UCLA launches free AAPI textbook to reshape how history is taught

UCLA has put a free digital textbook in front of teachers who are being pressed to do more with less, and to teach Asian American and Pacific Islander history in states where curriculum fights keep narrowing what makes it into the classroom. The new project, Foundations and Futures: Asian American and Pacific Islander Multimedia Textbook, is designed as a national resource for high school, college and lifelong learners, with UCLA calling it the most comprehensive free online collection of AAPI histories and perspectives.

The launch version includes 50 chapters, more than 1,500 media assets and more than 250 ready-to-use lesson plans for grades 9 through 14. The platform is ADA-compliant and includes translation tools, reading supports and customizable display features, a combination that could matter as much as the content itself for districts trying to serve multilingual classrooms and teachers with limited prep time. UCLA says the textbook covers more than 20 AAPI ethnic communities across the United States, its territories and the Pacific.

The public launch took place May 9 at the UCLA Luskin Conference Center under the theme “Reclaiming Our Narrative.” Karen Umemoto, a UCLA professor and co-editor of the project, has said the effort is meant to challenge the idea that AAPI practices, cultural rituals and presence are somehow not American. The textbook is built to correct enduring stereotypes such as the model minority and perpetual foreigner myths that scholars say still shape how AAPI communities are understood.

The scale of the project underscores its policy ambition. UCLA says more than 100 scholars, journalists, organizers and community historians contributed, drawing on more than half a century of Asian American and Pacific Islander studies scholarship. The project grew out of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, founded in 1969 and among the earliest Asian American studies programs in the country, and the center says the textbook was built in part to help schools meet ethnic studies requirements.

That timing matters beyond California. The state adopted an ethnic studies model curriculum in 2021, then set an ethnic studies graduation requirement for the class of 2029-30 and required schools to begin offering courses in the 2025-26 school year. UCLA previously said the center received $10 million in state funding in 2021 to build the resource, while the project has also been described as a roughly $12 million effort. In a national climate where textbook adoption can become a political battleground, UCLA is betting that a free, multimedia, classroom-ready resource can move faster than ideology and give teachers a way to teach AAPI history as a central part of the American story.