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.Have you, like me, found yourself noticing newstories or other mentions of topics involving Asia? If so, perhaps we can keep the "conversation" going by using this space to report any interesting news or information about Asia that we come across.
This week I've been involved in an LAUSD workshop about "Capacity Building", one of the newly fashionable terms for this year. I've come to find that it means basically knowledge of methods, strategies, and resources that a teacher can use to teach in their subject area. So, we've been doing what used to be called a methods workshop, getting some ideas from the workshop leaders (actual former teachers, wow!) and from all of us who are participating in this program. Well, two of the methods or lesson designs presented in the first two days used subject examples that involved Asia, or Asians. The first was looking at pictures and documents dealing with the Japanese internment camps followed by small group then whole class discussions of what we each saw as important details and features (I'm greatly summarizing the lesson design of course.) Then we actually had to write a short informational essay describing what we had learned. There was quite a bit of discussion about negative Asian stereotypes used during that time, and about how many of the internees saw this as a shame and a dishonor for their family. It made me think of some of the writings and films we saw where so much emphasis was placed on family honor and how individuals first responsibility was to maintain or increase that family honor in the eyes of the larger society. From this perspective, the disgrace of being ostracized, and the poor conditions of these internment camps had an even greater psychological impact than even the economic loss that these Americans had to deal with. Obviously, the men who thought up this particular plan had limited, if any multicultural education. And, the same could be said of the U.S. population at large (though they were told that the internees were being treated well in comfortable homes.) We have a ways to go yet though, since the recent anti-Arab sentiments and government policies show how superficial is our attachment to the ideals of liberty, justice, and tolerance.
The other activity used the Korean War as an example, and we were asked to critique a textbook's description of this event. The bias was very evident in the words that were used-- e.g., limited victory, limited war, communist threat-- and in the choice of facts presented. The text summary added up the costs by noting that 1.5 milion South Koreans were killed, along with 54,000 Americans--and yet this was a "limited war"! It seemes amazing that the bias was made so obvious by not mentioning the number of North Korean casualties, until you remember that the same thing has been done in the recent war in Iraq. Newspapers daily printed allied casualties but never figures on the number of Iraqies, soldiers or civilians killed, though our military certainly had estimates on these. I think it would be a good idea to use what we have learned in the Asian Lit. Seminar to critique our textbooks not only for factual errors but also for bias in word choice and selective editing of information.
Funny, with all these connections to Asia, I sort of still feel like I'm in our seminar 
( and I like that!)[Edit by="sperez on Aug 13, 7:24:12 PM"][/Edit]
[Edit by="sperez on Aug 14, 10:21:25 PM"][/Edit]
Great photos of the seminar Clay. Now I have proof I that I worked over the summer, not just vacationed and ate.
Thank you.
Caryn
