Gen Ed Course Swaps Podcasts for Papers

Imagine sitting down in a theater, popcorn in hand. The lights dim, Kung-Fu Panda reminds you to silence your cell phone, and the previews start. But instead of the new Saw flick, a trailer for Culture and Belief 11: “Medicine and the Body in East Asia and in Europe,” plays across the screen, narrated by Shigehisa Kuriyama, a professor of East Asian studies.
As the name implies, the class is a historical comparison of the body and medicine in East Asia and Europe, and its approach is anything but traditional.
Kuriyama jettisons the traditional required term paper in favor of newer pedagogical measures—making movies and podcasts.
The approach may mark a new path for General Education at Harvard.

THE BODY, REDISCOVERED

Last fall, Wenxin “Vincent” Xu ’09 flipped through the CUE guide looking for classes with the highest ratings, and Kuriyama’s class, then East Asian Studies 17, got a 5.0.
Xu praised Kuriyama’s sometimes “quirky” style of teaching for making lectures much more interesting.
“He’ll show a picture of a tree and he won’t show anything else for a minute and that will be something related to the concept of chi in East Asia, “ Xu said. “The particular way of thinking about the tree may be a way of thinking about the hand—does the hand have any meaning if it’s not connected to the body?”
Kuriyama approaches the body and its functions from a different angle than, say, the life sciences.
“We are brought up in a certain way of looking at the body. We take science courses that take an objective approach—the cells, the reactions, but on the other hand there’s a less quantifiable way,” Xu said. “You see connections that you wouldn’t see if you just read texts of Hippocrates,” Xu said.
This approach to a normally “pre-med” topic is one of the reasons the course was one of the first to be approved course was one of the first to be approved for the new General Education curriculum.
“We want students in their liberal arts education to really learn things that are going to reflect who they are as people,” said Stephanie H. Kenen, the General Education curriculum’s administrative director. “What better can you ask for than a class that asks people to think of themselves as an embodied person and what it means?”

A PAPERLESS CLASS

Unlike a traditional Core class, Kuriyama’s assignments focus on communication and technology, rather than writing papers.
For Xu’s final project, he chose to make an film about the history of tai chi.
“If it’s not a way of hurting people and not a way of meditating, how do we define what’s tai chi?” Xu said. “How many ways do you see different manifestations of the tai chi symbol?”
He said the process got him thinking about the way images are connected—he started seeing similar motifs of the tai chi symbol from the flag of Mongolia to the Pepsi logo. Normally, students make a short three-minute film or podcast every week that relates to the book or readings discussed.
Kuriyama said that while in his experience, students care very little about papers once they’ve been turned in—apart from their grade—his students have e-mailed their short films to friends, parents, and classmates. And every fall, there is public showing of the student-made movies.
“When the papers were written they were just for the professor, but the movies and podcasts are to share,” Kuriyama said. “It promotes one of the most fundamental aspects of composition—the idea of communicating with the audience.”
Kuriyama added that this model of communication, combining images and sounds, will become increasingly important in the Internet age.
“It’s essentially a new kind of language—it’s as important a skill as writing,” Kuriyama said.
Kuang-Chi Hung, a graduate student in EAS who has taken all of Kuriyama’s classes, said this use of technology requires thinking in more dimensions.
“The production does not just rely on traditional representations”, Hung said. “You have to mobilize all your senses, the eyes, the ears, to create a much more interesting medium that can convey powerful emotions to the audience.”
Hung added that in many talks, presenters will just go from one PowerPoint slide to the next, reading the text off the screen in a monotonous voice. By contrast, he said, embedding movies or using one as a trailer can get the audience interested in the topic and help them understand the message.
Similarly, Kuriyama said that in academic writing, being dull is often accepted—better to be interesting, for sure, but perfectly acceptable to be dull.
“That doesn’t apply to movies,” Kuriyama said. “You can’t have a movie that’s dull because that would be against the whole point of making a movie.”
This use of technology is especially relevant to a class like Kuriyama’s, according to Wilt L. Edema, the chair of the East Asian Languages and Cultures department.
“Imagine a body made up of energy or a body made up of bones and muscles,” Edema said. “The conception of the body has visual consequence which Kuriyama manifests in his class.”

A NEW WAY FOR GEN ED?

When Xu took the class, it was tiny, with only 12 students enrolled.
This year, there are at least 60 undergraduates, a trend that Kenen and Kuriyama hope will continue.
“It’s a really great example of a cross disciplinary class,” said Kenen. “It doesn’t fit neatly into one disciplinary framework and thus it’s the kind of thing that might not have worked well in the Core.”
She said that the General Education program has been criticized for recycling Core classes, but that classes like Kuriyama’s are “hidden gems.”
“We asked him, ‘Can you scale this course up, is it going to work?” Kenen said. “One of the challenges with Gen Ed is getting faculty to do new things, but there are a lot of faculty already doing fabulous things that few students know about.”
Kuriyama had experimented with innovative pedagogical approaches on a small scale, and had a clear idea of how and why technology should be integrated with more traditional lectures and response papers.
“We’re not demanding that faculty do new things or teach in new ways,” Kenen said, “but we’d like to encourage it, support it, and facilitate it.”
—Staff writer Alissa M. D’Gama can be reached at adgama@fas.harvard.edu