Teaching about the Vietnam War: Bringing it all back home to the classroom

What do we teach when we teach about Vietnam's twentieth century wars? Equally importantly, what do students learn when they learn about America's losing venture in Indochina? Like the American GIs who thought Vietnamese history began the day they arrived in the country, instructors often assume learning begins as students enter their first class. But what a student chooses to hear and remember is filtered through all of her or his previous experiences and unacknowledged assumptions. We know the content of a course on the Vietnam War is not neutral. And we often acknowledge that as teachers we ourselves are not neutral. If our assumptions and perspectives are neither clarified openly nor matched against those of the students, most of our audience will be gone in any significant way before the end of the first week of classes. Students will take notes, do the reading perfunctorily, and produce papers that mimic the political position of the teacher . . . but very little learning will occur.