Please follow the links below to access some of the materials that have been developed by teachers and their students.
Films for U.S. high school/middle school students
This list of Japanese-language films are recommended by AATJ members and other teachers for use in middle- and high-school classrooms. They have been selected not primarily for language teaching purposes, but for the window they offer into Japanese society and everyday life, and for the potential they offer for discussion in the classroom of differences and commonalities among cultures.
Humans of Minamisanriku: Joint Project by Students of Baylor University and Tohoku University
The Baylor in Japan (BIJ) Summer Intensive Japanese program began in 2012, just a year after the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami. The BIJ program not only focuses on language learning but also emphasizes community service. In the summer of 2012 following the tsunami disaster, during a time where basic shelters were practically non-existent, the students had the privilege of visiting the tsunami-stricken area owing to everyone’s support. They initially arrived with trepidation at Minamisanriku in fear that their presence would further cause a burden, but as they met the people and volunteered in the community, the people of Minamisanriku welcomed them with smiles despite the catastrophic devastation.
They have been visiting Minamisanriku ever since. Inspired by the photoblog “Humans of New York”, which has touched the lives of about eighteen million people, Baylor and Tohoku University students in 2017 collaborated to establish the Humans of Minamisanriku project (BIJ’s cultural exchange program with Tohoku University was established in 2015). The films and interviews produced during the summer of 2017 can be accessed on Facebook or YouTube at the following locations:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjhCCZCOX2aFBf8ZAawOX1w/videos?view_as=subscriber
https://www.facebook.com/TohokuBaylor/
View an NHK television interview with the group and one of the tsunami survivors they worked with
National Consortium for Teaching about Asia (NCTA)
The National Consortium for Teaching about Asia (NCTA) (http://nctasia.org/) offers many other resources and professional development opportunities for teachers.
Texas Teachers and Students Visit the Tohoku Region Recovering from the 2011 Earthquake, Tsunami, and Nuclear Disaster
In the summer of 2014 Baylor University professor Yuko Prefume took a group of students to visit the Minamisanriku and Kesennuma in the earthquake- and tsunami-devastated areas of northern Japan. A video, filmed and edited by one of Prefume sensei’s students, Mikey Newton (Baylor University, Class of 2013, Film and Digital major), shows students interacting with local residents in a variety of situations and reflecting on their experience in both English and Japanese. The VIDEO ON YOUTUBE can inspire conversations about culture and current events in Japan. More information on the Baylor project is available HERE.
Classroom Materials on Chanoyu
Washington and Lee University developed a wealth of materials for K-12 classroom teachers as one of the activities focusing on its Japanese Tea Room Senshin’an. The Chanoyu Classroom Materials website has links to activity pages and lesson plans about the tea ceremony, a specially commissioned kamishibai which can be downloaded in PPT or PDF format, and many other resources on tea and its place in Japanese culture. While you are there, pay a virtual visit to Senshin’an and the programs and activities it inspires at the university and in the community.
East Asian Bookshelf
The National East Asian Languages Resource Center (NEALRC) at the Ohio State University invites you to visit its “East Asian Bookshelf” website, which aims to promote teaching and learning materials in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean and to assist teachers to find quality language teaching materials available to purchase. This project is a collaborative effort of NEALRC, CLASS (Chinese Language Association of Secondary-elementary Schools), CLTA (Chinese Language Teachers Association), AATJ (American Association of Teachers of Japanese) and AATK (American Association of Teachers of Korean), with financial support from a Department of Education Title VI grant. Comments and suggestions will be warmly received, seriously considered, and deeply appreciated by the site’s coordinator, Minru Li, who can be contacted by email at or by phone at 614-688-3080.
Journey to the Interior: Curriculum Project
Thematic units were developed by participants in a one-month summer institute in Japan who retraced the haiku poet Basho’s iconic 1689 pilgrimage route through northern Japan, as told in his classic work Oku no Hosomichi (Journey to the Interior), studied Basho’s life and poetry, wrote their own poetry, experienced Japanese rural life, and developed materials for use in their classrooms. The two units collected here are (1) a standards-based introduction to Basho, haiku, and their Japanese context for intermediate to advanced students of Japanese, and (2) an interactive introduction to haiku using skits for beginning high school students.
Summer Language, Culture and Technology Institutes in Japan
Several dozen participants attended AATJ-sponsored summer institutes in Japan in 2002, 2004, 2006, and 2010 and produced multimedia resources designed for classroom use in grades K-12. If you were a participant in the summer institutes, and would like to retrieve the materials you produced, please contact the AATJ office.
