What Happens When a Curriculum Is Actually Written by the Community It's About?
Ask a Hmong, Cambodian, or Vietnamese student in a California classroom whose history they read about this year, and too often the honest answer is: nobody's. For years, that gap sat in plain sight. Southeast Asian communities whose histories are deeply woven into this state were largely absent from the curriculum their own children were handed every day. When they did appear, it was through a single flattened story, the "model minority myth," one that erased the very different histories, displacements, and forms of resilience each community carries.
The Orange County Department of Education set out to change that. And in doing so, they built something the National Equity Project was honored to help carry forward: a Community of Practice putting a new, community-authored curriculum into the hands of real teachers, in real classrooms, right now.
A Curriculum Built By the Communities It Represents
The curriculum at the center of this work was developed with guidance from OCDE as a model of what community co-design can look like when it's taken seriously. They knew they needed community members from Hmong, Cambodian, and Vietnamese backgrounds to collaboratively design the curricula that centered on resilience, cultural values, and traditions; not just stories about war and trauma. This involved elders, youth, survivors, scholars, and educators.They wrote it. Many of them now serve as guest speakers in OCDE's teacher training, standing alongside the formal educators who will carry these stories into their classrooms.
Their authorship shows up in the specificity of the work. This isn't a curriculum about a generalized Asian American experience. It holds space for a Hmong family's history separately from a Cambodian family's history, separately again from a Vietnamese family's history, because those experiences are not interchangeable, and students deserve to see their own particular story reflected back to them, not a story that stands in for it.
Prototyping What Comes After the Training
OCDE could give teachers a strong initial training in the curriculum. What it couldn't provide alone was the ongoing support teachers need once they're actually standing in front of a classroom, working through the complexity of teaching material this personal and this new.
That's the gap this Community of Practice exists to close.
Formally launched in March 2026, the effort brings together a cohort of 60 educators from more than ten districts, spanning a wide range of grade levels. From their very first session together, this group did something not every professional learning space manages: they shared their own stories and identities with each other openly, and let that trust become the ground the rest of the work stands on.
NEP's role has been to bring a framework for building those humanizing conditions into the room. Educators in the cohort are prototyping NEP's Elements of Learning Conditions framework directly in their classrooms, testing what it actually takes to create the kind of belonging this curriculum asks for, not in theory, but in practice, with real students, in real time. The thinking behind this is straightforward: if this framework can prove itself with teachers on the ground, it becomes far more credible when the conversation turns to adopting it at the systems level.
What's Ahead
The work is already reaching further than a single set of lesson plans. Alongside the Elements of Learning Conditions framework, the cohort is also drawing on NEP's Learning Partnership Framework, Focal Student Inquiry approach, and Designing and Facilitating for Equity frameworks.
This fall, the focus deepens. NEP will bring facilitative leadership training into the cohort, equipping these 60 educators to become ambassadors, not just for this curriculum, but for the human-centered approach underneath it. Focal Student Inquiry work will go deeper as well. And the group is exploring what it might look like to bring young people themselves into the design process as co-authors, not simply as the students the curriculum was written for.
None of this happens without funding willing to trust the pace this kind of relational work actually requires. This Community of Practice is supported by a generous grant from The Asian American Foundation, running through the end of the year, an investment in the belief that a curriculum is only as strong as the community that shapes it and the teachers who bring it to life.
