From Mohenjo Daro to Mao: Perspectives on Teaching Asian Civilization

Abstract

ALTHOUGH scholarship dealing with Asian history and culture has shown marked progress in the last three decades, advances in the teaching of introductory Asian Civilization courses have not kept pace. Instructional materials lack unifying themes and coherent perspectives on the entirety of Asia, and a satisfactory crossdisciplinary approach to the cultures of West, South, and East Asia does not exist. Classroom instruction, moreover, is often elementary because a substantial proportion of the students have virtually no background in Asian studies and because they experience difficulty in grasping new and often quite unfamiliar facts and concepts. The result is a rather unsatisfactory and fragmentary introduction to the history and culture of Asia. These deficiencies have been keenly felt at Colorado State University, where the History of Asian Civilization sequence (History 210-211-212, a year-long, 9-credit series) is foundational to the undergraduate Asian Studies Program. Consequently, three faculty members have attempted to find a new and hopefully better way to teach the course. This paper details their efforts and relates them to the larger problem of teaching introductory history courses. Specifically the four following problems needed to be solved. (1) The course was too much of a hasty survey. How could it cover everything from Mohenjo Daro to Mao and still provoke lively intellectual activity?