Mr. Alejandro Echevarria

Humanities Teacher
Rampart High School
Colorado Springs, Colorado

Mr. Alejandro (Alex) Echevarria is a humanities teacher at Rampart High School in Colorado Springs. He is a teacher in the International Baccalaureate (IB) Program and teaches IB Theory of Knowledge, IB East Asian Regional History and IB 20th Century History. He has taught a wide-range of subjects including World History, Asian Studies, U.S. History, Ethnic/Minority Studies, and Geography and has been a teacher and coordinator for the IB Middle Years Program. Mr. Echevarria is the faculty sponsor of the Japan Club and was the sponsor of the National Honor Society for six years. He led the district’s Secondary Social Studies Curriculum and was the editor for the district’s Social Studies Standards.

Mr. Echevarria first became interested in Japan when he was six years old and watched the Seven Samurai. As a young boy he studied judo in a traditional dojo and has studied the martial arts for over half of his life. He remembers the influence his high school Asian Studies teacher, Mrs. Hargrove, had on pushing him to study East Asia in college. He majored in history with a minor in philosophy and a certificate in Asian Studies. After college, Mr. Echevarria was invited to teach in Japan under the JET Program and he taught in a small mountain town in Fukui-ken. Upon returning from Japan he went to graduate school to study Asian history and religion. His master’s thesis focused on the U.S. Occupation of Japan and the policies concerning the separation of religion from the state.

Since becoming a high school teacher, Mr. Echevarria has led student study tours to Japan and works with Colorado Spring’s sister-city Fujiyoshida to promote student exchanges. In 2007 he led a group of students to the Noto Peninsula to participate in the Manjiro Grassroots Summit for furthering international relations between the U.S. and Japan. He believes his students must experience and participate in Asian culture to understand the region’s history. His classes have experienced the tea ceremony, held international conferences with Japanese college students, studied Buddhism with Thubten Chodron (author and writer), practiced kenpo-karate, learned about Chinese medicine and had acupuncture performed on them, practiced kanji and sumi painting, were taught Japanese, Korean, and Chinese by the ESL students in their school, ate Asian food and snacks, watched anime and Japanese movies, handled Japanese cultural artifacts, and of course learned about the history, literature, and religions of Japan and Asia.

Mr. Echevarria has taken many workshops and summer institutes with the Teaching East Asia (TEA) Program at the University of Colorado and the East Asia Resource Center at the University of Washington. He has been twice to China and once to Japan on the Freeman Foundation study tours conducted by TEA. He is a seminar leader for the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia (NCTA), conducts classes on Asia for his district, and contributes book reviews for the journal Education About Asia. Mr. Echevarria owes much of his professional development opportunities on Asia to support from the Freeman Foundation and from Lynn Parisi, director of the TEA Program in Boulder, Colorado.