February Featured Grant: Taiwan Travels: An Immersive Understanding of East Asian Culture
Emma Siver teaches 11th grade English and the 9-12 grade African-American and Latinx Scholars program at Brookline High School—a program for students who identify as African-American or Latinx with a history and identity curriculum. When she received a grant from the Brookline Education Foundation, she saw an opportunity to transform how her students understand immigration, cultural identity, and assimilation. Her five-day journey to Taiwan this year would become more than a personal adventure—it would be a teaching tool that brings new depth to her classroom.
What made Siver’s trip particularly meaningful was the chance to stay with a colleague and her family who live in Taiwan. This immersive experience allowed her to move beyond typical tourist encounters and gain authentic insights into daily life, cultural values, and the complex factors that shape people’s decisions about where to call home.
Siver had clear intentions for the trip: to help her students deepen their understanding of curriculum through oral history, to better grasp people’s motivations behind immigration journeys or the choice to stay, and to gain perspective on assimilation, homogenous culture, and political affairs.
Throughout her travels, Siver visited sites that each offered distinct lessons for her classroom. At the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, she gained context about the forces that drive immigration decisions—why people choose to go or to stay. The vibrant Raohe Street Night Market challenged a common assumption: that people who immigrate are necessarily leaving places with nothing to offer. The bustling market, filled with cultural richness and community vitality, told a different story entirely.
The Grand Hotel provided insights into how understanding a place’s history can help us comprehend why people behave as they do and how environment shapes communities. Visiting McKay Memorial Hospital and Fort Santo Domingo illuminated the wide reach of colonization and both the negative and positive influences this brought to places around the world. The Elephant Mountain hike offered a powerful reminder of our shared humanity—how much we have in common across different places, from living together in dense cities to protecting historic and natural landmarks.
“I travelled internationally before, but not this extensively, and being funded by the BEF and being able to travel with my colleague, being welcomed by her family, made this a full and wholesome experience. For the students, used to seeing mainly images from the past, getting to see images of Taiwan now is really interesting and engaging.”
The opportunity to see a new part of the world and to deepen her connections to colleagues is part of what helps younger educators of color like Emma see a future in education, specificially in Brookline, so it is particularly special for the BEF to have been part of this experience.