EAS 201
East Asia in the Contemporary World

Jeremy Robinson
robinjer@gvsu.edu

Office: MAK D-2-136

When Europe and America "rediscovered" East Asia in the 18th century, they found countries that had spent centuries looking inward rather than following the Western model of "progress." And while their technological superiority enabled the West to extend the influence of their empires into East Asia in the short term, forcing them to adopt Western conceptions of civilization and enlightenment, they would find that those countries did not easily fit into their preconceived molds. Through war and peace, economic prosperity and hardship, dominance and decline, East Asia has continued to be viewed as the counterpoint to the assumptions and expectations of the West and characterized as mysterious and inscrutable: the Orient that exists as the Other to the "default" Occidental worldview. This course attempts to shed this image of East Asia by placing the modernization of China, Japan, and Korea over the last century and a half in the context of the larger development of the specific regions within it. East Asia is not monolithic, nor are the nations within it homogenous. The three (or four, or five, or more) countries that make up the region continue to follow their own paths in their dealings with each other and the world beyond its environs, in ways that are as varied and changing as their people. The course uses history as a framework but takes the products of the people themselves – their essays, articles, literature, film, etc. – as the most important window on the attitudes of the time.

Student Learning Objectives

After successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

This course also fulfills the General Education "Historical Analysis" Foundation requirement and the "Global Perspectives" Cultures requirement. As such, it includes explicit focus on the following content and skills goals:

Eighteen Topics: 18 x 5 pts. each =
Final Exam

Texts

There are no required text books for this course. All materials will be made available either directly on Blackboard or through external sites linked through our Blackboard site. On any given day you may be asked to read or view assigned readings, external websites, images, or video and post your responses, reactions, etc. to these. Keeping up on these assignments will make up the vast majority of your grade. 

Topics 

Each of the eighteen course topics will consist of a combination of online readings, video lectures, asynchronous discussion, and individual assignments. While the class is asynchronous, it is VITAL to your success in the class that you keep up with the schedule for each topic as listed on Blackboard. You may complete the readings and assignments on your own schedule any time prior to the deadline, but all assignments for a given topic MUST be completed by the deadline and no late work will be accepted. This website includes the outline of the overall course schedule, but you should refer primarily to the detailed course schedule on Blackboard for specific readings, deadlines, daily work expectations, etc. It also contains links to the three main external sites we will be using for online discussion and assignments: Perusall, Padlet, and Flip.

Perusall

Perusall is a site for collaborative online reading, and this is where all course readings and lectures will be posted. The first time you click on the link for Perusall in Blackboard an account will be created for you linked to your GVSU username. The readings posted on Perusall will be the first assignments you complete for each topic and, as you read, you are expected to highlight passages about which you have questions or comments. These can be as simple as asking for clarification of the meaning of a term or as complex as highlighting connections between specific passages and the larger themes of the course. Other students can answer, upvote, or respond to your comments, and this interaction is what determines the online discussion component of each topic. For this reason, after you finish the readings you should plan to return to them regularly to skim other student comments and contribute to the dialogue. There is no "required minimum" number of comments for each reading, but in general you are expected to show active engagement with both the texts and with your fellow students rather than simply reading passively.

Lecture Videos

Each lecture video is linked to a set of readings, and these videos are also included on Perusall. As with the readings, you can ask questions, make comments, etc. at specfic time stamps in the video, and it is a combination of both the readings and lectures that will form the basis for assignments and the final exam. After watching the lecture video, you are encouraged to go back and continue to comment on the readings, videos, images, and fellow students' posts. Once again, the goal is active engagement with the material and with other students, and so it is expecteed that you will continue to contribute to the discussion until the deadline for that topic, even if you have already moved ahead to the next topic's material. The material for each topic is not a "to do" list to be checked off; it is a topic to be explored.

Padlet

Padlet is an "online bulletin board" for sharing text, images, links, etc. in a format that encourages collaboration. Creating a Padlet account is free but, if you prefer not to do so you can still contribute, though in this case you should be careful to include your name in all posts to ensure you receive credit for them. Required contributions might be in the form of a responss to an image or prompt, searching the web for and posting material yourself, etc. Not all of the topics will require a Padlet contribution and, when they do, it will be with very specific guidelines as to what is expected. As with Perusall it is intended to be interactive, enabling you to like and respond to fellow students' posts. So even after you complete your post you are expected to check back occasionally to view and comment on what other students have posted.

Flip

Flip (Formerly Flipgrid) is a forum for communicating through brief videos. Flip assignments will usually entail recording yourself responding to a specific prompt related to the material. The format is casual, so you will not need to worry about preparing a formal written presentation or editing your videos so that they look professional. And you will not be graded on the quality of your post, or even its "accuracy" (unless it reveals that you haven't actually read the material). These posts only need to show that you have read/viewed the material actively and given thought to them, not that you have fully internalized all the information. As with all the online material, Flip is intended to be interactive, and you can post response videos to other students' contributions. Every topic will conclude with a Flip post intended to foster discussion after all the other content has been completed.

Evaluation

Once the deadline for a topic has passed you will be given a grade for the topic which includes all readings, assignments, discussion, etc. The vast majority of this grade emphasizes active engagement with the material and participation in online interaction. The grade for each topic will be out of five points, making up 5% of your total grade, which means that the vast majority of your overall grade for the course (90% for eighteen topics) will be in the form of the active participation and engagement described above.

Final Exam

The final exam for the course will be taken asynchronously online. A set of key terms will be provided to guide your study and the test may be taken at any time after all topics have been completed up to the final deadline for the course. It will consist entirely of brief essays discussing key terms, quotes, images, etc. from the class. You will be allowed to select the topics with which you are most familiar from a larger set of topics designed to let you show what you know about the broader themes of the course. For this reason, the best preparation for the exam is to mentally tie each reading, assignment, discussion topic, etc. to these larger themes as you work your way through the course.