Seminar Reflection

[Rob_Hugo@PortNW]

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Prior to participating in the East Asia Seminar, I had very little knowledge of the various facets of Asian culture. As a child, even though I had grown up around Chinese, Japanese, Taiwanese, Koreans and Filipinos, I was still unaware of the significance of each culture. Looking back it was a disservice, that my education lacked the attention to the Asian cultures that so heavily dominated the student population. My only memorable learning experience occurred after I read The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan and it was only then that I realized the commonalities between the Asian and American culture. I saw mothers, daughters, aunts, and friends experiencing the tumultuous, but loving relationships that I and others can relate to. Their experience became one that I could understand and therefore, the novel was meaningful. Yet, unfortunately, that was my only connection to the Asian culture.
As I began teaching, I, at first, wanted to focus on the cultural backgrounds of my students—Hispanic and African American—however, I realized that I was limiting the topics I could cover and I was also limiting my student’s level of cultural awareness. In the times that I referenced an aspect of Asian culture, many reactions of my students were evident of only a superficial knowledge. It was in those moments and those times when I desired to incorporate Asian literature that I knew I also had to confront my own understanding of the East and South East Asian cultures. My mission became to close our gap. Thus, the learning that I gained while attending the Seminar was indispensible.
There are several ways that I plan to incorporate literature about Asian experiences and read text by Asian authors. This past semester, while teaching a New Orleans novel, Zeitoun, there was a point at which I wanted to discuss the role of racism that occurred within the news media coverage after Hurricane Katrina. It was also at this point that I attended the China Institute seminar and heard Rob Schmitz’s reflection on his coverage of the falsified reports presented by Mike Daisey on the Chinese workers in Shenzen. Schmitz’s report not only discussed the responsibility of the media to give accurate information but it also uncovered the prevailing stereotypes that people are willing to believe about a specific culture. My students and I engaged in a unit that would “uncover the truth” of the Daisey report and compare it to the false reports of the victims of Hurricane Katrina. The unit confronted the various assumptions that we make based upon cultural stereotypes and it lead to an open discussion on our presumptions. One other way, that I brought meaningful aspects of the Asian cultures to my class was through the novel Siddhartha. My AP students participated in a philosophical debate on the four golden philosophies: Confucianism, mohism, daoism, and leagalism in order to see the relevance of the Buddhist philosophy in the Asian culture. Then, after reading the novel, they wrote their own personal journey narratives and together we visited the Hsi Lai Buddhist Temple in Hacienda Heights. The unit was the culminating assessment of the year and the students could appreciate the knowledge that they gained while learning about the different religious beliefs.
In the future, I plan to continue to add more lessons and units dealing with the Asian culture as a way of building my students’ global awareness.

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