PIER East Asia Field Study 2004
Fifteen Educators to Explore Ethnicity in Southwest China
July
9 – August 7, 2004
Fifteen educators (seven from Connecticut) will travel to southwest China (Yunnan, Guangxi, and Guizhou Provinces) on a field study tour July through August of 2004. The tour will be led by Dr. Xinmin Liu, PIER Director for East Asia and Dr. Eileen Walsh, Assistant Professor of Anthropology in Lawrence University, as the conclusion of a postponed field study tour from June 2003 due to the SARS outbreak in China last summer. The project was made possible through a generous grant from the Freeman Foundation, which has dedicated its efforts to improving the quality of teaching about Asia in the nation’s schools, with support from the Yale Center for International and Area Studies, parent organization of Programs in International Educational Resources.
The group will travel to Kunming, Dali, Lijiang, Lugu, Xishuangbanna, Guilin and Kaili to explore and study China’s most diverse but least known habitat of assorted ethnic communities. Drawing on the success of recent“ Backroads Tours,” these educators will venture out to less visited villages, towns and temples to participate in local customs and cultural events intermingle with native farmers, artists and educators, and experience in person the vibrant and sometimes still mystifying cultures, languages and religions. They will also study the interaction of these ethnic groups with the Han Chinese over the centuries and the impact of such ethnic co-existence on our understanding of the era of globalization.
As a component of field study, members of the tour will report the progress of their journey by every means available, i.e., personal journals, video recordings and photographs as the tour proceeds, so that colleagues, students, family and friends back home can share the experience. During the tour, they will also collect materials and data to be used in writing curriculum, contributing articles to publication and in supplementing materials already available in U.S. schools. In addition, they will be committed to making presentations at various regional and national educational conferences throughout 2004-2005.
The selection of these fifteen educators began in Mid-December 2002 upon their completion of all required assignments. They had by then attended an intense summer program, “Exploring Ethnicity in China” (hosted by PIER, East Asia at YCIAS, July 2002), and completed a demanding online course with the same title in September through December 2002. From a competitive pool of participants, they have been chosen on the strengths of keen perception, remarkable insight and persistent dedication to China curriculum research and development for K-12 and college educators. Their outstanding success adds another new chapter to the various outreach projects led by Yale University in promoting international education. The 2002 summer institute and fall online course had gathered a group of 31 educators and teachers to investigate issues related to the ethnic plurality of Chineseness as is discovered in frontier and border regions in northwest and southwest of China. They had attended lectures by the leading scholars of the field: Yale professors Beatrice Bartlett, Valerie Hansen and John Masa Mirikitani, Humphrey Tonkin (Hartford), Jonathan Lipman (Mount Holyoke), Michael Brose(Wyoming), Stanley Toops (Miami), Justin Jon Rudelson (Maryland), Ann Maxwell Hill (Dickinson), Minglang Zhou (Dickinson) as well as Maxwell Hearn (Curator of Asia Collection at Metropolitan Museum of Art) and Wang Yingfan (China’s Permanent Representative to the UN). The success of these programs would have been grimly eclipsed without the capable assistance of PIER fellows: Christopher Bryant, Zoe Resch and Peggy Stewart, who themselves were participants of previous summer institutes at YCIAS.
Roster
of Tour Members
Michael Abraham,
Mew Milford High School, CT
Kathleen Cietanno, East Lyme Middle School, CT
Elizabeth Downing, Hunterdon Central Regional High School, NJ
Janet Frazer, Abington Friends School, PA
Mary Ann Hansen, State Department of Education, CT
James Kiehle, Brattleboro Union High School, VT
Michele Lasker, Byrd Middle School, OK
Sharon Maloney, Newfield School, CT
Carol Moakley, Old Saybrook High School, CT
Patricia O’Leary, Old Saybrook High School, CT
Charlotte Scheckel, Catholic School in Anamosa, IA
Joan Sizemore, Byrd Middle School, OK
Karen Ward, Lawrence School District, KS
Peggy Stewart (Fellow), Vernon Township High School, NJ
Alison Zhou, State Department of Education, CT
Eileen Walsh, Lawrence University, WI
Xinmin Liu, PIER Yale University
