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Stimulated by Asia's growing importance in the world, East Asian studies are booming across the United States. Columbia, which has one of the largest and most highly regarded East Asian studies programs in the country, has seen an almost 20 percent increase in enrollment in courses on East Asia over the past five years.
Reflecting these trends, national demand is increasing for authoritative and up-to-date teaching materials on all aspects of Asia. In response, Columbia has created an innovative program, Expanding East Asian Studies (ExEAS), to help develop courses and teaching materials for use in undergraduate institutions throughout the United States. These materials are available to all on the new ExEAS Web site (http://www.exeas.org).
"Now that knowledge of Asia and the wider world is no longer an optional matter but an imperative need," said Carol Gluck, director of ExEAS and the George Sansom Professor of History, "our task is to provide materials that enable undergraduates to acquire global literacy as part of their regular course of study."
From the beginning, the program has relied on a network of scholars, who have collaborated in creating interdisciplinary learning units for a variety of educational contexts. "We've been fortunate to have the enthusiastic participation of some 60 faculty members from colleges and universities around the Northeast," Gluck said.
Each year, participating faculty attend three weekend workshops, where they discuss the intellectual and pedagogical needs of today's students. A key goal, Gluck said, is to "make it easier to teach Asian studies across various disciplines and in different undergraduate contexts -- whether four-year colleges, community colleges or large universities.
ExEAS program officer Heidi Johnson added: "Although we focus on East Asia, we're also committed to viewing Asia in a broad comparative and global context and developing materials accessible to diverse undergraduate audiences."
One of the units on the Web site, "Women and Politics in Japan," for example, provides all the material necessary for instructors who know little about Asia to incorporate the topic into introductory courses in political science, sociology, gender studies and the like.
Another unit, "Your Honor I Am Innocent: Law and Society in Late Imperial China," uses a translation of a 19th-century family homicide to introduce Confucian principles, as well as to explore broader issues of gender relations, law and social justice in different cultural contexts.
The ExEAS program provided initial support for a new position in Chinese society at Barnard College, and each year it funds up to four postdoctoral fellows in different disciplines. Every ExEAS Fellow teaches a new undergraduate course at Columbia, designed with guidance from ExEAS faculty participants.
According to Johnson, "these courses expand Columbia's East Asian studies offerings, develop new materials for distribution on the Web site and, most important, provide the Fellows with pedagogical experience teaching across borders and disciplines at the earliest stages of their careers."
Established in 2002 with a $2 million grant from the Freeman Foundation, an organization dedicated to strengthening ties between the United States and East Asia, the ExEAS initiative is based at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and works in cooperation with Columbia's Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures (EALAC), Barnard College's Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures, and various disciplinary departments.
For more information and to check the latest online offerings -- e.g., a syllabus for "The World of Banned Books" and a unit on "Asian Revolutions in the 20th Century" -- go to http://www.exeas.org/. |
