The Indiana University East Asian Studies Center (EASC) has developed a World Wide Web (WWW) server’ for students and educators concerned with East Asian studies. Since its creation in 1979, the EASC has sought to make available a variety of information and expertise concerning the languages and cultures of China, Japan, and Korea. Thanks to the explosion in the use of the Internet’, resources and expertise that were once somewhat confined to libraries and campuses are now available on demand to a world wide audience. Resources available via the EASC server include: curricular material for languages, social studies, and humanities; discussion groups on all aspects of East Asian related teaching and research; newsletters, information pertaining to East Asian studies at IU, and links to other worthwhile sites found on the WWW.
To access this server requires a computer connected to the World Wide Web. As there are photos, graphs, maps, and audio/ visual material available, a multimedia workstation using a browser such as Netscape3 is recommended. The resources presented can be used on-line or downloaded for duplication and distribution to other teachers and students. Material for this site is constantly being added, updated, or removed.
The recommended K-12 resources on Asia listings were compiled by the National Project on Asia in American Schools at Columbia University in cooperation with the Committee on Teaching About Asia (CTA) of the Association for Asian Studies. The areas surveyed include China, Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia. Each area’s resources are broken down to include:
CLASSROOM CURRICULUM MATERIALS AUDIO-VISUAL RESOURCES
MULTICULTURAL MATERIALS ON ASIAN-AMERICANS (CURRICULUM UNITS)
MAPS
TEACHER REFERENCE GUIDES
NON-FICTION AND FICTION READINGS
APPENDIX WITH PUBLISHER DISTRIBUTOR ADDRESSES.
This list is not exhaustive. It provides a basic list of materials, including both classroom curriculum units and more general resources for class or school libraries. Items listed are published primarily by university resource centers on Asia and other non-profit educational groups. Other items are drawn from commercial presses. Commercial educational materials on Asia are now being published at a rapid rate. A list of commercial distributors is appended to this electronic resource, and users are urged to consult current catalogues from these distributors for lists of new materials.
China: A Teaching Workbook has been compiled and distributed by the East Asian Curriculum Project of the East Asian Institute at Columbia University. This workbook is accompanied by Lesson Plans on China which has also been compiled by the East Asian Curriculum Project. By combining these two resources, K-12 teachers have the material necessary to teach most aspects of Chinese studies including: language, early and modern history, politics and foreign relations, art and music, and contemporary society. Japan: A Teaching Workbook, along with Lesson Plans on Japan, also from Columbia, cover the same topics as the China workbook. (The China and Japan workbooks were under development at the time this article was written and should be available very soon.)
The Roundtable is an organized discussion forum for reviewing and commenting on the latest textbooks, software, other instructional resources, and pedagogical issues pertaining to East Asian studies. The goal of the Roundtable is to provide a forum for sharing our collective knowledge and experience. For example, teachers from throughout the country can discuss the latest developments in Chinese proficiency testing or teaching Japanese at the elementary school level. Or if a teacher is planning a trip to Hiroshima and would like recommendations of where to stay or who to visit, s/he could post a question in the Japanese Studies area and receive answers from colleagues who have been there. Technology issues, such as how to use e-mail in Chinese or do word processing in Korean, could be posted in the technology forum. The structure of the Roundtable is such that readers can add a comment to a line of discussion for all to see, start a new line of discussion, or send an answer/comment directly to the individual who posted a question.
Curriculum Units and Lesson Plans submitted by teachers for teachers are being converted into the HTML format for viewing, printing, or downloading via the WWW. At the time of writing, there were two submissions on-line. East Asian Studies: A Guide for Teachers, by Mara Pinto Oess of the Notre Dame Academy, contains ninety pages of study guides, activities, tests, and lessons on China, Japan, and Korea. The material is suitable for adaptation at many levels and covers the arts, geography, history, political science, economics, language, and literature. A Geography of Chinese Peoples, by Paul Haakenson of Bloomington, Indiana, consists of ten lessons covering the history, culture, and demographics of Chinese populations throughout the world. The EASC is continually soliciting curricular material for distribution on the WWW. If you have been successfully teaching about Asia and would like to share your resources with others, please contact the EASC.
Korea: People, Culture and Society is a slide presentation developed by the Korean Press Center in Seoul, Korea. There are 180 slides with accompanying text on various aspects of Korean society and culture. This has been supplemented with material from Window on Korea, a multimedia CD-ROM developed by Korea’s Overseas Information Service. Both of these resources can be adapted for use at any level. The material was converted for presentation via the WWW and can also be downloaded for duplication. Approaches to Teaching About Korea, from the East Asia Curriculum Project at Columbia, is an excellent resource geared for teachers who want to include Korea into a larger curriculum unit on East Asia.
The Association for Asian Studies (AAS) has begun to make its resources available via the WWW. The East Asian Studies Center at IU is providing this service for the AAS. Newsletters, publication brochures, job listings, AAS annual meeting programs, and other announcements and news from the field are made available here. In addition, publications associated with the AAS annual meeting are reproduced in full text, such as the Abstracts of the Annual Meeting, which contains the abstracts from all of the papers that were presented at the annual meeting.
The services and resources available through Indiana University’s Server for East Asian Languages and Cultures are intended to promote and assist the teaching and study of East Asia at all levels. If you have access to the WWW, please browse through the available material and offer feedback as to how they can be improved, what works best for you, or what you would like to see added.
The EASC can be contacted at:
Phone: (812) 855-3765;
or on the WWW at:
Notes
1. The World Wide Web is an interface to the Internet that allows for multimedia presentation. It links computers so that files can be accessed from around the globe as if they were all on one computer. A computer that has been configured to distribute files over the Internet or WWW is referred to as a server.
2. Internet refers to a global network similar to the phone system (via cables and satellites) that allows computers to link and transfer data at high speeds.
3. Software by which a computer can access text and multimedia in a WWW format is referred to as a browser. Netscape and Mosaic are popular multimedia browsers.