Filipino history and culture matter.
And many Filipino students felt their heritage mattered enough to be taught in school.
For the past three years, they worked to design a curriculum and obtain approval from the state Department of Education. This fall, students of all races were able to enroll in the first Filipino studies course in the U.S. adopted by a statewide public school system.
Vel Angela Fernando, a Filipino senior at Farrington High School, said, “Since taking the course, I feel more comfortable embracing who I am. A lot of people my age, they seem to be ashamed of who they are. … This course was very inspiring for me, just connecting with these feelings. I finally have a space where I get to learn and not feel ashamed.”
Fernando is one of 127 students enrolled in the course, developed by the Filipino Curriculum Project in partnership with the Sistan C. Alhambra Filipino American Education Institute. Farrington and Waipahu high schools were selected as pilot programs because a majority of their student bodies is Filipino.
The coordinator of the project is Patricia Espiritu Halagao, professor and chair of the education college’s Department of Curriculum Studies and co-director of the Center for Philippine Studies at the University of Hawaii Manoa.
Halagao credited her daughter Marissa Halagao and other like-minded students for initiating and pushing the project toward fruition. In 2021 her daughter was bothered that there were no Filipino history courses offered at Punahou School, where she was a sophomore, even though Filipinos make up the largest ethnic Asian population in Hawaii.
“I felt like we deserve to have representation, and the fact that we were not getting that in our history classes, it communicated to me as a Filipino American that my history and my culture was not worthy to be explored,” Marissa Halagao told Teen Vogue (February 2024). Now a freshman at Yale, she said her teachers encouraged her to initiate such a program.
Professor Halagao said, “She (Marissa) did it all and started it all. … With my background I helped to guide her and meet with other teachers and professors to learn about curriculum development and content.”
After talking to teachers at other schools, her daughter discovered other students had the same desire for the recognition of Filipino history and culture. Those who have enrolled in the course are a mixture of diverse backgrounds and racial ancestry, though most are Filipino. Some have been born in Hawaii, and others have emigrated from the Philippines, Halagao said.
Fernando has been active in the development of the Filipino project for two years, since she was a freshman. Though she was born and raised in Kalihi, where many Filipinos reside, “I didn’t know much about myself and where I came from.”
“As a Filipino, I feel like I deserve to be seen in education and that other people would feel the same way.”
Fernando enjoys the course’s different activities, including creative writing, art, reading and acting, to learn about her history and culture. During discussions, “I really like that we’re able to share our part of what we know,” and the immigrants can chime in with personal knowledge of the areas they came from, she said.
Halagao said: “I think that’s what the beauty of the project is — that it’s really bridged and brought together students from all different backgrounds as well as multi-ethnic: Filipino Hawaiians, Filipino Koreans, Filipino Japanese. There’s a need to bridge the experiences between our immigrant and our local-born students where they seek strength from each other’s backgrounds.
“For example, Marissa really wanted to learn the language more. The students from the Philippines taught her the language. And the students from Philippines learned more about local culture,” Halagao said.
