Season 7, Ep. 6: The Learning

In our next episode of Saturday School, where this season we're exploring Asian American interracial cinema, we look at the 2011 documentary "The Learning" by Ramona Diaz.

It's about four women from the Philippines as they're recruited to be teachers in the American public school system around 2006. It follows them over the course of their first year teaching at a predominantly Black school in Baltimore.

Over a century ago, the U.S. colonized the Philippines and established an English-speaking public school system there, inadvertently creating a workforce of Overseas Filipino Workers that could be exploited decades later. The Filipina teachers come because they are able to earn over 20 times as much teaching in the U.S., and they can send money home, which also supports the economy of the Philippines.

We're reminded of a popular trope in Hollywood, where an outsider white teacher comes to teach at a low-income school and ends up uplifting Black and brown students, and then Michelle Pfeiffer ends up in a Coolio video in a shiny black leather jacket.

But in "The Learning," the power dynamics are more complicated. These women teachers come to a new country and are often separated from their husbands and young children for a whole school year for these jobs. Here, there are no white saviors, just the failures of colonialism on both sides of the ocean that bring Black and immigrant Filipino communities together to figure out how to save themselves and each other.