Ways of Seeing Asia: Pedagogical Inquiries into Asian Art Histories

I-Fan Chen
Visual Arts
UC San Diego

Yun-Chen Lu
History of Art and Architecture
UC Santa Barbara

Participants

Among UC campuses in southern California, courses like Introduction to Asian Art or History of East Asian Arts are among the most popular GE (General Education) courses for undergraduate students. These courses, generally expected to cover a vast variety of artistic media produced over a long period of time and an extensive geographic area, are compressed into ten-week quarters. Students taking these classes often haven’t been exposed to art historical modes of enquiry and/or are unfamiliar with the historical background of Asia. In combination with changing demographics throughout the UC system and evolving learning habits, this situation has led to observable challenges in the effectiveness of teaching Asian art. In response, this project aims at developing strategies of teaching and designing syllabi that address these challenges. The working group, composed of seven Ph.D. candidates of Asian art history from four UC campuses in southern California, greatly values undergrads’ learning experience and is committed to improving it. Therefore, the project aims at collaboratively developing pedagogies that address issues such as engaging syllabi, teaching resources (both digital and analogue), learning tools (traditional and digital), and teaching outcomes.