[Juan Liebana-Mena]

Hello Jane,

I found your debate lesson quite interesting and engaging. I am teaching debate for the first time this year and I am already overwhelmed with the amount of information, details, tournaments, lessons, etc. However, I found this lesson quite effective and likely to boost student interest and engagement. I am going to be looking at this unit for mini lessons on the urban debate league curriculum and my own lessons.

[Juan Liebana-Mena]

Hi Nira!

Thanks for uploading such a complete and detailed lesson plan. I really like the amount of resources and cultural approach of this lesson. The graphic organizers, videos and analysis questions at the end are very rigorous and useful. I also found the rubric quite complete and student-friendly. I teach ELD and I found this quite complete and could even use as is with any class with some minor modifications. Thanks!

[Juan Liebana-Mena]

Hi Courtney! I teach 9th and 10th grade English. Thanks for sharing this idea and the web resource. I think the idea of using Kamon to represent family is great and will boost student curiosity and interest in Japanese culture. My students are very interested in logos and modern commercial branding, so I believe this type of content would be quite refreshing and new to them. Thanks for sharing this idea and project. I will be trying it out with my students. 

[Juan Liebana-Mena]

Hi Wen! I really like your approach to bringing the ideas from this lecture to the classroom. I think the concepts and imagerie about currency and nationalism are powerful to boost students interest and curiosity. How do you plan to use this? What are the grade levels and content units you think this would work best with? I am intesrested because I might try to launch an interdisciplinary lesson with other history teachers in my school so students can work on projects for both English and History.

[Juan Liebana-Mena]

I agree. At first, I too thought the main idea behind the poster was to portrait the Chinese as the leader or most powerful of the three characters. However, it was Mao's book being held by all three that revealed this idea of expansion of communism. I think it is a very powerful poster in order to show Chinese citizens of the power of communisism and how even foreign societies and other ethnicities are embracing communism and ready to fight for it. I also found key the fact that the three men protrayed are not soldiers but workers. This conveys the idea that every person is a soldier of the nation and that it's everyone's role to fight and work for communism success. 

[Juan Liebana-Mena]

I too watched Last Train home and found it a great resource to learn about the importance of family and traditions in Chinese culture. It's a great movie to learn more about a tradition that keeps getting bigger every year in the United States, the Chinese New Year, and to understand its massive importance in China. The scenes of the workers in their factories can be a bit hard sometimes as they paint a quite dismal picture. Still they are of great importance in order to better understand the life of migrant workers in modern industrial China. The scenes of the crowds and desperation of some people trying to secure a place to travel home can be very hard too, but they are necessary in order to help the western viewer understand the economic expansion of China and the massive migration from rural areas to the cities and industrial areas. 

To me, the most impactful scene of the movie is when the couple is traveling on top of a boat and the wife tells the story about leaving her baby behind with her mother because they had to relocate to their new workplace. The way this woman describes the pain experience by living without seeing her kid is heartbreaking. She even said that it was extremely painful receiving letters from her kid that made her even sadder to the point that she wouldn't eat. 

Despite the sadness and the dismal themes and stories this movie depicts, I still think this is an amazing movie and a necessary movie for the western viewer in oder to understand the industrial growth of modern China and the life situtations of the workers that have made this economic progress possible on a daily basis. 

[Juan Liebana-Mena]

            The Exploring East Asian Visual Culture seminar has been quite enjoyable and interactive, and I really value the opportunity to attend this seminar. It’s quite refreshing to actually attend a program at such a unique location and discussing visual culture and its educational applications with fellow teachers. The ample amount of strategies, content, and teaching approaches I was able to learn from the readings, lectures, and interactions with other colleagues will really benefit my lessons and my students’ engagement.

            I am looking forward to incorporating some of the strategies from this seminar into my lessons. In particular, I am already planning some lessons for the upcoming academic year, and I want to use the “Look! What do you see?” activity that professor Michael Berry presented during his presentation about Contemporary Chinese Culture and Cinema.  I'm thinking of using it when teaching Greek and Latin roots and common cognates between English and Spanish. The idea is to trigger curiosity and have students examine language from a more inquisitive point of view. I think this could really help English Learners and native speakers taking foreign language classes as well since it would help them develop the skill of decoding new vocabulary by looking for similarities in their native language.

            Apart from the lectures, materials, discussions, and resources covered daily and in the forum; I really appreciated the field trips to the Korean Culture Center and the Chinese American Museum. Both places offer a very well-organized array of culture about both countries/communities that can help students learn about the history and also modern culture presence of Korean and Chinese culture in mainstream global culture. The Chinese American Museum is very close to our school, and I think it is a great location for a field trip. In addition, the LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes is across the street from the Chinese American Museum, so it would be a great combination for a day field trip. That way students can experience and learn about the history and culture of such two important places around our school community.

            In addition, I plan to visit the program’s forum regularly in order to look for and utilize activities, lessons, and ideas that fellow teachers have developed or suggest to incorporate. This is a great resource that contains some of our best practices. The variety of topics, grade-levels, and relevance make it very useful resource for any teacher. I really like the High School Ideas section and some of the lessons posted there by teachers such as the idea of crossing the curriculum via technology. I think that would a very interesting idea since our school just acquired more technology and now every student has access to a laptop or iPad.

            I really enjoyed this summer program and appreciate this opportunity. I am looking forward to attend future seminars and more summer programs with the Institute. This was the second USC U.S.-China Institute program I attended. I have taken many other salary point classes, seminars, and courses; and I must say that this was one of my favorites due to the fact that everything we learned about and the topics were quite new to me. It’s truly refreshing when you learn to apply new skills and strategies to your lessons from a different perspective such as visual culture.

[Juan Liebana-Mena]

The last session of our Exploring East Asian Culture seminar took place at the Chinese American Museum. First of all, the introduction by the museum coordinator was really eye-opening. I can’t believe that this is one of the only two buildings from the historic Chinatown that still remain in this area of Los Angeles. Her explanation about the evolution of Chinatown, the planning and construction of Union Station and the evolution of the area were quite important for any local to know about the history of Los Angeles. The building itself is very charming and conveys a lot of history in itself.

The artifacts and artwork from the Chinese Herbs room on the first floor really take you back in time and help you visualize how life was back in the day for Chinese Americans in Los Angeles. The exhibit with little bowls with rice symbolizing the growth of the Chinese American population in the city was also a very clever and simple way to help students realize the growth of the community.

It was also great seeing so many newspaper materials, election pamphlets, artifacts and even clothing from Chinese politicians running for office. They really helped me understand this growth of the Chinese communities and the evolution of Chinese culture in the city. Finally, the hip hop exhibition on the third floor was also quite engaging and interesting. Again, as it happened on the modern culture exhibition on the first floor of the Korean Cultural Center, I think this modern exhibit is a great way to instill curiosity in my students, and help them better understand Chinese American culture and the evolution of this historic part of Los Angeles.

 

[Juan Liebana-Mena]

I had a great time at the Korean Cultural Center on Friday morning. These two field trips were the perfect closure to a great week where I learned a lot about East Asian Visual Culture. The presentation about Korea was really impressive and well organized and really got me interested and wanting to learn more about South Korea and, in particular, about the economic plan that made the country grow from a more humble economic hegemony to a world superpower status in such a short period of time.

The fact that Jeju Island is of the wonders of the world came as a surprise. I didn’t know South had one of these seven wonders. I have some research and, the island is not only a world heritage place in terms of fauna, flora and landscape; but it’s also home to some quite modern electrical plants and naval bases. The island looks astonishing and I would love to visit the lava tubes in Manjang Cave.

The part of the presentation and further analysis about Korean language was really surprising too. For some reason, I always associated Korean language as quite complex and emanating from a lot of traditional words and writing that only made it possible to learn by heart. However, I was surprised when I learned about how scientific and precise Korean language really is. The presenter explanation and phonological examples were very simple and made it all look very easy to learn.

The exhibitions on the second and first floors were very well organized and appealing to any type of visitors. I really liked the artwork, video descriptions and pictures of the second floor exhibition. I particularly liked the traditional string instruments and the time line depicting important global events that took place in South Korea such as the 1988 Olympic Games, the 2002 World Cup with Japan, or the G20 World Summit in 2010. The exhibit on the first floor was about modern culture, which I think would be something that my students would really like as it provided information about iconic movies, artists, and events such as the 2018 Winter Olympics.

Finally I really liked how the Government of Korea has many of these cultural centers all over the world and how they spread Korean culture and success, which I think is a quite clever way to bridge both cultural and economic relationships in today’s global market. I think this is a way of soft power that comes from the government down but that really puts Korean people and culture first as global ambassadors of their country.

 

[Juan Liebana-Mena]

I really liked the afternoon discussion about soft power. It was very interesting to dissect some of the topics covered throughout this week and analyze Professor Rosen’s presentation about soft power. This type of open forum discussion really allows for community building and to instill curiosity in our students.

The clip of the movie To Live we watched was very fun. I wish we could have watched a bit more, but I am now very interested and will watch it. I would like to know more about which are the topics or points that were identified as critical and why it was banned in China. Professor Dube states that it covers over 50 years of Chinese history. The journey of the boy and his character seem promising.

The last section about Criticizing Lin Biao and Confucius presented a set of posters and visual culture elements. I was curious about why somebody would criticize Confucius, but it appears that he represented the old society, hence the reason for aiming at him.

 

[Juan Liebana-Mena]

The images presented by Dr. Coats were very interesting both from the point of view of the social values they depicted and their aesthetics. As he pointed out at the beginning, it was a great way to create art for the entire country and gaining political control.

The history and images about the Kabuki Theater were amazing. The distribution of the stages that Professor Coats discussed makes it a super interesting kind of place. Also, he spoke about the plot line about the plays. Contemporary themes divided between two to three narratives, with breaks in between and dance performances. The tradition of onstage transformation and the roles ranged from military to ghosts to gender.

The second part of the lecture about Pleasure and Pain was important to understand the depiction of women. However, as Dr. Coats points out, “there were more depictions of the women from the pleasure quarters than of the everyday type of women.”  Then the depiction of women from the 1710-1715 changed and depicted them as very powerful and untouchable, which starts to delineate the standards that will be followed at the beginning of the 18^th century. Conversely, by the end of the century it has started to change back to the more delicate, slender, willowy type of women. These new innocent, young women are becoming the ideal in the 1760’s, which comes to signify a significant type of change in the audience.

The manga, anime and pop culture of the presentation was very interesting as I think many of these characters, games, and content are very relevant to my students. Here the influence of western culture. Some of the older manga was directed towards older teenagers was a commentary on the modernization process of the country. Series such as the Children’s Land, which ran for 22 years, had a huge influence in illustration and storytelling, but the big change came with Astro Boy, which ran from 1951 to 1981. He looks very appealing, with a cute face and a big resemblance to Mickey Mouse. It was interesting to learn that, despite of the year gap, most people today still enjoy the same type of anime graphics as the first anime that came in the late 1980’s. This led to the modern manga that popular in the 21^st century. It’s more action oriented and with a story line that will progress over a period of months. For example, Dragon Quest went from being a manga, to an anime, to a videogame; which teaches us about many of the videogames and content that our students consume.

[Juan Liebana-Mena]

Dr. Rosen’s lecture was not only very interesting but quite revealing about the influence of west culture in modern china. It really helped me understand the focus china wants to play as a leader at a world stage. The John Oliver clip was a lot of fun to watch but it also explained this Chinese global expansion very intelligently. Also, I learned that in china’s hierarchy of values, influencing the behavior of other countries is more important than soft power; soft power is sacrificed. The whole point of soft power is to try to create an international environment where others will be more included to cooperate.

An ironic fact professor Rosen covered is that of how American soft power has been successful precisely because it is not linked to the American government, whereas the Chinese promotion of soft power hardly exists apart from the efforts of the government. This shows of culture and entertainment is can be more influential and powerful than politics and laws.

During the last sections of professor’s Rosen, we were able to dissect graphs about soft power by nation, approval rates, China box office and movie rankings, and analysis of TV shows. This was quite telling about the importance of the Chinese market for Hollywood films, which also connected with the ideas that Michael Berry discussed during his Monday’s lecture.

 

[Juan Liebana-Mena]

I was really impressed with Dr. Brown’s presentation and to realize how much something as simple as a postcard can tell about history and social issues. Dr. Brown’s knowledge and enthusiasm are contagious and I really liked how diverse the postcards and images were.

Some of the images were not easy to digest, but I still consider them very necessary in order to learn about the war and to better understand modern Japan after the war. The war images supported Dr. Brown’s idea that war today is a part of nation building very strongly. The transition from the war and masculine modernity of the war images to the new women images was also quite interesting. They described women from the five senses and also the theme of modern love was quite recurrent.

I found the designs for sheet music very interesting too. You can see that the same trend of modernity also permeated the sheet music designs. There are themes of nature, children, love, tragedy, colonialism, and more avant-garde themes and imagery. The characters depicted were also quite consistent with the idea of modernity and every day events. There are modern girls going to the beach, modern boys playing baseball. However, despite their value for visual culture and aesthetics, it appears that these sheet music designs were not valued much in the artistic circuit due to the fact that they were inexpensive and held no much value.

 

[Juan Liebana-Mena]

This poster really called my attention because of the distribution of the flags and its aesthetics. This is quite powerful in terms of colors and symmetry. It's intersting to see the Soviet and Chinese flags first, which highlights their leadership within the communist countries, the tower and the star at the very top full of gold color and glow to convey the idea of glory and majesty. What I found most interesting about the post is the fact that it includes the German flag. This reveals that this poster is probably from a post World War II, when east Germany was under Soviet control. It's interesting how they decided to include the flag even thought they technically only controlled half of the country. This reveals their unapologetic notion of power and confidence. 

[Juan Liebana-Mena]

The afternoon lecture and activity by Professor Dube were really engaging. The selection of posters and imagery were very entertaining, symbolic, and informative. What I liked most about this lecture is how interactive Dr. Dube was with us. We all had the opportunity to discuss the posters and identify recurrent themes and symbols. I think this is a great way to instill curiosity in my students and have them infer many values and ideas from the pictures that accompany the texts in the English Language Arts textbook.

Many of these posters were essential in order to understand the communist propaganda machine. All of them depicted leaders as very close to the people, which were illustrated with picture of children and average people.

The reform era posters offered a new style and lots of symbolism. The poster of the little girl with her mother is quite interesting. She was playing a violin, which is a quite western instrument, but there was also a panda teddy bear next to her to highlight the Chinese culture element. Also, the posters with the brother and sister with the computer during the technological ear and the ones with the boys surrounded by rockets and space imagery were very interesting to highlight the focus on science that was now recurrent in China.

The 1980’s posters also offered a shift in the themes and aesthetics from the previous ones. The propaganda effort of those posters addressed the common issue of an aging population that faced at that point in time. I can see many of the familial values such as reciprocity in these posters. The paintings from the 24 filial exemplars convey that idea of how to take care of your family. This notion of making sacrifices for the older generation seems very profound in these posters and period.

 

[Author]

Posts