Kansas and Missouri Teachers Make the East Asian Connection

Kathy Ray and Becky Palmer are serious about putting international education into their classrooms. The two teachers – Ray from Lansing, Kansas, and Palmer from Pleasant Hill, Missouri – have worked hard to find educational and exciting ways to introduce information about East Asia to their students. And the results have been empowering, enlightening and just plain entertaining.

Both Ray and Palmer are graduates of the East Asian Institute for Teachers (EAIT), run by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Kansas. After taking this 30-hour graduate-level course designed for Kansas and Western Missouri K-12 teachers who want to add East Asian content to their curriculum, Palmer successfully incorporated East Asia into her lessons including building an Asian installation in her classroom. And their East Asian thrust is a direct outgrowth of the course. As Ray puts it, "Students have almost no exposure to this part of the world, yet in the 21st century [they] will be more and more influenced in their daily lives by a global community that has strong economic ties to East Asia."

To this end, the two teachers have introduced Asian content to help prepare their students for the future.

Students in Ray’s Lansing middle school classes get a complete tour of Southeast Asia over a three-year period, starting with China, traveling to Japan, and ending at several smaller Southeast Asian countries. And it’s all  for free.  Ray has held a Southeast Asia Cultural Seminar for her students for the past three years, focusing on different countries each year. This year, students explored Korea, Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia and Indonesia.

For the seminar, students read historical information about the countries and biographies of prominent figures. They study current events and compare and contrast their own attitudes with those of people living in the other countries. The seminar culminates in a day of cultural activities that includes speakers from the targeted countries and various hands-on stations where students can play games, create art, and try their hand at ethnic cooking.

Yoo Gye-Hyoung, a graduate student at the University of Kansas, was one of the speakers at this year’s Cultural Seminar. She gave an interactive presentation about Korean culture and had students sing a traditional song, play a traditional instrument and practice the traditional way of greeting elders in Korea. Yoo says the "cultural seminar is a good idea for the students because activities like this can broaden [their] knowledge and lead [them] to understand other cultures. Through this activity, I want students to value each country as an equal of their country."

Ray said that listening to the speakers and participating in the cultural activities is one of her students' favorite parts of the seminar. From seeing the artifacts and learning the language to trying new foods, students thoroughly enjoy receiving firsthand knowledge of the countries they've read about. "They go away feeling that they have learned new information about a culture in a pleasant way," said Ray.

Meanwhile, in Missouri…

On January 21, 2005, Becky Palmer gave her 24 gifted third-, fourth- and fifth-grade PHYRE (Pleasant Hill Youth Reaching for Excellence) students a taste of Japan in their hometown of Lee's Summit. As part of the K-12 outreach activities of KU's Center for East Asian Studies, Takako Yano, a graduate student in education, traveled to Palmer’s classroom to make the presentation.

Takako first solicited previous knowledge of her home country from the students with a lively Q & A opener. She then went on to teach some katakana, some Japanese phrases and the proper way to bow to elders. The students practiced saying "Good morning" and bowing: third graders to fourth graders, fourth graders to fifth graders, and finally, the whole class to the teacher.

In addition to teaching the students how to greet each other in Japanese, Takako showed and spoke about photographs of school life in Japan. Her description of the daily work schedule and the tradition that requires students to clean the school after school was met with astonished gasps by the Pleasant Hill Elementary School pupils.

The highlight of Takako's presentation came when she unfolded a map of the world that she had brought back from Japan on her most recent visit. Students were surprised to see that on this map Japan was in the center and the US was situated to its east; in other words, what they had learned of as the Far East was depicted by the Japanese as being to the Far West of the US.

The presentation culminated in an origami crane lesson. The students were familiar with the book Sadako and the 1000 Paper Cranes and the teacher hoped to send her students' origami cranes to Japan to be displayed on The Children’s Peace Monument in Hiroshima. Teachers interested in doing this can visit the Kids Peace Station Hiroshima for more information on how to go about it.

Epilogue: As a measure of the success of this outreach event, a week or so later, the Center for East Asian Studies office received an envelope full of arigato (thank you) notes from the class: some of them with elements written in katakana!

top of page