Education About Asia: Online Archives

Editor’s Message

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As we mark EAA’s twentieth anniversary, I am sincerely grateful for the incredible work of so many people and several organizations during the last two decades. Our collaborators, readers, and the Association for Asian Studies understand the critical need for an Asia teaching journal and have demonstrated a sustained commitment to EAA by deeds and not just words. Thank you!

Ezra Vogel, both an imminent scholar and through his many publications for non-specialists, one of the world’s most influential educators, in “Lessons for America from China?” contributes an essay that many high school and undergraduate instructors will almost certainly assign to students.

“Southeast Asia in the Humanities and the Social Sciences Curricula” constitutes the focus of almost all the rest of this issue. Given Southeast Asia’s varied cultures, emerging dynamism, global contributions, geopolitical importance, and last but not least, the lack of knowledge on the part of educators and students concerning this region, an EAA special section is long overdue. Especially because of the Southeast Asia knowledge gap, this special section has the largest number of suggested classroom resources that are applicable to the greatest number of academic disciplines of any EAA issue ever published. The EAA Satu Limaye interview is a broad-based contemporary overview of Southeast Asia. Dana Herrera’s, Michael Vann’s, and Mauricio Borrero and Tuan To’s articles on, respectively, the Philippines, the Cambodian and East Timor genocides, and Việt Nam, can all be easily integrated into world history courses as student readings.

The feature section contains a special segment, “Teaching and Learning Southeast Asia” that begins with a convincing rationale for integrating Southeast Asia in middle school, high school, and undergraduate classes, followed by pages of annotated multimedia Southeast Asia teaching materials. The feature section includes lead author and historian of Southeast Asia Paul Rodell’s description of an introductory workshop for educators on Southeast Asia that he and coauthor Salli Vargis implemented. It is both a practical model for short educational workshops and, as importantly, includes accessible PowerPoints and Southeast Asia-related readings suitable for both teachers and students that are available on the Internet. Ivan Ivanov and James Masterson conclude the feature section with their account of an ASEAN-related seminar they conducted with undergraduate students from two colleges and also include extensive teaching resource entries in the article.

Readers interested in teaching and learning about Southeast Asia should particularly take note of what, in my opinion, are two of the more creative teaching resource essays we’ve published in some time. Elmo Gonzaga, in “Visualizing Southeast Asian Cities: Multimodal Writing Pedagogies in a Global Asian University” recounts his use of a variety of resources and classroom strategies that foster critical thinking skills as survey-level students with various academic majors learn about a range of topics related to urban areas in Southeast Asia. Helen Waller, Dorothy Guyot, and Win Kyaw in “Ideas from a Vibrant Liberal Arts High School in Myanmar” describe the successful Pre-Collegiate Program of Lumbini Academy in Yangon and inform educators about the possibilities of utilizing some of the graduates of that program as intercultural resources in their own institutions. Judith Ames’s column and Sok Udom Deth’s film review also focus on Southeast Asia.

The fall 2015 issue special section is “Asia: Biographies and Personal Stories, Part II.” The winter 2015 special section is “India: Past, Present and Future” and the deadline for initial receipt of manuscripts is July 22, 2015. We are considering manuscripts for our spring 2016 special section “Asia in Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, and Undergraduate Honors Courses” and the deadline for initial receipt of submissions is December 1, 2015. Please see the EAA website for three more special sections that are scheduled for future 2016 and 2017 issues. Individual readers, educational institutions, and libraries that prefer print issues are urged to please renew their subscriptions. Every EAA issue is also available for no charge through open access via our website, making it easy for instructors to assign student readings or increase their own knowledge of important Asia classroom topics. Please visit the improved website often, watch for the new Digital Asia column that will be appearing soon in EAA, and like us on Facebook!

Cordially,

Lucien Ellington

Editor: Education About Asia

l-ellington@comcast.net

Send formal EAA submissions to:

Jeffrey Melnik

Managing Editor, Education About Asia

300 Pfeiffer Hall, Dept. 2222

University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

Chattanooga, TN 37403

Phone: (423) 425-2118, Fax: (423) 425-5441

Email: edast@utc.edu

Website: http://www.asian-studies.org/EAA

ERRATA
Spring 2014 Issue
Thomas Lamont, on p.7 of his article “‘Give Me Blood, and I Will Give You Freedom’ Bhagat Singh, Subhas Chandra Bose, and the Uses of Violence in India’s Independence Movement” stated that Mahatma Gandhi attended Cambridge University. Tom recently learned Gandhi did not attend Cambridge. Gandhi was admitted to the one of the four British Inns of Court, The Inner Temple, in 1888 to study law. He passed the bar examination in 1891.

Winter 2014 Issue
In the masthead of the issue, we incorrectly spelled the name of Yasmeen Niaz Mohiuddin, a reviewer for the issue. The editors sincerely apologize for this error.