Ziegler, Jan Fielder

Dr. Jan Fielder Ziegler is Vice President of Development at Black River Technical College. She earned her Ed.D. from Arkansas State University, her Masters of Arts in German Studies from University of New Mexico and her Masters of Arts in English from Arkansas State University. Dr. Ziegler has published numerous articles and teaches writing, Holocaust Studies and German. Ziegler is currently researching Vienna-born artist Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, art teacher in Terezin (Theresienstadt) Ghetto/Concentration Camp; her next work will examine the work of Brandeis, who perished at Auschwitz, and Mabel Rose Jamison, art teacher for Japanese American children incarcerated at Rohwer Relocation Center during the same time frame.

Schooling of Japanese American Children at Relocation Centers During World War II: Miss Mabel Jamison and Her Teaching of Art at Rohwer, Arkansas

2005 0-7734-6149-3
The general story of education of Japanese Americans imprisoned in camps in this country during World War II has long been known. Little has been written, however, about the individual teachers who agreed to live and work with the students in the camps during the period of incarceration. The story of “Miss Jamison” and the education program in the prison camps at Rohwer and Jerome in Arkansas provides a fresh new view of a Caucasian teacher who came to work with a “strange” group of students, but who was herself educated in the process. Through evidence from Jamison’s papers, contemporary documents, historical accounts, interviews with survivors and even from the students’ art work Miss Jamison preserved, Ziegler creates a perceptive account of the wartime ordeal of the more than 110,000 Japanese Americans, two-thirds of them American citizens, from a unique point of view. This book is a moving and significant expansion of our knowledge of the human dimensions of a wartime tragedy.