Section 5 | Anthropology and Sociology, Saturday, 03.09.2005, 09.00–12.30, JAP 2 (break from 10.30–11.00)
Organizer: Susanne Kreitz-Sandberg (VSJF)
Participants: Els-Marie Anbäcken (University of Linköping, Sweden), Ute Hoffmann (Berlin), Yuki Shiose (Sherbrooke University, Canada)
Many departments for Japanese Studies have introduced intercultural communication or similar topics as part of the curriculum. While some universities have been developing this subject as a wide spread discipline, others adapt the contents of learning rather to the competence of the teaching staff than to evaluated needs of the students. The idea with this EAJS-VSJF-JAWS workshop is to share experiences and to develop intercultural strategies. Discussions of teaching on Japan will be combined with experience of teaching in Japan. This workshop is being organized in cooperation between the EAJS, explicitly the Japan Anthropology Workshop (JAWS) and the German Association for Social Science Research on Japan (VSJF) in order to strengthen co-operation between these organizations, which share not only common research interests but also an overlapping membership base. We aim at extending the institutional ties among the three organizations and to improve and expand existing research networks among their members. The organizer and three active participants will give input from their often as such interdisciplinary perspectives and practical experience. These individual approaches towards the topic shall be further developed in a structured discussion. We plan to address the topic from our respective personal backgrounds and we would like to discuss questions like the following: What do you think to be most important in intercultural teaching? Where do you see central problems? Which elements must be included in a program (appropriate to a special audience)? Which roles play our experiences in teaching multi-national groups, especially in connection to students in or from Japan and other countries? With much of the workshop being devoted to discussion we expect the participants in this EAJS conference to share their own maybe diverse experiences with us. As a general starting point we consider that approaches towards intercultural teaching strategies combine theoretical, methodological and practical competence with special weight being placed on language competence. However, we shall also address the relevance of ‘body learning’ in intercultural teaching and training, so please ‘... be ready to work in bare feet’.