Education About Asia: Online Archives

Browse and download over 1,500 articles – feature articles, lesson plans, interviews, classroom resources, and book and film reviews — from twenty-four years of Education About Asia (EAA).

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Film Review Essay, Resources

Mini Dragons II

by Rita Smith Kipp

(Pt. 1) Indonesia (Pt.2) Malaysia (Pt.3) Thailand PRODUCED BY MARYLAND PUBLIC TELEVISION (MPT) PRODUCTION AND FILM AUSTRALIA DISTRIBUTED BY AMBROSE VIDEO PUBLISHING NEW YORK 1993. Three Southeast Asian countries with high rates of economic growth over the last decade, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand, are the subjects of this series originally aired on television in one-hour segments. The filmmakers were concerned to show the trade-offs of rapid development in this region where indus...

Essay, Resources

Postholing

by Marth LaCroix Daily

WHEN A TWENTY-ONE-YEAR-OLD LAW STUDENT FROM TOKYO’S CHUO UNIVERSITY VISITED OUR TENTH GRADE SOCIAL STUDIES CLASS FOR FOUR CONSECUTIVE DAYS THIS YEAR, HE CREATED A TEACHING ENVIRONMENT THAT WILL LAST LONG AFTER THE UNIT TEST. Sponsored by the Never Again Campaign,1the young man demonstrated Japanese calligraphy, origami(paper folding), and judo. On the fourth day of his visit, he asked all the male students to remove their ubiquitous baseball caps while he told them about the hibakusha(survivor...

Essay, Resources

Outreach Programs at the National Resource Centers for the Study of Asia

by Anne L. Foster

Increasingly, Asian history, culture, language, and politics are being integrated into the K-12 curriculum in schools across the nation. Many teachers are now teaching subjects, then, in which they received little or no training while in college. Fortunately, however, centers for the study of Asia at universities around the country have, under the auspices of Title VI of the Higher Education Act, established National Resource Centers (NRCs). One of the nine programs within the Center for Interna...

Resources, Web Gleanings

Web Gleanings: Asian Dance

by Judith S. Ames

CHINA SITE: CHINESE LION DANCE URL: http://www.columbia.edu/~nc79/liondance.html To learn about the symbols of the Chinese Lion Dance and about its development, this page from Columbia University will give a great deal of information and images. The Lion Dance of China is also contrasted with those of Taiwan and Korea. SITE: TRADITIONAL CHINESE CULTURE IN TAIWAN: CHINESE DANCE URL: http://www.houstoncul.org/culdir/danc/danc.htm On the page “Traditional Chinese Culture in Taiwan: Chinese...

Feature Article

Enduring Stereotypes about South Asia: India’s Caste System

by Joe Elder

For decades most United States textbooks dealing with South Asia have contained sections on India’s caste system, and most such sections have contrasted India’s “immobile caste society” negatively with America’s “open and mobile class society.” People in India are seen (presumably) as locked forever in birth-determined positions, while people in the United States can (presumably) rise to whatever levels their abilities and good fortune permit. Caste in India is described as a fatal...

Film Review Essay, Resources

Rebeka Goes to China

by Diane Carson

EDITED BY LUCY KOSTELANETZ DISTRIBUTED BY THE MEDIA GUILD 11722 SORRENTO VALLEY ROAD SUITE E SAN DIEGO, CA  92121-1021 1992. 28 MINUTES Reviewed by Diane Carson In August 1988, when her parents move to the foreign visitors’ guest house at Zhongshan University to teach English to Chinese students, seven-year-old Rebeka accompanies them. Thus begins a ten-month adventure that few children could envision, a thorough immersion in Chinese culture including learning to read, write and speak s...

Essay, Resources

Teacher Outreach in Japanese Studies: A Case Study

by Alan Wolfe, Joseph Laker, Lucien Ellington, Mark MacWilliams, Richard Minear

What a good way to get people interested in Japan? For us, teaching in rural West Virginia, this is not an academic question. Our students are often reluctant to study something that is seemingly so foreign and unrelated to their own lives as Japanese culture. They are also turned off by the highly negative images of the Japanese that pervade contemporary hit movies and best sellers. In books such as Tom Clancy’s Debt of Honor and movies such as Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun, the Japanese co...

Book Review, Resources

Maritime Southeast Asia to 1500

by Robert Lawless

BY LYNDA NORENE SHAFFER ARMONK, NEW YORK: M. E. SHARPE, 1996 XVII+ 121 PAGES This book grew out of a team-taught course in world history at Tufts University. Shaffer believes that “Southeast Asia’s maritime realm is an excellent vantage point from which to watch the events of world history go by” (p. xv). Indeed, the author believes that “a general knowledge of the early history of maritime Southeast Asia should be common knowledge among those who study and teach world history” (p. ...

Book Review, Resources

Japanese Women: New Feminist Perspectives on the Past, Present, and Future

by Kinko Ito

EDITED BY KUMIKO FUJIMURA-FANSELOW AND ATSUKO KAMEDA NEW YORK: THE FEMINIST PRES SAT THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK, 1995. XXXVIII+ 422 PAGES. As a teacher of a course titled “Japanese Culture and Society,” I have not found an ideal textbook that covers many areas of the culture and society simultaneously. Fujimura-Fanselow and Kameda offer what may be an ideal additional reader/textbook for my course. The primary focus of the book, as the title suggests, is Japanese women and their stat...

EAA Interview, Feature Article

Framing Japan’s Constitution: An EAA Interview with Colonel Charles L. Kades

by Peter K. Frost

On June 18, 1996, one of the leading figures in the framing of the Japanese constitution died peacefully at his home in Heath, Massachusetts. For more than 50 years, Colonel Charles L. Kades vividly remembered what happened when General Douglas MacArthur ordered American Occupation officials to produce a draft of what an acceptable constitution might look like.(note 1) Characteristically modest but also proud of what the Occupation accomplished, Colonel Kades recently gave what turned out to be ...

Book Review, Resources

Songs My Mother Taught Me

by Alyce Hunter

BY WAKAKO YAMAUCHI EDITED BY GARRETT HONGO WITH AFTERWORD BY VALERIE MINER NEW YORK: FEMINIST PRESS 1994. 254 PAGES Reviewed by Alyce Hunter Songs My Mother Taught Me is a collection of short stories, memoirs, and plays by Wakako Yamauchi. As a second genration Japanese-American or Nisei, she recounts in a strong, lyrical, and sensual voice the city and country tales of two generations of Japanese in the United States. While these selections do not focus on the World War II detention camp e...

Book Review, Resources

Educating Hearts and Minds: Reflections on Japanese Preschool and Elementary Education

by Gerald LeTendre

BY CATHERINE LEWIS NEW YORK: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1995 In Educating Hearts and Minds, Lewis guides us through the diverse world of Japanese preschool and elementary school students. It is a world that Lewis knows well. Her research centers on early childhood education, and she has also sent her own children to Japanese schools. Like Peak’s Learning to Go to School, Educating Hearts and Minds makes a major contribution to the study of early childhood education. This book is useful...

Essay, Resources

The Internet and Education About India

by Suzanne McMahon

For students studying about India, the Internet can bring immediacy and involvement to the learning experience. Multimedia resources from the Internet can add new dimension to printed course material. E-mail, listservs, and newsgroups open the door to communication in the global arena. With authoring software, it is possible to organize Internet resources into creative classroom presentations and  demonstrations; to create multimedia tutorials; or to provide links to scholarly resources through...

Feature Article

Asia and the Voluntary World History Standards: A Teacher’s Perspective

by Henry Kiernan

During the famous turning point scene in Shakespeare’s King Lear, the King cries out, “I am a man more sinned against than sinning.” Almost two years after Lynne Cheney’s op-ed criticisms in The Wall Street Journal (note 1) and Rush Limbaugh’s call “to flush the history standards down the toilet,” it is painfully clear to the more than six thousand teachers, historians and parents who worked on developing and reviewing the national history standards that their work was unfairly car...

Book Review, Resources

Ways of Enlightenment: Buddhist Studies at Nyingma Institute

by Robin Kornman

BERKELEY: DHARMA PUBLISHING, 1993 371 PAGES In recommending this book for classroom use, I am breaking with an established custom in Western academia. I would like to propose that professors surrender a certainly scholarly distance and actually use a Tibetan survey of Buddhist teachings as the central reading for a Survey of Buddhism course. The book is Ways of Enlightenment, an outline of Buddhist philosophy and practice written by American Tibetan Buddhists under the direction of a Nyingma l...

Essay, Resources

Teaching and Interpreting the Works of Kurosawa Akira

by David P. Phillips, Jan Bardsley

Few Japanese artists have won the international attention and critical acclaim enjoyed by filmmaker Kurosawa Akira (b. 1910). His films span a career of over fifty years, and whether framed as period pieces or modern dramas, explore the elusive topography of self and society. The popularity of his films has led to their wide availability on video with English subtitles, and stimulated many books and essays of critical interpretations. This essay will present a brief introduction to Kurosawa’s ...

Feature Article

Incorporating Asia in the General Education Curriculum

by Fritz Blackwell, Roger Chan, Theodore Nitz, Thomas Kennedy

Washington State University is probably not very different from many mid-sized universities, rooted in mid-America and laboring in the midst of a curriculum reform. This article, the distillation of the experience and study of three of our general education faculty members, is submitted in the hope that it may prove useful to the hundreds of faculty in scores of similar institutions struggling with the problem of how to integrate Asia in the general education curriculum. Specifically, we have be...

Film Review Essay, Resources

Japanese History and Literature

by James B. Leavell

PRODUCED BY COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY’S PROJECT ON ASIA IN THE CORE CURRICULUM OF SCHOOLS AND COLLEGES DISTRIBUTED BY THE ANNENBERG/CPB PROJECT 901 EAST STREET NW WASHINGTON, DC  20004-2037 1996 Designed as a resource for teachers of world history and literature courses, this group of materials can be used as part of faculty development institutes, in-service workshops, or as a resource for individual instructors. Three video tapes survey premodern Japanese history with special reference to se...

Book Review, Resources

Masterworks of Asian Literature in Comparative Perspective: A Guide for Teaching

by Richard A. Johnson

EDITED BY BARBARA STOLLER MILLER ARMONK, NEW YORK: M. E. SHARPE, 1993 XVI+ 583 PAGES “ Dad,” one of my sons said to me when he was a college sophomore, “I wish I knew Chinese.” I eagerly explained just how he could arrange to learn it, and was ready to go on to talk about Mandarin, Cantonese, and the rest, when he interrupted: “You weren’t listening to me. I didn’t say I want to learn Chinese; I said I wish I knew Chinese.”  That’s the problem. Separated from most of us ...

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.

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