A Pedagogy Workshop on Teaching East Asian Performing Arts at Liberal Arts Colleges
Location and Time 
Swarthmore College, May 17-19, 2019
– The Inn at Swarthmore, May 17, 2019
– Scheuer Room, Kohlberg Hall, Swarthmore College, May 18-19, 2019
Rationales and Goals
A large part of our job as pedagogues is engendering interests and sympathies in our students for the unfamiliar performative elements in East Asian languages, literatures, musics, theaters and other cultural domains. In building a strong, diverse, and balanced East Asian-related curriculum, we have encountered many challenges in course designs and classroom teachings. We are bringing together teacher-scholars in liberal arts colleges who share an interest in teaching East Asian performing arts and those who are passionate about incorporating performative elements in their teaching.
How to translate the pedagogical practices we experienced in the indigenous learning environment into an effective teaching method in our own classroom? How does interacting with performing arts help motivate students to participate? How to use the performing arts as a source and stimulus for communicative exchange in language classroom? How, as professors of modernism and performance studies, can we open up a space for students to approach performance by using a variety of methodologies and tools? These are the main questions this workshop intends to address.
In this workshop we seek to share our empirical experiences and theoretical thinking about new modes of teaching that integrate broadly construed performing arts, be it tea ceremony, music and opera, poetry chanting, or theater. We are fundamentally interested in a productive discussion of effective strategies, concrete successful examples of teaching, and construction of syllabi. As such, this workshop offers the opportunity for a mutual support among instructors who work with constraints on time and who endeavor to balance teaching responsibilities and research.
Potential Outcomes
After the conclusion of the workshop, there will be three follow-up activities.
1. Workshop website: Our cross-institutional exchange of pedagogical ideas will take the format of pre-circulated papers, syllabi, and lesson and assignment plans among participants. We are creating a website for the posting of papers delivered at the workshop, syllabi and lesson plans. This website will also be used prior to the workshop to post useful information concerning schedules, conference participants, maps, and local accommodations.
2. Publication: A special journal issue on pedagogy can be developed after the workshop, which aims at providing teaching guidance appropriate for liberal arts education. We hope that it will appeal to scholars in East Asian studies interested in finding their way into the performative side of the cultures for the first time, or in expanding their knowledge of traditional performances in teaching.
3. “Drop Box” or Blog: In order to continue discussion about issues raised during the course of the workshop, conference participants would be encouraged to post thoughts and comments on a blog or send files to a “drop box,” for which there would be a link on the workshop website. These interactions would serve as the basis for future workshops on pedagogical issues discussed in the proposed workshop.