Kayla Walford '26 began creating a mother-daughter doll set as part of a project for Professor Yoko Yamamoto’s family engagement course. Professor Yamamoto invited students to incorporate art and storytelling into their final projects for community partners, in order to highlight students’ talents. When the project requirements changed and Walford was no longer obligated to finish, she chose to complete the doll set on her own time and donate it to the AAPI History Museum in Providence, in celebration of the museum’s first anniversary. 

The idea was born through a conversation with Jeannie Solomon at the museum. When Solomon described the museum’s commitment to intergenerational AAPI cultural joy, Walford realized she wanted her contribution to be something a family could interact with together. She decided she could engage both a mother and daughter while also giving a child room to explore the side of their own identity. 

The choice of the qipao, a traditional Chinese garment, was rooted in Walford’s own childhood. "I remember when I was a child, cultural days in my elementary school were an important factor in my journey to embrace my Chinese heritage," Walford says. "Each year on school cultural day, my mother always ensured that I was wearing a pretty qipao. By wearing qipaos around my peers, I felt confident that my Chinese identity was not something that was diminished by my multiracial status.” She hopes the doll set can carry that same feeling forward, that it "can be passed down with good memories, from generation to generation."

Even before the dolls were finished, the artistry drew people in. Walford found that whenever she worked on them in public, passersby would stop to admire them, and their excitement would grow when she explained where the dolls were headed. "Through these dolls, I was able to inform a lot of people about the museum's existence downtown, and hopefully intrigue them to visit," she says. "I loved how even before the dolls were complete, they were still excelling at my wish to engage people in AAPI culture and the museum it would soon go to."

For Professor Yamamoto, this is precisely what community-engaged learning is designed to make possible. "When students collaborate with community members who do important work and see their efforts and impact, learning becomes more relational and grounded," Yamamoto says. "Such experiences can encourage them to reflect on how they can contribute to their communities in thoughtful ways."

Walford's thinking about the piece was also shaped by what she was learning in the course itself, particularly around the idea that family engagement is a two-way relationship, and that children have equal agency in building connections between home and school. She wanted the doll set to give a child a starting point for that sense of agency. As she looks ahead to further research at the intersection of early education and racial equity, Walford sees art and storytelling as “ways of bridging that gap, and inviting people from all ages and walks of life to consider how their racial identity and education experience intermingled," she says. "To have my work be featured as a celebration of AAPI history and culture in a museum is something that I would have never thought possible."