[Hannah Klein]

3. Hanbok and cultural dress tie-in with teaching about gender identity. As teachers work to create space for children of various gender identities and expressions to be themselves in our classrooms, talking about how pink was a boy's color in traditional Korean dress can help children start to understand that the association of certain colors/interests/behaviors with specific gender identities is arbitrary and socially constructed. Might be nice to bring up with this book: https://www.amazon.com/Pink-Boys-Robb-Pearlman/dp/0762462477

[Hannah Klein]

2. Lunar New Year: What are some resources for teaching about specific Korean traditions that have to do with Lunar New Year? I would love some resources so kids could practice compare/contrast skills with other countries' lunar new year traditions. For the past couple of years I've read the book Dumpling Soup to my students, which is a great story about a young girl of mixed asian/pacific islander ethnicities (Korean, Hawaiian, Japanese I believe) who makes a traditional dish and celebrates Lunar New Year with her family. My students who have strong connections to cultural food traditions and my students who come from multiracial/ethnic families really connect with the story! https://www.amazon.com/Dumpling-Soup-Jama-Kim-Rattigan/dp/0316730475 

[Hannah Klein]

Thank you for this resource. I can definitely see this being used in a classroom. For a secondary teacher, how interesting would it be to use this in conversation with Macchiavelli's The Prince? I remember reading this in High School and I can imagine it would be very enriching to put this text in dialogue with it.

[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!

[Hannah Klein]

I was excited to be able to visit the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in Pasadena with my East Asian education glasses on! I’m a member of the Huntington so I’ve been before and visit occasionally, but it’s definitely different visiting with my students in mind! I focused my visit on the Chinese and Japanese gardens. The Japanese gardens include water features, bridges, manicured trees, small decorative objects, as well as an exhibition pavilion with objects that showcase japanese tea ceremony culture and ikebana (flower arranging). There is also a zen rock garden, two curated bonsai collections, and some “touching stones” from the eel river. The Japanese garden seeks to spotlight the beauty of nature. While it may look less planned than a traditional british garden for example, each element is carefully planned to accentuate the beauty of the natural environment. 

 

The Chinese garden on the other hand, highlights the beauty of human construction in nature. Architectural elements and water features take center stage, with special attention paid to giant limestone rocks with chinese characters carved into them.

 

If I took students here, I would love to have discussions comparing and contrasting these two gardens. It would be great to give them the opportunity to deeply observe their surroundings using arts integrated modalities. Sketching, photography, using viewfinders, taking rubbings of the different textures could all be great ways to engage students here. I also saw in their emails that the Huntington hosts concerts of traditional chinese music in the garden every Wednesday afternoon. This would be amazing for a field trip!

 

According to this website (https://www.huntington.org/tours), there is a digital resource that would help provide more context for students. We could bring iPads and refer to the digital guide as we explore! There are also plenty of youtube videos of walking tours of the Huntington, so we could use these in the classroom if we weren’t able to make it out on a field trip (for those out of the area, you can just search Huntington Library Virtual Field Trip and see what comes up – there’s a lot!)

 

[Hannah Klein]

It seems from these lectures and my own experiences with urban centers that intentional urban planning cannot often keep up with the pace of urbanization and the need for changes to the built environment to accomodate population, resource, and labor density in urban centers around the globe. We see how some urban planning projects don't often anticipate the growth and change in a city. I think of the BART system in the Bay Area, which was built for a much smaller population and now does not suffice to meet the needs of all of the people who live and work in the area. I was living there when the official twitter account for BART posted this: https://twitter.com/sfbart/status/710274963987570689?lang=en

How do cities across the globe adapt to rapid changes in population and resource demand? How can architecture, public policy, and planning support this process? How can we plan for the future of cities, especially with the looming spectre of climate change in mind?

[Hannah Klein]

This reminds me of the family in the movie Parasite, who in order to survive live in a below-ground cave-like apartment that ends up completely flooding during a big rainstorm. I wonder how the legacies of colonialism in different east asian countries contribute to the high cost of living, and the conditions of life that force ordinary people to make many sacrifices and live in very difficult conditions? And of course there are so many parallels with rampant social/economic inequality here in the US and around the world!

[Hannah Klein]

I have always been so impressed by the famous woodblock prints from this era of Japanese civilization, and in fact took an art history course in college on japanese prints specifically! It's been awhile since I took this course and I must admit that I've forgotten a lot of what I've learned. Some questions that I have (that would probably be in my course materials from this experience) are, what was the social function of woodblock prints? What other artistic and functional/design forms emerged concurrent to this phenomenom? 

I'm wondering why we don't see a lot of woodblock prints coming out of China during this same era, mostly lots of meticulous paintings on scrolls. What accounts for these differences? 

As I think about my final project, I'm kicking around ideas for a social studies/geography direction, focus in on lunar new year, or plan a art/science/literacy integrated unit on the moon. I've started to pull out anchor standards and I definitely want to pick something I'll actually use with my firsties next year!

Seeking: LAUSD salary points!

[Hannah Klein]

I would love to introduce my future first grade students to some of the examples of Japanese poetry in the readings for this week! It's so great that they're short and full of feeling and sensory detail. It ties in perfectly with this standard!

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.1.4
Identify words and phrases in stories or poems that suggest feelings or appeal to the senses.

As I browsed some of the short poems in the readings linked above I noticed quite a few examples that include the moon. Moon observations are part of the science standards for first grade, so I can definitely see myself planning an interdisciplinary unit on the moon. We could start our inquiry with the question of how people in different places and times see the moon!

1-ESS1-1. Use observations of the sun, moon, and stars to describe patterns that can be predicted.

[Hannah Klein]

I also love the cheeky/sassy tone of this letter and the way the emperor shuts down all of the king's request! I'm not a secondary teacher but I can see older students having fun riffing on/interpreting this source. For some reason, I can really see this interpreted as a rap!! It could be an engaging way for kids to dig into a primary source and express their learning through an arts-based modality. 

[Hannah Klein]

I loved this article from The Met about the similarities between these sculptures of the Virgin Mary and Guanyin. This would make another great prompt for discussion during a designated ELD session! We could ask students to compare and contrast these two images, perhaps even lifting some text from the article (or modifying it for their reading level). Students could practice gaining the floor, rephrasing, respectfully disagreeing and building on classmates' contributions (connected to both ELD and listening/speaking standards). Seems like the Met's website could be a great resource for integrating east asian history in general! 

[Hannah Klein]

Thanks Molly and Jennifer! This makes me think of the debates unfolding in education and in general about who how to share information and engage in learning about cultures that are not your own. As a teacher with no direct cultural/ethnic linkages to east asia, what are some pitfalls I need to watch out for as I engage my students in learning activities about east asian culture? How would my teaching/approach change if there are students who do have direct connections to these cultures in my class? While elementary-aged children aren't exactly looking out to see if their teachers are committing acts of cultural appropriation, it's still important to model respectful engagement with cultures that aren't your own, no matter who's in the room. I would never show up to school in hanbok, for example! It's such an amazing resource when there's a student in your class who does have a direct connection to the culture/history being discussed, and I'm always looking for ways to bring my students home cultures into the classroom (without putting them on the spot of course). 

[Hannah Klein]

I love this idea, Betsy, and I think that integrated ELD is a great place in general to weave in cultural artifacts from ancient East Asia, especially given that the social studies standards don't really start to address world history until kids get older. What other images, primary sources, or data visualizations could we bring in and tie to our standards for primary grades?

[Hannah Klein]

The lectures and readings from this week reminded me of an immersive art installation here in LA at the Velaslavasay Panorama, an unconventional art space housed in an old movie theatre. The Shengjing Panorama is a 360 degree panorama painting with sound and light components that portrays the northern Chinese port city of Shengjing between the years of 1910-1930. There is a pastiche of architectural styles on display in this cityscape, some that seem indigenous to China and some that seem European. If you're in the area, I definitely recommend checking it out! https://panoramaonview.org/home/shengjing-panorama

[Hannah Klein]

I'm reading a book this summer that digs into how ancient japanese cultural practices persist to today, and through the author we get to meet the people who are keeping these traditions, crafts, and cultural practices alive in a tiny mountain town called Yamanaka. It's a memoir/book of essays by an American writer/chef/artist named Hannah Kirshner called Water, Wood, & Wild Things. https://www.amazon.com/Water-Wood-Wild-Things-Cultivation-ebook/dp/B08FH9WRRR 

It's a beautiful book and I highly recommend it! 

[Author]

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