Projects / University of Washington,
Project Title: Engaging Southeast Asian American Pluralism in Seattle: Undergraduate Student-Teacher Conversations on Religion, Politics, and Identity PIs: Francisco B. Benitez, Assistant Professor, Comparative Literature Department; Laurie J. Sears, Professor, History Department. Location: Simpson Center for the Humanities in the College of Arts and Sciences.
Seattle has the fifth largest Asian-American population in the continental United States. At the University of Washington, Asian-American students now make up nearly twenty-five percent of the student body, and at times are more than fifty percent of students in classes about Asia and Asian America. Cognizant of a changing student population and of the continuing need to address issues of diversity and equality on campus, the University of Washington has had a continuing initiative of curricular transformation through the Office of Minority Affairs.
The project will focus on Southeast Asian American undergraduate students and Seattle’s Southeast Asian American communities. The major emphasis will be on students and community members from Brunei, Cambodia, East Timor (Timor-Leste), Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Burma (Myanmar), the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. Specifically, an integrated program of five innovative pedagogy workshops; six new team-taught courses; five mediated student dialogues; and a performance at the end of the two-year period are proposed. The emphasis throughout will be on encouraging dialogue through a series of techniques ranging from oral history and dramatic reenactments to video conferencing and e-learning. The project will also stress connections to the larger community through its activities. The project will host a workshop designed to teach faculty from all the units on campus the skills to facilitate inter-group dialogues on issues and themes from the project in their classes.
See the project's site here.