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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Editor's Message

Editor’s Message

by Lucien Ellington

I hope readers look forward to engaging in creative, interesting, and exciting summer changes of paces from the usual routines of fall and spring terms. In our nonthematic first feature article, “The Journey to the West: A Platform for Learning about China Past and Present,” Jianfen Wang and Gordon Gray offer readers the chance to use this classic work in better understanding how Chinese political elites, ordinary people, and shapers of popular culture have reacted to the novel th...

Resources, Teaching Resources Essay

Graduate School Confidential: Misguided First Impressions of Japanese Preschools

by Gary DeCoker

I started graduate school in 1980 after living in Japan for four years. In my second semester, a nearby college held a colloquium for business and community leaders in Detroit, Michigan, on “What We Can Learn From Japan.” They asked me to talk about Japanese education, specifically high achievement test scores. There wasn’t much scholarship available on Japanese education then, but after an extensive card catalog search at the University of Michigan library, I discovered some Japanese g...

Facts About Asia

Facts About Asia: Asia and Education

by EAA Editorial Office

Editor’s Note: EAA readers are invited to send material for this column. Please include a source for your “Asian fact.” Reported Literacy Rates of Select Asian Countries (age 15 and over) Taiwan 98.5% China 96.4% Indonesia 95.4% Việt Nam 94.5% Thailand 92.9% Bangladesh 72.9% India 71.2% Pakistan 57.9% Source: CIA World Factbook https://tinyurl.com/hhhvnby. Years of statistics compiled range from 2014–2017. Percent of Populations with Tertiary Educat...

Book Review, Online Supplement

South Asia in World History (New Oxford World History): Reviewed by Rachel Ball-Phillips

by Rachel M. Ball-Phillips

Writing world history is a daunting task. World historians continue to struggle with how to write effective survey world history texts for use in the classroom. The New Oxford World History series is an ambitious project that emphasizes “connectedness and interactions of all kinds—cultural, economic, political, religious, and social—involving peoples, places and processes” (viii). By situating South Asia within a broader global context from the Indus Valley Civilization to present, Marc ...

Online Supplement, Teaching Resources Essay

AP Art History and Chinese Art

by Lisa Hirkaler

The AP art history curriculum identifies 250 works students are required to know, spanning 20,000 years of history and cultures across the globe. The list includes thirty works of Asian art. I teach in a rural fringe district and am committed to giving my students “equal access” to non-Western artistic traditions, and have taken several courses with NCTA, including the 2011 China study tour. My study tour began with Shanghai at night (with its river of lights), the gardens at Hangzhou, Ch...

Film Review Essay, Resources

Around India with a Movie Camera: Film Review Essay by Coonoor Kripalani

by Coonoor Kripalani

This seventy-two-minute silent documentary film, spliced together and edited by director Sandhya Suri from archival British Film Institute (BFI) clips, cleverly juxtaposes scenes of the daily lives of Indians with that of the activities of the British. Some sections are from news footage, while large parts are drawn from family movies shot by expatriate families, giving the film its greatest value. It provides a firsthand look at how the colonialists lived and how they viewed the empire in India...

EAA Interview

Key Issues in Asian Studies: Indonesia: History, Heritage, Culture: A Short Interview with Kathleen M. Adams

by Kathleen M. Adams

Key Issues in Asian Studies (KIAS) books complement Education About Asia and are succinct, well-written, practical resources for university, college, and high school instructors and students. Indonesia, long important in Southeast Asia, now has a global impact and for a variety of reasons deserves more attention in higher education, as well as secondary schools. The archipelago’s significance notwithstanding, Professor Kathleen Adams has authored a highly readable good story about the peoples ...

Book Review Essay

To Live (Revisited)

by Charles Newell

Editor’s Note: In the winter 2003 issue of EAA (vol. 8, no. 3), To Live was extensively featured with reviews of the novel and film adaptation as well as an interview with the novel’s author, Yu Hua. The significant success of the novel and film warrants reintroducing To Live to new readers. To Live (Revisited) By Yu Hua New York: Anchor Books, 2003 (Originally published in 1993) 256 pages, ISBN: 978-1400031863, Paperback Reviewed by Charles Newell Since its publication, Yu Hua...

Book Review Essay

The Fourth String: A Memoir of Sensei and Me

by Anne Prescott

A young native English speaker goes to Japan to earn money to pay her debts. This is not an unusual beginning for the “foreigner discovers Japan” memoir. But shortly after Janet Pocorobba settles into her new life, it takes a surprising turn when a friend points out an ad in an English-language publication: “Free lesson in shamisen and singing! Take something home with you from your stay in Japan!” (60). In September 1996, Pocorobba responds to that ad and meets Sensei, as she calls the...

Teaching Resources Essay

Population Trends and Issues: Bangladesh

by Byron Haast, Phillip O'Brien

In demographic studies, much discussion in academic circles centers around either the challenges faced by aging populations in places such as Japan, Germany, or Italy, or the impacts of pronatal and antinatal policies (policies meant to increase or decrease birthrate), such as China’s One-Child Policy or Australia’s Baby Bonus. With a population in excess of 165 million, Bangladesh is currently the world’s eighth-most populous nation, yet remains largely unknown and misunderstood outside o...

Feature Article

The Journey to the West: A Platform for Learning about China Past and Present

by Gordon Gray, Jianfen Wang

In US college students’ first course on China, the challenge for instructors is to pack the maximum amount of punch into the experience so that the course will inspire them to seek more opportunities to learn about China at and beyond the college level. One way to achieve this goal is to use a rich text with many applications to help students unpack the complexities of Chinese history, language, politics, economics, and thought. For this purpose, the sixteenth-century novel The Journey to the ...

Teaching Resources Essay

Leading a Short-Term Study Trip for Students in Japan

by Daniel A. Métraux

The best way for students to study the history, culture, and livelihoods of another country is through an organized in-country experience. There are various benefits that can accrue through such an endeavor. One can learn about a part of the world away from home while at the same time gaining a deeper appreciation of one’s own culture by looking at it from the outside. Ideally, a student will spend a full semester or year studying abroad, but that is a luxury that many cannot afford in terms o...

Teaching Resources Essay

The Great Courses: Books that Matter: The Analects of Confucius

by Carol Stepanchuk

“Imagine a world,” author/narrator Professor Robert André LaFleur suggests, “in which the gift of a book could change your life forever. Imagine a world in which you didn’t just read, but read, reread, read again, and lived a book.” This is the dynamic instruction that drives twenty-four half-hour lectures on Confucius and the Analects for listeners/viewers who are new to, or even those well-acquainted with, the teachings of one of China’s greatest thinkers and educators.

Feature Article

Reading Beyond the Curriculum Fostering Communities of L2 Chinese and Japanese Learners

by Jason Herlands, Meghan Cai

Reading need not be a solitary or passive activity, and indeed we have found that active, communal reading can be both productive and pleasurable for students. In this article, we discuss how our respective reading groups serve as low-pressure environments for students to approach challenging texts in Chinese and Japanese. As visits to on-campus counseling services continue to set records at universities nationwide, we have established spheres apart from the university curriculum and its pressur...

Feature Article

Science Education in Singapore and the US: An Interview with Michael Lowry

by Maranda Wilkinson

In the following interview, conducted as part of an East Asia STEM teaching module developed by Maranda Wilkinson for the UTC Asia Program (https://tinyurl.com/y3oepewy), Maranda questioned Michael Lowry on his studies of the Singaporean science education system as a 2016 Fulbright Fellow focusing on comparisons of science education in Singapore and the US.

Feature Article

Thai Buddhist Monastic Schools and Universities

by Brooke Schedneck, Samran Khansamrong, Steve Epstein

A collection of three essays by authors with extensive knowledge of Thai Buddhist Monastic Schools: "Buddhist Education and Temple Schools in Thailand" by Brooke Schedneck; "An Overview of MCU Chiang Mai Campus" by Samran Khansamrong; and "Teaching in the English Program at MCU, Chiang Mai Campus" by Steve Epstein.

Feature Article

Children’s Rights in Japan’s Schools

by Robert W. Aspinall

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) is a human rights treaty that sets out the civil, political, economic, social, health, and cultural rights of children. It was adopted without dissent by the UN General Assembly on November 20th, 1989, and was swiftly ratified by almost all member states. Japan ratified it in 1994. The convention is based upon the so-called “three p’s”: children’s needs for a balance of “provision,” “protection,” and “participatio...

Feature Article

The China Survey Course in the Age of STEM

by Barry C. Keenan

Assistant professors in humanities fields are facing new enrollment pressures as humanities majors are shifting to majors with more concrete job prospects. A beginning history professor made a careful examination of reliable statistics on college majors in 2018 that revealed, “A lower share of newly graduated Americans earn humanities degrees today than did so in 1970 or 1990.”1 The reason for the decline was explained by the perceived lack of job prospects, especially in the four humanities...

Feature Article

Beyond the Spoon-Feeding Classroom: A Jesuit Priest’s Use of Outings as Holistic Education

by Daniel Fung, Michael Tsang

When Reverend Father Harold Naylor (1931–2018), of the Society of Jesus, passed away in October 2018, his funeral mass attracted an attendance of 1,000 at Wah Yan College, Kowloon, in Hong Kong, where he had devoted more than four decades of his life. Many alumni, as well as friends, in the nearby parish took time off from work to bid him farewell. At least three local daily newspapers published coverage on the funeral mass, clearly an exceedingly rare phenomenon. In 1993, Fr. Naylor had an ea...

Feature Article

Chinese Schools and Students—1985–2015: My Reflections

by Roy E. Bergeson

On my first visit to a Chinese high school in March 1985, I received a tour starting in the courtyard, where a PE class was in session. The students at the front of the rows were doing their jumping jacks with full energy. The students at the back were barely going through the motions. “This is totally familiar,” I said to myself.

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.