SUNY in Asian Studies Development

Advocating a global as opposed to a Eurocentric perspective in the college classroom, discusses why and how to teach about China's Silk Road. The romance of the journey along the Silk Road with its exotic locales and luxury goods still excites the popular imagination. The trade route between China and Central Asia that flourished from about 200 BCE to the 1500s, the Silk Road can provide great insight for contemporary higher education curricula. Indeed, with people, plants, animals, ideas, and beliefs traversing it, the Silk Road is now considered both a metaphor of globalization and an early example of it. Teaching the Silk Road highlights the reasons to incorporate this material into courses and shares resources to facilitate that process. It is intended for those who are not Silk Road or Asian specialists but who wish to embrace a global history and civilizations perspective in teaching, as opposed to the more traditional "world history" view that shows impacts of other societies on Europe. The work explores both classroom and experiential learning and is intentionally interdisciplinary. Each essay focuses on pedagogical strategies or themes that teachers can use to bring the Silk Road into the classroom. Jacqueline M. Moore is Professor of History at Austin College. She is the author of several books, including Cow Boys and Cattle Men: Class and Masculinities on the Texas Frontier, 1865—1900. Rebecca Woodward Wendelken is Associate Professor of History at Methodist University.

Questions universities’ increasing reliance on market-oriented metrics to determine their strategic directions and gauge faculty productivity. Teaching, Tenure, and Collegiality espouses the concept of relationality—the idea that people’s activities necessarily emerge through contextual engagement with others—as an alternative to the "publish or perish" ethos in higher education. Building on research by comparative philosophers, Mary K. Chang constructs a concept of Confucian relationality and engages it to question universities’ increasing reliance on market-oriented metrics to determine their strategic directions and gauge faculty productivity. Using a process-oriented approach that features change, the embodied connectedness of people, and the extensive impact of personal cultivation, Chang situates higher educational institutions as continually constructed by people's actions in ways that cannot be wholly described or quantified—and need not be. Values are powerful in educational contexts because they direct how administrators, faculty, and students focus limited energy. Teaching, Tenure, and Collegiality reevaluates what universities normatively value and offers a holistically expansive view that positions faculty as experts and learners whose activity is inseparable from the contexts constructed by the relationships from which they emerge.

Essays on a wide range of areas and topics in Asian studies for scholars looking to incorporate Asia into their worldview and teaching. Contributors give contemporary presence to Asian studies through a variety of themes and topics in this multidisciplined and interdisciplinary volume. In an era of globalization, scholars trained in Western traditions increasingly see the need to add materials and perspectives that have been lacking in the past. Accessibly written and void of jargon, this work provides an adaptable entrée to Asia for the integration of topics into courses in the humanities, social sciences, cultural studies, and global studies. Guiding principles, developed at the East-West Center, include noting uncommon differences, the interplay among Asian societies and traditions, the erosion of authenticity and cultural tradition as an Asian phenomenon as well as a Western one, and the possibilities Asian concepts offer for conceiving culture outside Asian contexts. The work ranges from South to Southeast to East Asia. Essays deal with art, aesthetics, popular culture, religion, geopolitical realities, geography, history, and contemporary times. David Jones is Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences, National Taiwan University and Professor of Philosophy at Kennesaw State University. His books include Asian Texts - Asian Contexts: Encounters with Asian Philosophies and Religions (coedited with E. R. Klein), also published by SUNY Press. Michele Marion is Director of the Center for International Studies at Paradise Valley Community College.

“Crossing Borders and Confounding Identity” advances our understanding of the diversity of Chinese women's experiences and achievements, from the Han Dynasty to the present. With a particular emphasis on literature and the arts, the chapters offer insights into the work of current Chinese women artists as well as literary, historical, and cultural portrayals of women and women's issues. Taken together, they provide new perspectives on Chinese women, their lived experiences and fictional representations, across a broad spectrum of literature, theater, film, and the visual arts. Accessible to nonspecialists and general readers, this book will also be a valuable resource for faculty who teach Asian studies courses in history and in the humanities, as well as for students in interdisciplinary Asian studies courses.

Explores the rich potential of Confucianism in American and Chinese classrooms of the twenty-first century. This is one of the first books to explicitly address twenty-first-century education from a Confucian perspective. The contributors focus on why Confucianism is relevant to both American and Chinese education, how Confucian pedagogical principles can be applied to diverse sociocultural settings, and what the social and moral functions of a Confucianism-based education are. Prominent scholars explore a wide-range of research areas and methods, such as K—12 and college teaching; conceptual comparisons; case studies; and discourse analysis, that reflect the depth and breadth of Confucian ideas, and the divergent contexts in which Confucian principles and practices may be applied. This book not only enriches the research literature on Confucianism from an interdisciplinary perspective, but also offers fresh insights into Confucianism's continuing relevance and its compatibility with the latest research-based pedagogical practices. Xiufeng Liu is Director of the Center for Educational Innovation and Professor of Learning and Instruction at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. He is the author of several books, including Linking Competence to Opportunities to Learn: Models of Competence and Data Mining. Wen Ma is Associate Professor of Education at Le Moyne College. He is the editor of East Meets West in Teacher Preparation: Crossing Chinese and American Borders and the coeditor (with Guofang Li) of Chinese-Heritage Students in North American Schools: Understanding Hearts and Minds Beyond Test Scores.

A guide to Buddhism's rich variety of traditions and cultural expressions for educators who would like to include Buddhism in their undergraduate courses. Over its long history, Buddhism has never been a simple monolithic phenomenon, but rather a complex living tradition-or better, a family of traditions-continually shaped by and shaping a vast array of social, economic, political, literary, and aesthetic contexts across East Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. Written by undergraduate educators, Buddhisms in Asia offers a guide to Buddhism's rich variety of traditions and cultural expressions for educators who would like to include Buddhism in their undergraduate courses. It introduces fundamental yet often underrepresented Buddhist texts, concepts, and material in their historical contexts; presents the major "ecologies" of Buddhist belief, practice, and cultural expression; and provides methodological insights regarding how best to infuse Buddhist content into undergraduate courses in the humanities and social sciences. The text aims to represent "Buddhisms" by approaching the subject from a broad range of disciplinary perspectives, including art history, anthropology, history, literature, philosophy, religious studies, and pedagogy.

A translation and discussion of the central Confucian text on education, Xueji (On Teaching and Learning), influential in China from the Han dynasty to the present day. Written over two and a half millennia ago, the Xueji (On Teaching and Learning) is one of the oldest and most comprehensive works on educational philosophy and teaching methods, as well as a consideration of the appropriate roles of teachers and students. The Xueji was included in the Liji (On Ritual), one of the Five Classics that became the heart of the educational system during China's imperial era, and it contains the ritual protocols adopted by the Imperial Academy during the Han dynasty. Chinese Philosophy on Teaching and Learning provides a new translation of the Xueji along with essays exploring this work from both Western and Chinese perspectives. Contributors examine the roots of educational thought in classical Chinese philosophy, outline similarities and differences with ideas rooted in classical Greek thought, and explore what the Xueji can offer educators today. Xu Di is Professor of Educational Foundations at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa and the author of A Comparison of the Educational Ideas and Practices of John Dewey and Mao Zedong in China. Hunter McEwan is Professor of Education at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa and the coeditor (with Kieran Egan) of Narrative in Teaching, Learning, and Research.

This anthology provides an accessible introduction to East Asian Buddhism, focusing specifically on China, Korea, and Japan. It begins with a detailed historical introduction that includes an overview of the development of the various schools of Buddhism in East Asia and traces the transmission of Buddhism from Northwest India to China in the first century CE, and then to Korea and Japan in the fourth and sixth centuries CE. The first part of the book contains five chapters that offer creative pedagogies that can help college professors infuse East Asian Buddhism into their courses. The second part includes six interdisciplinary chapters that explore thematic links between East Asian Buddhism and religious studies, philosophy, film studies, literature, and environmental studies.