Program for Teaching East Asia wins Community Impact Micro-Grant
Impact of COVID in China and the U.S.
Senior Staff Associate Lynn Kalinauskas
Center for Asian Studies, Program for Teaching East Asia
The program, Understanding the Impact of COVID in China and the U.S. through Literature and Writing, will work with a group of ten Colorado secondary teachers to introduce their students to the book Wuhan Diaries: Dispatches from a Quarantined City, by the accomplished Chinese author Fang Fang. The program will build on and expand the impact of an online course that the Program for Teaching East Asia is scheduled to teach to in-service teachers in winter 2021 through its National Consortium for Teaching about Asia funding.
The Program for Teaching East Asia will target Colorado high school teachers and their students to participate in this program. Given the subject and scope of the Wuhan Diaries, the project could include social studies (AP History, History, Comparative Government, AP Human Geography) or humanities (literature, cultural studies) teachers. The participants will first take part in an online program that examines the book, Wuhan Diaries. They will then develop and bring the activity described above into their classrooms and work with their students to:
- Read and learn about an established 21st-century Chinese author.
- Share a detailed description of early COVID-19 times in China.
- Understand different cultural and social values as they relate to lived experiences during the pandemic.
- Understand the “global” aspect of this pandemic.
- Understand how racial issues have arisen from the pandemic;.
- Learn about the work being done at Ҵýƽ in these areas.