Centering Community Storytelling & Learning

Full Spectrum Education’s cinematic digital history projects surface stories rarely explored in traditional classroom spaces. Our work to date has focused on the unconstitutional incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II—including their forced removal, forced assimilation and resettlement, and their decades-long fight for redress. Built in collaboration with community members, educators, and scholars, these open-access learning tools are chock-full of primary sources, such as digitized photographs, documents, and oral histories.

Across our projects and educator trainings, we fuse creative storytelling with rigorous historical research to deepen educational impact. Our curriculum is rooted in holistic, justice-centered pedagogy developed by professional educators and tested in real classrooms. We understand that educators work within different local and state contexts, so our resources are modular, adaptable, and designed to meet educators where they are. We aim to empower not only students’ learning, but educators’ growth as critical thinkers and facilitators of complex histories.

When Full Spectrum Education shares our open educational resources with the world, we also want to make sure that they are given to educators with context—both in terms of how these tools are developed and how to engage these rich histories in the classroom. Through community-centered professional development (PD) for educators, we create space for dialogue, reflection, and strategy, equipping educators to bring hidden histories into the heart of their classrooms and their broader networks.