Call for Proposals: Teaching East Asia in the Humanities
April 24-25, 2021 (via Zoom)
The past decade has produced a great corpus of literature which defends and reimagines the value of the humanities—its potential to cultivate critical reasoning and cultural literacy necessary for a healthy civil society (Helen Small, 2013), ethically meaningful reading practices (Peter Brooks, 2014), and the character and judgement required to become “more human” (James Hankins, 2017). For teachers of the humanities, maintaining the sort of engaged pedagogy necessary to deliver on these promises means frequent trial and error. This conference is designed to serve as a forum to discuss both our challenges and successes in achieving our goals as humanities teachers in East Asian fields.
We invite proposals that reflect on your own stories of challenging and rewarding moments in your teaching, as well as common pedagogical strategies within your fields. How do we grapple with tensions between global and local perspectives? How do we account for particularities (philosophical concepts, literary forms, and social institutions) in East Asia while avoiding essentialisms, or introduce students to Western theory without perpetuating discursive hegemony? How should we navigate or challenge the boundaries imposed by the premodern/modern divide, or disciplines such as history, literature, philosophy, and religion? What pedagogical hurdles and advantages accompany teaching translated sources? Ultimately, how should we tailor our pedagogy to foster humanistic thinking?
Presentations should be 15-20 minutes in length, and will be followed by questions and answers. Proposals should be no longer than 300 words, and might include any of the following:
- A brief description of a teaching experience that your presentation might highlight
- Reflections on new trends in teaching in your field or new digital resources
- How your presentation addresses questions of humanistic pedagogy in East Asian fields, such as (but not limited to) those raised above
Please submit proposals to proposals@teachinghumanities.com by January 31, 2021.
Visit our website for updates: www.teachinghumanities.com
Organizers:
Xiaoyu Xia (xiaoyu_xia@berkeley.edu)
Nicholas Constantino (nconstantino@berkeley.edu)
