Marissa Halagao

Background

About Marissa Halagao

I'm majoring in Ethnicity, Race & Migration (ER & M) at Yale University and am pursuing a certificate in Education Studies. As an educational advocate, I see the need and value in structuring an education system built on igniting intellectual growth, self-affirmation and anti-racism, using history to contextualize, critique and empower. Born and raised in Hawaiʻi, I'm interested in the intersections between Asian and Pasifika histories and communities. I founded the Filipino Curriculum Project in 2021, a student-driven organization of Filipino students in Hawai'i collaborating with educators to develop and advocate for a statewide Filipino history curriculum, representing the need for student voice empowerment and structural revitalization to educationally serve our communities. The project's course,"Filipino History Culture," is approved for the entire Hawai'i Department of Education and will be taught in select public and private schools starting Fall 2024. The national recognitions and overwhelming support of the Filipino Curriculum Project (FCP) have shown students that our identities deserve to be affirmed and represented in education. I'm passionate about the learning and teaching of marginalized histories to understand and combat systemic oppression. As an undergraduate student coordinator at the Yale Asian American Cultural Center and the co-president of Kasama: the Filipinx Club at Yale, I'm involved in student organizing efforts, such as leading the "Tagalog @ Yale" initiative which successfully advocated for formal Filipino (Tagalog) language courses to be offered at Yale.