This book aims to offer ideas and examples of pedagogy in the undergraduate classroom. The basic premise taken by the authors begins with a question: What if stereotypes surrounding Japan were not pushed to the margins in teaching but took center stage and were exposed for the multiple ways that they can be used to learn not only about “Japan” but of various scholarly disciplines? The task then becomes constructing ways to challenge essentialist notions that do not seek merely to deny, but to shift the conversation constructively by encouraging engagement with a theoretical field from which to acquire tools to critically and effectively evaluate stereotypes of Japan or other societies. The result is a collection of carefully crafted case studies of syllabi that showcase pedagogies aimed at the deconstruction of concepts such as “Japan,” “Japanese,” or “Japanese society” while at the same time offering skills of inquiry that transcend the topics being deconstructed. This handbook is a source of ideas from colleagues in a variety of disciplinary and institutional settings, who are tackling the same issues current or future teachers who plan to use case studies from Japan in their lectures.
- Cover
- Table of Contents
- Contributors
- Preface
- Introduction
- Critical Pedagogy as Public, Scholarly Engagement
- Ioannis Gaitanidis and Gregory S. Poole
- Part 1: Critiquing by Reflection on Acquired Knowledge
- 1. Reconstructing the Narrative of “Because Japan is an Island”: Discussions of Immigration, Migration, and Refugee Policy
- 2. On Pedagogy and the Personal: Teaching Media, the Nation, and Globalization about/in Japan
- 3. Teaching Human Agency in Science through Japanese History
- 4. Teaching Gender and the Politics of Reproduction in Japan: Self-Government as a Theoretical Reference Point
- 5. Disentangling “Japanese Religion” in the Classroom
- Satoko Fujiwara and Ioannis Gaitanidis
- Part 2: Critiquing by Comparing (with Oneself and with Others)
- 6. Out of Site, Out of Mind? Ethnographies of Japan, Outside Japan
- 7. Challenging the Ideas of “Japan” and “Japanese Language” in a Foreign Language Classroom: Linguistic Landscapes Project
- 8. History and Holism: Making Sense of the Anthropology of Japan
- 9. Deconstructing “Japan” through the Lens of Border Crossing
- 1. Applying Intersectionality to Teaching Social Inequalities in Japan
- Part 3: Critiquing by Creating
- 11. Undoing “Japan” in Global Education: Three Class Projects for Dismantling Culturalist Portrayals of Society
- 12. Japanese Gardens as a Zone of Contact for Teaching
- 13. From “Japanese” in the US to “Foreigner” in Japan: Unpacking “Race” in Representations
- 14. The Materiality of Mokkan: Creating Sources for Reflection on Text in Ancient Japan
- Part 4: Critiquing through Curriculum Building
- 15. The Visual Anthropology of Japan: In and Outside the Classroom
- 16. A Balancing Act: Teaching the Anthropology of Japan at French Universities
- Alice Berthon, Alice Doublier and Charlotte Lamott
- 17. Teaching the Japanese Workplace: From Principles to Practice (and Back Again)
- Jeremy Breaden and Fusako Ota
- Index