Final Essay

[stubing]

Please post your reflective essay here.

[Molly Cowan-Johnson]

Reflection Essay

The classes I teach demand the incorporation of what I have learned in this course. In my Modern World History course, we first discuss East Asia during the Age of Exploration in our second Unit including the Ming and Qing dynasties. For my AP World History it is a HUGE portion of the class right from the start. That was the main reason for why I wanted to take this class, so I gained a more comprehensive understanding primary of Chinese history. I learned way more than that and plan to incorporate more things from all three regions we discussed especially Korea. One of my biggest take-aways from the course will be the resources including some of the readings, artifacts, and primary sources. A lot of the artifacts that were used in this class like the variety of Buddhist temples in China with some in Japan gives some good visuals to discuss the idea of religious syncretism.

On my team one of our main goals is to expose students to variety of things out there in the world so we like to include a variety of things for students to look at and activities to do. I really like the variety of ideas that people of different backgrounds and teaching expertise have brought up in our zoom discussions but also posted to the forums like the globalization of food or the earthquakes in Japan. These are resources that I can use in some of my other classes like World Geography.

One topic that was brought up in our discussions was accessibility of this content. As a World history teacher non-western content is the hardest for my students because it is all new and most of the time, they don’t know how to say the names. I understand this having studied East Asian history. I took a US and Vietnam class in college where one of the books was the Chinese perspective of the war….I do not speak Chinese so my brain skipped over the names and I had no idea what was going on. I always give my students this example and we practice how to say the names. I assume that is why we are all kind of here because we think it is important that students learn about this region of the world. Our last group discussion we discussed the importance of this and how we all plan to use what we’ve learned from the course to guide and aid our teaching. The wider use of this content across age groups will have a big impact on our students in their approach to classes like mine but also, I think to the world right now. East Asia today is powerhouse and not knowing anything about this region seems unwise and also kind of self-centered. World domination has shifted before….who is to say the West will continue to be the dominate force…

 

[Hannah Klein]

While this course went into much greater depth than I would likely go with my elementary-age students, there were many resources from the course and of course the forum that I know I can bring into my teaching. When we studied East Asian history up to 1800 we encountered a wide variety of artifacts which tell interesting stories and can open up conversations with even our youngest students. Something I want to make sure to do this year is to bring in resources from East Asia into my teaching of all of the subjects, and in particular ELA and social studies. One teaching strategy that I've mentioned a few times in the forum is VTS (Visual Thinking Strategies), a protocol for facilitating constructive, evidence-based conversation in the classroom based on images. This would be a very obvious place to bring in images produced in different times/places in East Asia. 

 

I'm also looking forward to teaching more about holidays, which is part of the first grade social studies standards, and exposing my students to Lunar New Year (which I've planned a unit around now thanks to this class!) and maybe even the Mid-Autumn Festival. 

 

Asking the question of how I can integrate resources from East Asia in my teaching really gets my creative juices flowing, and oftentimes points me in the direction of interdisciplinarity. When we teach about the moon, could we time it with some short ancient japanese poetry about the moon that one of the visiting lecturers exposed us to during this course? Could I somehow sync it up with a short study on the Mid-Autumn Festival? What kinds of story problems could I write in math that would relate to these topics?

 

Of course the easiest way to integrate East Asian resources in my teaching is through readalouds and my classroom library, which are such an important part of the elementary experience. What kinds of books should I add to my library? What are some readalouds that can help me hit the first grade ELA standards while also exposing my students to East Asian culture?

 

I'm looking forward to building out my cache of resources and am very inspired by this course! Thank you!

[Ying Yu]

This program is such an excellent program! Through months of learning, I got a deeper understanding of history for China, Korean and Japan. Their cultures have some kind of similarity, or overlaps over some parts, such as some traditional festivals. But mostly their cultures are different from each other.

 

I was so additive to those history lectures that some lectures I played many times for reviewing. I felt so sad about some parts of Chinese history, like Mongrols conquered Song Dynasty and Qing government forced Han people to changed their life styles. I also felt impressive about Japanese women writes and I would like to read those literature books from them. 

 

For reflection part, I believe that I should do more research before each online discussion session. For example, read some papers, or watched related lectures. Those lectures from USC are in general and I need to know more about how the background was. For example, the professor Morgan Pitelka  mentioned that there was a big fire in Kyoto during 15 centry, however, I have no idea what was happening so I had to searched online to find the related background information. Also, Professor Dube mentioned “Yuan Ming Yuan” was destoried by fires because of British army and French Army. Although I learned a little bit history about that event, I still felt confused about how they set up fires and how was the results after that.

 

Moreover, this program is so wonderful for school teachers to know East Asian history and teachers will know how to use some learning materials from this program to their teaching. I am considering to put a historical map to compare these three countries for specific history timeline for my students. There were some connections between those countries that history textbook may not mention very clearly. For example, during Ming dynasty, pirates who were from Japan and some parts of China damaged lots of area in China. During that time, Japan was under Sengoku period that lots Japanese people were under wars. However, during Qing dynasty, the pirates disappeared and Japan also went into Tokugawa era. 

 

Thus, there are so many connections behind single history event. I would like to use maps to help my young age students to understand the logic behind history.

[Author]

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