After five years, the time has come for us to split the East Asian Research and Bibliographic Methods course. It's come a long way since I first taught it solo--not only has our number of majors and minors doubled, but the material we need to cover, thanks to the digital age, has also increased exponentially. This past year it became downright unruly, as those of you who took it know, even without trying to squeeze in Korean studies. So, we've decided to bid good-bye to an era and split EAS205 into EAC205 and EAJ205.
Bibliography is something usually taught at the graduate level, so structuring the undergraduate curriculum is tricky. In addition to the linguistic limitations, we also face library limitations. That is to say, we don't want to flood the curricula with information about materials that are not readily available to UAlbany students.
A final consideration is that the materials are increasingly dynamic because they are largely electronic, not on paper. Whereas "methods" courses in graduate schools were relatively static for decades, now the materials change so rapidly that the curricula have to be reviewed and revised on a constant basis.
Personally, I think that it is important to include both the "old" paper materials and the new electronic resources. Both are important to master if one is to be truly proficient in East Asian Studies. I know that there is some resistance on students' parts to learning some of the more arcane aspects of bibliographic method, that they think those skills are obsolete (or soon will be). But in the same way that knowing the multiplication tables is important in a world of pocket calculators, knowing how to find a character in a paper dictionary is important.
So although students should stay tuned for some big changes on the horizon, the fundamentals will live on.
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3 comments:
Is there now a complete separation of Chinese/Japanese subjects within the course? For example, do the Japanese students still go over the Chinese calendar? I really enjoyed the opportunity to explore something I would not normally have encountered in my Japanese classes.
Speaking of calendars, have you had any students born in Heisei yet? I remember an exercise that assumed a Showa birthday.
Japanese students will still go over the Chinese (lunar) calendar, because the Japanese use it, too. Really, after running over the syllabus, I think that the topics will change very little but the detail for Japanese students will increase. For example, in word processing, we never had time to do furigana before but now we'll have time.
The Heisei problem looms large, not so much because we assumed a Showa birthday but rather because the Calendar for 2000 years stops at the year 2000, and before long that will be a problem. But, because Information Technology changes so fast I'm waiting on worrying about that a while until I see what resources we have in, say, 2018.
It's probably the most practical thing to do, but I'm glad that I took the course prior to the split. In fact, learning the Chinese materials was part of what influenced me to take elementary Chinese the following year.
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