Final essay - Due by December 1

[vjones]

Reflect on the seminar experience in a 250-500 word essay. Discuss how you intend to incorporate East Asia into your teaching. Possible topics you may wish to address include attitudes, approaches, and materials. Which issues or ideas raised in the seminar are of greatest relevance to your courses and your students? Your unit or essay will be shared with other teachers via the web.

[Jazmin Luna]

I plan on incorporating East Asia into my teaching by using certain content topics as examples.  Unfortunately, the social studies standards in second grade focus on family history, map skills focused on the United States, governmental practices in the U.S., and important people who made a difference in our country.  Due to that, I won’t be able to go into detail about the history of East Asia countries.  I can, however, use certain articles or excerpts from articles to do close reading activities or further explain how each country, like individuals, are different from each other yet have similarities. 

Three social studies units I can use examples from East Asia are “Families Now and Long Ago”, “The Land Around Us”, and “People Who Make a Difference.”

For our language arts units, I believe that certain excerpts from articles can be beneficial in the following units.  “Characters Facing Challenges”, “Many Characters, Many Points of View”, “What Can Different Cultures Teach Us?”, and “How Does Understanding the Past Shape the Future?”

One issued raised in this seminar that was of greatest relevance to my course and students would be when we first started and the professor talked about the names of the sea depending on the country. This would be a perfect topic of discussion when looking at maps and learning how to read them, as well as how depending on where people live they will have their own point of view.  The film that I also reviewed “The Concubine” would also serve as a great example as to how people and countries are different.  I would only show the scenes of how they mourned for the loss of someone and discuss how different cultures have different customs.  This year I have one Armenian student and one student from Thailand.  The rest are Hispanic.  Using this topic for discussion, I would also be able to include all of my students’ cultures when discussing mourning practices.  I actually plan on talking about this, this week since we will be learning about Dia De Los Muertos and how people celebrate the dead.

Overall, this seminar has provided me with many examples of East Asia that I can incorporate into my curriculum. 

 

[Rick Steil]

Rise of East Asia Seminar.

 

When I received the email about this seminar I was skeptical about what information I would acquire and how would I be able to use this information in my classroom. I found this seminar eye opening because I learned that I did not know very much about the history and lifestyle of these Asian countries. I also was naïve on what impact that these nations have on our daily lives and how much they will be in the future.

I am a High School Photography teacher and I plan on using this information to make my students aware of the impact that these countries have on us in America. I think this is important for the students to become aware of but for my photography classes I hope to make my students aware of the style and techniques that Asian photographs use to create their images. The website that I wrote about showcases 30 Photographers from Asia and I will have my students use this and other sources to research a particular artist and compare their work to that of a western photographer during the same time period. I believe this will help my students to look closer to the artist elements that are used by Asians and understand the reasons behind their images. This will also help my students see what it was like in Asia when compared to the same time period in the Western world. After doing the research on an Asian photographer I will assign a project that will have the students use the images created by their Asian photographer and attempt to create images that use some of the same techniques. These students should be influenced by their Asian photographer’s work and I believe this will make them more aware of the culture and creativity that exists in Asia.

[Eric Hoh]

 

            The primary way I want to incorporate East Asia into my teaching is with the intention of helping students to see and understand East Asian culture and history as being rich and unique. I would desire for students to be able to make connections and parallels to more emphasized histories of European and United States histories. In addition to this, it would be amazing to create opportunities for students to see themselves in a global scale and perspective. My personal upbringing has largely felt Western-centric, and even this designation of globally Western versus Eastern assumes Europe as a central position. This is actually a crucial idea about history that I want my students to become aware of and to think critically about when they are processing any histories they are taught in the future. Students should develop a critical and analytical lens when reading history books, texts, resources, etc. I think that this seminar has done an excellent job in highlighting the deep complexity and nuance that is present in East Asian history, as well as the utter importance of learning these histories due to the global presence and impact that these nations have had on European and American history.

            Overall, my general desire is to see a greater openness and awareness to the importance and influence of East Asia on Europe and America. The students I teach are largely unfamiliar with East Asian people and/or culture. As such, I see a great opportunity to help build the bridges for future cross-cultural interactions and connections that I hope my students will experience in their future relationships in their future communities and college campuses. I am certain that I will continue to bring up discussion about the Sea of Japan versus the East Sea at dinner tables and friendly conversations. 

[Michelle Levy]

Final Reflection:

I first want to thank Professor Dube for the rising amount of information he shared with us in this seminar. I took away new feelings and a wealth of knowledge towards everything East Asia.

Secondly, when I signed up for this class, I was not entirely sure what this class was going to be about. After attending the sessions, I am glad I participated because I learned a lot. I would have loved this class even more when I was in University. However, it was also a challenge for me. I sometimes had to dig deep to figure out how to integrate some of the information to my lower-elementary students. Of course, there was a plethora of information I can now bring into my classroom.

To begin, the lessons on Korea really spoke to me. I found that Professor Yung-Kim’s presentations included a great deal of lesson ideas that elementary aged students could participate and excel at. Juxtaposing Korea with parts of the United States to compare and understand its size would be a fun lesson! She also provided us with a list of resources in which one was Korean Children’s Favorite Stories that could give students an introduction to some stories told to Korean children. I definitely plan on using those stories in my classroom.

Another great idea I would like to integrate would be the “debate” that we had in class between the Reform, self-strengthening, and rebel opinions in China. Maybe I wouldn’t assign the roles to specific students (because we are still working on courage), but groups of students could begin to understand point of view, and more importantly, how every group is similar and different.

In short, I really had a fascinating time learning about The Rise of East Asia and I want to thank everyone involved. Huge congratulations and thank you to Catherine Gao, who I know worked so hard for the organization of this class, especially during the last stages of her pregnancy. I also want to say thank you to everyone that participated in the forums. Many of you helped me plan my lessons, and helped me understand some of the readings and lectures that went over my head. A great experience! 

[Jacqueline Mercado]

I must confess that I felt unsure about my commitment to this seminar for a couple of reasons:  I am not a history teacher by training and I did not have a sound knowledge base of East Asia.  This lack of knowlege is a result of the gaps in my own education and one reason I decided to enroll in the course. It is also my belief that teachers should be life learners and that we should seek opportunities to both learn new ideas and reflect on our teaching practice.  I hoped that the seminar would strengthen my content knowlege of world history by exposing me to a culture and history that I did not know much about so that I could become a better prepared teacher of history.  As I reflect on my experience going through this seminar, I feel that it has assisted both my learning and teaching practice in many ways.  It exposed me to new perspectives and voices that I had not been exposed to and offered me the space to reflect on my teaching practice and what I would like to emphasize in my classes as an educator.

While many ideas and information presented in this seminar will be useful in my work with my students, what would be most applicable in my teaching of world history would be the inclusion of perspectives and voices that are not traditionally taught nor studied for the purpose of creating understanding, empathy and connections to these in my students' lives.  By exposing my students to multiple perspectives and viewpoints, I hope to facilitate the process of a debate and cause shifts in the perspectives of my students.  Throughout this seminar I learned that by approaching any issue through the prism of a debate, I can cause my students to think through their assumptions and help them develop more inclusive and broader perspectives.  This idea of shifts in perspectives is linked to another idea presented in the seminar that I would like to emphasize in my teaching and that is that history is a narrative that can be revised if new information dictates revisions.  This is an important lesson to teach to students as truth is often times elusive and students need a framework from which to build upon and strategies to help them research for the untold story.

In addition to these ideas presented in the seminar, multiple teaching strategies were introduced that I will implement into my teaching practice.  I was impressed with the importance of preparation and research, the inclusion of detail and primary texts and how these inserts help fluidity, engagement and execution of lessons.  I was impressed by how much detail and primary texts were inserted in the presentations throughout the course and this inspired me to think about how student engagement depends on my prepartion of lessons.  Student engagement can also be heightened by the integration of political cartoons and other visuals.  There are many skills that students can learn from the elements of propaganda and the power of persuasion.  This seminar has reminded me that visual can be a strategic teaching tool that can used to reach all students, especially my struggling students.  Another teaching strategy I would like to implement into my teaching is the interactive historical enounters activity.  Combined with the integration of visuals, this activity can help students create historical characters and narratives while fostering empathy and academic rigor.  I appreciated that through the development of a lesson, I had to consider how I would implement these in an actual lesson.

I thoroughly enjoyed this seminar and found it a valuable experience both as a learner and teacher.  I was impressed and inspired by the professionalism, expertise and enthusiasm the presenters exhibited.  Their passion for knowledge and their desire to create understanding showed through each presentation.  I look forward to enrolling in future seminars like this one and will recommend these to my colleagues.

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