Education About Asia: Online Archives

NEW FOR 2023: Beginning with Spring 2023, subscribers to the print edition of Education About Asia (EAA) will receive additional exclusive digital access to the current year’s three issues (spring, fall, and winter) as an online flipbook for the duration of their active subscription. Articles from the three print issues for 2023 will be uploaded to the EAA Digital archives in 2024. View the TOC and Editor’s Message for the Spring 2023 issue. Subscribe today to stay up to date with EAA!

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EAA Interview, Feature Article

Is There a New India?: A Conversation with Shashi Tharoor

by Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan

Shashi Tharoor is an Indian author, diplomat, and politician who has twice been elected Member of Parliament from Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. He was previously Minister of State in the Government of India for External Affairs and Human Resource Development. Tharoor was born in London in 1956, grew up in Bombay and Calcutta, and left India in 1975 for graduate school in the United States. In 1978, at the age of twenty-two, he earned a doctorate from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tuf...

Feature Article

Mahavira: From Heretic to Fordmaker

by Ana Bajželj

Apart from Buddhism, Jainism is the only other ancient non-Vedic Indian tradition that has survived until the present day. While Buddhism all but disappeared from India by the fourteenth century CE and was only later revived, Jainism has existed in India uninterruptedly for over 2,500 years. However, unlike Buddhism, it had not spread from India until recent times, which is largely due to the observance of the ethical principle of nonviolence. Careful attentiveness not to harm even the tiniest o...

Feature Article

Integrative Pedagogy: A Case Study of the Lasting Legacy of India’s Partition

by Mark Dennis

This article describes a case study from modern Indian history through the lens of “integrative pedagogy,” which is a way of teaching that challenges the tendency of many of our students to reduce, isolate, and oversimplify the myriad things of the world. This example of integrative pedagogy encourages students to think critically about historical context and make meaningful connections while engaging in “emotional and mental migration” to a region that has often been viewed in the West ...

Feature Article

The History of Economic Development in India since Independence

by Nimish Adhia

The Background The task that the democratically elected leaders of newly independent India embarked on in the early 1950s was not for the faint of heart. It was to lift living standards of a people accounting for one-seventh of the world’s population who earned an average income that was one-fifteenth of the average American income of the time.1 Three-fourths of the Indian people were engaged in agriculture working with primitive tools and techniques, as either destitute landless laborers, hi...

Feature Article

Activism and Women’s Rights in India

by Vera Heuer

People around the world watched as thousands took to the streets in New Delhi in December 2012 following the gang rape of twenty-three-year-old physiotherapy student Jyoti Pandey. While similar protests were held in other metropolitan cities across the country, the protests in Delhi became so intense that the government imposed a curfew and sanctioned the use of force by its riot police. Domestic as well as international media coverage of these events helped fuel public outrage. The protesters m...

Feature Article

Property Rights and One Indian Village: Reform, Enterprise, and Dignity

by Ken Schoolland

Despite impressive national progress that occurred with the 1990s sea change away from democratic socialism and toward economic liberalization, large numbers of Indians remain desperately poor and plagued by a lack of educational and economic opportunities, often corrupt and unresponsive bureaucrats, and an inability to secure basic property rights. What follows is an essay focusing upon the collaboration of a nongovernmental organization (NGO) and a rural village, whose residents were among the...

Feature Article

Teaching India’s History and Contemporary Society Through Film

by Thomas Lamont

Indian films, traditionally known as Hindi films but today more commonly referred to as “Bollywood” films, named in honor of Bombay (Mumbai today), offer a wonderful opportunity to teach students about the history and culture of India and South Asia. There are dozens of movies about Indian historical subjects and cultural issues that are accessible to American students. Many of the movies are typical Bollywood fare that include lots of upbeat songs and dancing. However, some, especially of l...

Curriculum Materials Review, Online Supplement

“My Cambodia” and “My Cambodian America”

by Van Anh Tran

The traditional high school history classroom presents dominant narratives as facts. This is not a surprise. It was not until after I had become a history teacher, however, that I understood the intentional effort a teacher must put into finding (often creating) and implementing culturally relevant, competent, and responsive curriculum for the classroom. I was born and raised in one of the largest Vietnamese ethnic enclaves in the United States. I grew up hearing stories of war, redemption, and ...

Web Gleanings

Web Gleanings: India: Past, Present, and Future

by Judith S. Ames

INDIA: PAST Indian History URL: http://tinyurl.com/m79fltp This is the first page of many devoted to the history of India. The history begins with the Indus Valley civilization and continues chronologically on succeeding pages of the site. It is a bit tedious to navigate this history section, as one must click continuously to travel through time periods. The links are at the bottom of each page. Internet Indian History Sourcebook URL: http://tinyurl.com/opg7ods This compendium of prima...

Asia: Experiential Learning, Columns, Resources

Drawing Insights in Việt Nam

by Carol Hendrickson

Every spring, Marlboro College offers one or two semester-long courses that include a travel abroad experience. A few years ago, I had the opportunity as part of a Freeman grant held by the college to participate, along with students, in a study course focused on Asia.1 The year that I participated, the course was titled Việt Nam: Revolution and Restoration, and it included a three-week trip to north and central Việt Nam. The classwork introduced our group of five faculty and twelve students...

Curriculum Materials Review, Resources

“My Cambodia” and “My Cambodian America”

by Tobey C. Reed

My interest in Asia dates back to when I was a child. My interest in Cambodia started when I began my teaching career in Attleboro, Massachusetts. Attleboro was one of the places where a large group of Cambodian families moved after leaving the refugee camps in Thailand after the Khmer Rouge period. My first Cambodian students in 1999 were born in Thailand in the Site II camp. Now, sixteen years later, my Cambodian-American students are second-generation Americans who are heading off to college ...

EAA Interview, Resources

The 2015 Franklin R. Buchanan Prize Winners for “My Cambodia” and “My Cambodian America”

by Lucien Ellington

This is our nineteenth consecutive interview with the recipients of the AAS Franklin R. Buchanan Prize. This year’s winners are Rylan Sekiguchi and Risa Morimoto, who developed the free multimedia education package My Cambodia and My Cambodian America, published by the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE) online at stanford.io/1sI162V. SPICE serves as a bridge between Stanford University and K–12 schools and community colleges by developing multidisciplinary...

Resources, Teaching Resources Essay

The Appropriated Geisha: Using Their Role to Discuss Japanese History, Cultural Appropriation, and Orientalism

by Elisheva Perelman

Moving beyond Facebook to the Internet communities of Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, and Tumblr, students would leave older forms of media behind. Or such is their conviction. Of course, previous generations have purported to break ground where their predecessors failed to sow, and sometimes they really do. What is dramatically clear from a perusal of these new forms of social media is what consumes student thought. Certainly some of the topics one finds are of little import, but others are insta...

Resources, Teaching Resources Essay

The League of Extraordinary Bloggers: A Game for Exploring Asian Cultures

by Leslie Swartz

Apps are a quandary for educators and parents: are they mindless distractions with little intrinsic value or educational tools that build curiosity and persistence, and bridge informal and formal learning? Clearly mobile game applications are magnetic. Applying game theory to educational apps with motivational challenges and rewards seems like an intriguing and potentially productive format for expanding interest, knowledge, and understanding in learning about Asia. As part of the Freeman Founda...

Resources, Teaching Resources Essay

The Lion’s Roar in Taiwan: Genealogy of a Traditional Dance

by Tsun-Hui Hung

The colorfully dynamic spectacle of the Lion Dance is now a seemingly requisite part of celebratory events in Chinese communities around the world. Documentary evidence for the performance of dances featuring lions can be traced back over a thousand years. But since lions have never been a part of China’s natural environment, how did they come to be such iconic inhabitants of the Chinese cultural landscape? In this article, I will focus on changes and developments in the Lion Dance in response...

Resources, Teaching Resources Essay

Digital Archives: Teaching Indian Colonial History Through Photographs

by Neil Foley, Rachel M. Ball-Phillips

We often use photographs in a history classroom to illustrate a point rather than as a foundation for our courses. I coteach an interdisciplinary course that integrates visual culture and history into an undergraduate class titled On the Edges of Empire: India and Mexico/American Southwest at Southern Methodist University. I was surprised to stumble upon a unique digital collection at the SMU DeGolyer Special Collections Library, which is known for its archives related to the US west, borderland...

New to EAA?

Before viewing the full archives, view Editor’s Choice Articles, handpicked by EAA Editor, Lucien Ellington, which provide a good overview of EAA and introduction for new readers.