Final Reflection Essay

[Anonymous]

After attending both classes offered by the USC US-China Institute, including East Asia Since 1800 and East Asia from Pre-Origins to 1800, one of the most valuable lessons I learned is making an attempt to look for lesson plans everywhere in the curriculum, especially when it seems like there are no possibilities. I have enjoyed spending time with my fellow teachers, discussing curriculum possibilities as well as listening to the thought provoking lectures from Dr. Dube as well as his occasional surrogates like professors Yamashita, Miyake and Ye. It feels good to be the student instead of the teacher and letting others entertain and educate you. I am thankful for all the lesson possibilities that were offered by our lecturers and even if I could not use that specific idea it seems to most of often than not generate another idea. I remember when Professor Yamashita mentioned doing an ad for a samurai warrior and how clever I thought that was. I could not use that idea, but I knew I could rework it and apply to my specific curriculum. I could for example have my students write an ad for a civil rights protestor after having them watch a SNCC training video. There were many instances during the class, when I realized that even I could not use a suggested lesson idea, I could either rework it or suggest to someone who could. The opportunity to sit and brainstorm possibilities cannot be underestimated, because as teachers, we do not have enough of that time during the year.

Once I completed the first seminar I was able to use some of the ideas I developed or was given by the Dr. Dube. I used the Schools of Chinese Thought Lesson with my students after we finished the CSTs last year with great success. My students enjoyed the readings and discussing them in class. I also developed a lesson on Chinese propaganda posters and used them while studying the Communist Revolution in China. I of course used the lesson I developed during the first seminar about Japanese Internment for my World War II unit. It is important to remember that one does not have to do a lesson specifically on an Asian topic to have students study about Asia, but it is a matter of finding room for Asia in the curriculum we are studying. Last year, while studying the Industrial Revolution I had my students watch a documentary about the way workers are treated in Chinese factories, after which they did a Venn Diagram, comparing and contrasting Chinese workers with English workers during the Industrial Revolution. I will continue to try to incorporate Asia wherever I can in the curriculum I am currently teaching, because my students just do not seem to know enough about Asia, even though China and I would argue Southeast Asia are becoming more and more relevant to our lives in our shrinking modern world.

[Anonymous]

Although, in the beginning I had reservations about meeting often and completing all of the assignments, I really did learn enough to foster my facilitation and or deliverance of some information about certain East Asia topics and or subjects within East Asia, to my students with confidence. Dr. Dube shared his passion for East Asia with a overwhelming vast amount of information in a very short period of time. When ever he lectured I could vividly visualize what he was talking about. He really explained it out clearly when we studied China's Major Philosophical Traditions that included Confucianism, Mohism, Daoism, and Legalism. I want to try the debate strategy with my students but it will require great preparation. I'll have to condense and scaffold the debate.

Samuel Yamashita from the Department of History at Pomona college was a guest speaker. He shared his knowledge of "East Asia from Origins to 1800". The information he presented was on Warrior Japan with the rise and development of the warrior society, Historical Puzzles and Questions, The Origins of Japan & Classical Japan. I plan on using the Historical Puzzles & Questions to merge into my lesson plan on Ancient Japan. Lyanne K. Miyake, also from Pomona College was a another great guest speaker with a wealth of knowledge about " Literature from Japan's Classical and Warrior Age". She covered the periods about the Japanese literary history, the terminology of different types of the Japanese literature, and different types of literary works of poetry. I would like to do a mini lesson on how to write a Tanka .

I teach 7thgrade World History " The Medieval World and Beyond". My students are in the process of completing four chapters on Ancient China. Those chapters include The Political Development of Imperial China, China Develops a New Economy, Chinese Discoveries and Inventions, and China's Contacts With The Outside World. After wrapping up China we are going to study Ancient Japan and it has three chapters that include, The Influence of Neighboring Cultures of Japan, Hein-kyo: The HEart of Japan's Golden Age, and The Rise of the Warrior Class in Japan. Those are the only East Asia countries I am scheduled to teach because of standards and time. I plan to make connections with the other countries as they may appear in the readings. My students are Learning Disabled and or Other Health Impaired. Therefore, it takes time for them to learn. I have to scaffold,condense,omit, and many times towards the end, I end up rushing through the lessons. I realize there is so much more to East Asia than just China and Japan, but they are a huge chunk of East Asia History.
edited by cware on 12/31/2012

[Anonymous]

edited by nfreeman on 1/1/2013
edited by nfreeman on 1/1/2013

[Anonymous]

I have attached my reflection essay.

[Anonymous]

My reflection essay is attached
edited by gsharpe on 1/16/2013

[Anonymous]

My reflection essay is attached.

[Anonymous]

Taking the seminar on East Asian history again has been just as satisfying as the first go around in the Spring. Before these classes, my understanding of East Asian history had been limited to information I picked up while studying the history of Western cultures and countries. East Asia, specifically China and South Korea, has risen quite dramatically since the early to mid 90’s, when I was in high school and college. Today, a strong understanding of East Asian history seems imperative to those who desire a more well rounded worldview. I am happy to have continued developing a better understanding of this region of the world, and I look forward to sharing my knowledge with my students.
There are many ways in which I plan to use all that I have learned from my time in this seminar. The standards for the 7th grade social studies curriculum include a unit on Japan. The chapters in our textbook on Japan cover culture diffusion and the samurai, but mention very little about the actual history of Medieval Japan. Many of my students leave this unit wondering where the story is. With my new found knowledge on Japan, I can now provide them with the fascinating stories that brought about and sustained the samurai class.
Similarly, the Japan unit ends with the decline of Japanese feudalism, but does not discuss how it went away and what replaced the feudal system. With the lesson plans I created from the Spring seminar, my students will also get to find out how the samurai came to an end.
In conclusion, I wanted to once again say that taking this class has been very satisfying. I am excited about the prospect of bringing new content to my classroom, and I am looking forward to furthering my understanding of East Asia by staying abreast of East Asian happenings in the news and on the institute website.

[Anonymous]

Lesson Plan attached.

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[Anonymous]

I am an educator with a 40 year career and a focus on Latin America. I hold an MA for UCLA in Latin American Studies, with a focus on Economic Development. My recent fascination with East Asia began well before enjoying this learning opportunity. Last year I taught Economics at Huntington Park High School. During the course I made extensive use of Ted Koppel's excellent documentary People's Republic Of Capitalism. The four part series presented me and my students with an amazing story of rapid transformation in the world's largest nation. This course has greatly expanded my newly acquired desire to expand my content knowledge as a social scientist fascinated with issues of development and growth. Professor's Dube's lectures and presentations, along with those of the visiting scholars on Korea, China, and Japan have provided me with the cultural, historical, philosophical background knowledge and appreciation I had been lacking.

I must now transform that content knowledge into pedagogical content knowledge by developing a curriculum unit of three lessons to share these resources with my students. I have a renewed enthusiasm and capacity to empower my students to make connections between the US, Latin America, and East Asia. I understand that understanding how history and economic and social development in this critical region has impacted our planet in the globalized era of the 21st Century. The course I have just concluded has been well designed and presented by Professor Dube and the staff of the USC US-China Institute. I will be working closely with the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California to help my students study the contributions of Chinese and Italian American legal figures. I hope to visit and teach in either South Korea or China after retiring in the next few years and this course has propelled me expand my geographic horizons and and educator and world traveler!

[Anonymous]

A study by Lisa Cameron suggests that the results of the PRC long standing one child per couple policy may impact "...the vanguard of the country's future government and business elites..." and that their psychological and behavioral attributes should be studied both nationally and internationally. The article's title caught my attention in the LA TImes with the buzz word '"Little Emperor Myth' seen as reality" the premise being that a massive generation or two of future Chinese leaders would be detrimentally influenced by being spoiled and given exclusive attention by their parents and thus be less prone to take calculated risks and other less assertive personality traits. Fascinating!

[Anonymous]

Is Japan getting ready to institute military conscription to expand its military forces in the face of the growing military might and economic competition from the PRC? This Op-Ed piece by Tokujin Matsudaira and Bruce Ackerman suggests that sweeping changes in the Japanese constitution will revise it to such an extent that Japan will even drop the provision most certainly imposed as part the the United States after World War II. That key and symbolic section renounced that "war as a sovereign right of the nation." There apparently is some concern around the world in capitals of nations that have had to deal with a militarized and aggressive Japanese war machine. The scholars report that the Japanese public remain unimpressed by these proposals by the new Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. They suggests that nations like China, Korea, the Philippines, and the United States play a wait and see attitude rather than fuel the flames of Japanese nationalism. Happy New Year to all!

[Anonymous]

I visited the official site of the Republic of Korea It was glitzy and sophisticated with a continuously moving band of related site links and links to You Tube, Twitter, Facebook, and a Blog. It had daily news links and I read pieces on the increase of income of people in the South and their fear that a war with the North is inevitable. this was the opinion of 8 of the 10 South Korean people polled. Tourism featured winter sports like skiing and ice skating, and the foundation of new national parks and nature preserves to protect endangered species. I would like to visit in the near future related sites for opportunities to study and or teach in South Korea or some of the newer inland cities of the PRC. The site also included a plethora of links to sites and articles about Korean films and other items of cultural interests. There was important information about the Special Olympics movement in South Korea. The site was bilingual English and Korean languages.

[Anonymous]

Finally, decades after reading my first history book as wee lad, I can make some sense of the notion of Chinese Dynasties. Before this seminar four millennia of Chinese history was just a blur. Dynasties were a means to carbon-date vases and other precious types of furniture. I am so thrilled to be able to place all that history into perspective. It will make further reading more manageable and desirable. My knowledge of East Asian geography has been consolidated. Better yet, I now have a reference point from which to continue exploring East Asian political, social, cultural and artistic trends. It feels as if the world has shrunk another notch.
As a teacher (and student) of World Languages, it is natural for me to be inquisitive about other cultures and to want to share that passion with students. Multiculturalism is rapidly becoming the norm. The futures for all nations are going to be inextricably intertwined with the fate of countries and populations on every continent. It is paramount for educators to instill an appreciation for other cultures, to be cognizant of the differences and to recognize common ground. This course has provided a wealth of information and resources to teach about this corner of the planet.
I have some Asian American students, mostly Korean to date. I feel that my increased understanding of the social, political and cultural history of their heritage countries will help to forge more meaningful connections with them. Inquiry about other cultures should be positively infectious.
Admittedly, there have been limitations for making viable connections with the French-speaking world prior to 1800, but I look forward to learning more about the missionaries and colonial outposts for that exchange of cultural influences. At such time I am sure I will compile sufficient material to develop an instructional unit that incorporates a closer examination of Franco-Asian connections. If I ever get to a stage when I can seriously tackle French literature (AP French, French 3 maybe), there may room to present comparative samples from Japanese of Chinese literature. Until then, I am content to insert some cultural interlude mini-lessons. For example, I can feature cultural products of France and East Asian countries, comparing them to those from North America, for foods, clothes, celebrations, inventions, music and art. Three ideas I plan to implement in the near future include a quick look at the Chinese calendar, the Chinese Zodiac and a comparative examination of historical time-lines (Chinese, American, Roman and French). Each subject lends itself to further research and in generating opportunities to produce language.

[Anonymous]

I am as grateful as all the other participants of this class for the opportunity to have not only been able to take such an enlightening class with such a superb professor, but also, to have been offered an incentive to take the class; in this case, I am referring more to the primary incentive of expanding our knowledge base, and less to the material incentives offered to us.
I absolutely concur with the above comments in regards to the fact that within our practice as professional educators, it is of the utmost importance to continue to grow and expand our repertoire of knowledge (as History/World Language teachers specifically, and as teachers in such a diverse city in general), and to never conform to what we already learned (emphasis on the past tense). Rather, one can only hope that such opportunities will continue to be available, and not only for those of us in our particular academic subjects, but for all teachers in all academic subjects.
In particular, I feel that I most benefitted from those lessons that dealt with the present realities of the East Asian countries, and how those present realities have been either directly or indirectly influenced by the ancient histories of those same countries (aside from the more obvious and perhaps direct effects of present-day globalization). It is vital for these types of connections to be made, as it is in history and language classes. Not only has my interest continued to grow in the subjects we visited, but also, I feel that I have been given a key to have a critical eye as to my own perspective of East Asia, as it is presented in popular culture here in the U.S. Indeed to be able to see and think critically is what one most hopes s/he can transmit to her/his students in the academic context, and this class was a welcome challenge so that I could do the same.
As a student myself within the LAUSD system, I had my share of Asian friends, and now as a teacher, I have also had students of Asian origin. As Asian students in the LAUSD system (at least those which I have been directly exposed to) are not all representative of Asia’s countries at large, nor within the inner variations of the countries they come from independently, one is sometimes at a loss as to be able to expand one’s knowledge base as to the particular subject of the East Asian countries, without falling into the trap of eating up what the media and interests of this country have to say about East Asia. All this goes to say that just as we were all challenged to demystify some of our thoughts about Asia (both its past and its present), so to should we be reminded of our responsibility of promoting the same tasks onto our students, especially when (as has already been pointed out) the world is getting ever-smaller and within reach, with this new generation living the very limits of global communication and worldwide exposure to other (political, cultural, societal, economic) realities. So too should these technological innovations be met with knowledge, open-mindedness and readiness to coexist with realities that are many times closer to our own realities than we think.

[Anonymous]

Final Reflection
When I heard about this course, I was interested in learning more about a continent that I knew little about. Living in Rowland Heights, which has a large Asian population, I felt that I knew next to nothing about my neighbors and people that I interact with on a normal basis. I felt that this course would help me understand a little about Asian history, especially as it pertains to what I teach (Ancient Civilizations). I learned a lot about these countries in terms of their history but what I was not expecting was the wealth of knowledge in terms of not-so-ancient history and current events. Professor Dube combined ancient history with current events in a way that made me excited to delve into these cultures and what has happened to them in the past and how those events or practices affect their countries today. I greatly appreciated the chance to learn in class and to seek out news events, movies and resources pertaining to Asia. I feel as if I was living behind a closed door all my life in regards to Asian culture as I was fairly oblivious to what has happened and is happening now in Asia. This class was the “key” to that door and through lectures and the assignments that we were asked to complete, I have opened up to learning about and discussing events and beliefs in these Asian countries. While some topics weren’t exactly my “cup of tea” in terms of what I plan to teach my Ancient Civilization students, I am very thankful for the knowledge that I gained from the course and my ability to cover Ancient China (in particular) improved dramatically. As an Ancient Civilizations major at USC, I delved deeply into Ancient Greece and Rome and I have struggled a bit covering the other civilizations that we have covered so far. However, I have not struggled in covering Ancient China (our current chapter) thanks to this course: I just wish that there were other courses that I could take to address my lack of knowledge of these other countries! Besides bringing a wealth of knowledge to my instruction about Ancient China, I would also like to incorporate some Asian literature (poems, haikus, and stories) into my English class as there are many great universal themes covered in these works. Overall, my goal with my students would be to open their eyes to the wonder of Asia because all they have are the stereotypes of their parents and very little else. I want them to understand and enjoy Asian cultures and to see them as something that is not so foreign or alien but instead, to realize the importance of Asia and to appreciate the beauty that every culture brings to the world we live in.
edited by dfinlay on 1/15/2013

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