Andrea Scaturo, above, a faculty member at High School South, has been selected by the Columbia University National Coordinating Site of the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia (NCTA) to participate in a two-week study tour of China and Korea in October to establish links with partners in these countries.##M:[more]## The study tour is supported by the Freeman Foundation. Study tour participants will visit the major cities in China and Korea as well as adjacent cities where contacts for collaboration have been established. The proposed itinerary includes travel to sites in and around the following Beijing, Shanghai, Suzhou, Seoul, Daegu, and Pusan.
Scaturo’s proposal is to create a class-to-class project where students can discuss key texts taught in “Politics and Government in Literature” including Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” John Hersey’s “Hiroshima,” and Elie Wiesel’s “Night and Dawn,” with other students via a blog. Partners would discuss how their country teaches the historical events and compare them to how the other country teaches the same within a discussion of the literature. “It will be an asset to our class discussions and to student understanding of the world as a whole as they add in comments from their international peers,” says Scaturo.
The goals of this study tour are to provide educators with professional development opportunities that will expand their understanding of East Asia and to explore ways for classrooms in the U.S., China, and Korea to be linked digitally for collaborative teaching and learning that will expand the horizons of students in these countries.
