domestic workers, to the plight of Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II. Challenging dominant historical narratives, the lyrics reframe so-called “unskilled” labor and largely erased Asian American stories as foundational to the making of the United States.
“We Are the Children” reminds us that music can be both a historical witness and a powerful pedagogical tool. It was one of several songs that music educators gathered to listen to, reflect on, and strategize with at the AMS’s Teaching Music History Conference this June, where I led a workshop titled “Teaching Asian American History in 25 Songs.” The workshop was part of the Many Musics of America initiative, a series spotlighting “the richness and diversity of America’s musical traditions as the country approaches its 250th anniversary.” I approached facilitating this workshop in the same spirit that I approach my research and teaching: with a hunger to listen to Asian American voices and experiences in all their complexity and envision ways of integrating them into their rightful place in music curricula.
The workshop invited participants to explore how Asian American music can illuminate cross-cutting themes such as migration, diaspora, labor, power, identity, and belonging. Educators from any musical background or specialization were welcome to attend. The session centered three goals:
- 1. Foster Connections: Create space for educators to share experiences and pedagogical strategies from across disciplines, institutions, and grade levels.
- 2. Expand Historical Narratives: Deepen the group’s collective understanding of Asian American histories and the diverse musical practices these communities have cultivated.
- 3. Translate Listening into Teaching: Develop practical strategies for listening to and integrating Asian American music and history into our classrooms.
This post gives an overview of the resources used to facilitate the workshop, followed by a summary of the discussion activity that anchored our dialogues and that can be adapted to readers’ own classrooms.
Asian America in 25 Songs
My experiences as a student, teacher, and researcher have shown me how Asian American stories are often overlooked in classrooms, relegated to single units on a syllabus or brief spotlights during heritage months. But Asian American music making helps to direct listeners to a deeper account of Asian American multiplicity and the community’s many forms of resistance: from nineteenth-century plantation work songs like “Hole Hole Bushi,” to contemporary feminist hip-hop anthems like Ruby Ibarra’s “Us,” to Jin Hi Kim’s avant-garde response to COVID-19 and anti-Asian racism.
To bring these musics into focus for educators, the workshop offered a hands-on introduction to “Asian America in 25 Songs,” a playlist curated by the Music of Asian America Research Center. This interactive resource includes a wide range of musical works by and about Asian Americans. Each song on the list includes a sound file, an artist biography, brief historical context, and some thematic insights that help educators prepare lesson plans. Some of this information remains in process. But for one example song, see Dharmakapella, “Jiya Re.”
A disclaimer: against notions of fixed canons or definitive repertoires, this resource does not claim to be the be-all-end-all survey of Asian American music. Instead, it invites curiosity, further research, and adaptation to our local classroom contexts. In doing so, it resists the idea of a single sound or story of “Asian American music,” recognizing that the term describes a heterogeneous body of work that cuts across genres, generations, regions, and audiences.
Organized into three chronological periods—before 1965, 1965–2000, and post-2000—the songs align with key themes in Asian American history, such as immigration, labor, empire, globalization, and additional themes as illustrated in the figure below. This enables educators to structure lessons around critical junctures in Asian American history while at the same time engaging students through musical style, lyrics, historical and cultural contexts, and the personal connections that the songs express or evoke.
Listening Circles
I invited workshop participants to listen to songs on the playlist, first, as if they were students, and then again as teachers, and offered guiding prompts they could use during the session and adapt for later implementation in their classrooms. These prompts invite participation regardless of familiarity with the songs or Asian American history, which helps to make the listening exercises accessible and generative for a diverse body of learners. The prompts included:
- Feel it: How does this music make you feel? What emotions, images, or memories come up when you listen? Does this song remind you of any people, places, or moments in your own life?
- Hear it: What do you hear in the song? What instruments, voices, or sounds stand out? What is the song about? How is a story told in musical structures, lyrics, or sounds? Have you heard songs like this before?
- Connect it: Who made this song, and who is it for? How does it connect to a community, culture, or movement you may know of? Do you see any connection between this song and your own culture, background, or experiences?
In small groups, workshop participants used these prompts to discuss playlist selections. For many, their lack of familiarity with the music resulted in a genuinely new learning experience that allowed them to respond to the collection as their students might. We then shifted the conversation to brainstorming ways the songs could be used to address themes or to teach skills and frameworks in our own classrooms. You can see some of these discussions in the figure below.
As I listened in on small-group discussions, participants also shared ideas for:
- Pairing Asian American musical texts with songs from Black, Latine, and Indigenous communities to teach comparative approaches to listening or analysis of cross-cultural solidarity.
- Using “Asian America in 25 Songs” as a model for student-curated playlists with reflective writing prompts based on personal or community histories.
- Incorporating local artists into lesson plans to encourage place-based learning that reflects our classrooms’ surrounding communities.
These ideas are just some of the ways we can help our students hear the full breadth of American musical stories. If you weren’t able to attend the workshop—or if you’d like to explore further—the “Asian America in 25 Songs” resource is freely available online through the Music of Asian America Research Center. At the workshop, I shared a list of even more resources on Asian American history and music including books, additional curated playlists, documentaries, and sample lesson plans. You can download these here.
What voices have been missing from your classroom? Let’s continue this work and make space for the many musics that have always been part of America’s soundtrack.
Elaine Andres’s research and teaching engage music and performance studies, transnational American studies, critical geography, and popular cultures of US empire. She earned the PhD in Culture and Theory from UC Irvine. Dr. Andres is a Panda Express Postdoctoral Fellow in Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and was formerly an ACLS Leading Edge Fellow.
