Outreach

As the heart of on-campus Asian expertise, the Asian Studies Center plays a vital role in proactively sharing knowledge and resources with its many stakeholder communities. Stretching from West Virginia and Ohio to the Atlantic shores of Delaware, Maryland and Pennsylvania, the Center’s outreach initiatives target educators as well as the business community and the general public.

Outreach initiatives include but are not limited to professional development workshops for K-12 educators, faculty development seminars, curriculum development projects, school visit programs, free educational resources, study abroad opportunities, and lecture and film series. The Asian Studies Center also partners with Pitt’s other area studies centers to develop two- and four-year college and university faculty workshops on global and Asian themes. Additionally, the Center is the home of the Confucius Institute at the University of Pittsburgh and a national coordinating site for the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia.

National Consortium for Teaching about Asia

With a regional focus on Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, the Consortium’s outreach activities target K-12 social studies teachers and teachers of world history, geography, literature, and language arts. Outreach includes East Asian seminars, opportunities for travel to Asia, and support for curriculum development and in-service training.

K-14 Curriculum Components

The Asian Studies Center has developed the following curriculum components for K-14 educator professional development and classroom use.  If you would like access to one or more of the components, please register here.

Centering Taiwan in Global Asia

The interactive website Centering Taiwan in Global Asia explores the themes of Indigeneity & Early Settlement, Navigation, Trade & Piracy, and Colonization to introduce the rich and contoured history of the island of Taiwan and its role as a nexus for global trade and conquest by outside powers. Developed by a team at the Asian Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh including a NCTA Alumna of the University of Pittsburgh National Coordinating Site, this website fills a gap in curriculum about Taiwan by providing a content-rich and guided, interactive, spatial digital humanities resource for classroom use.

Teaching with the World Historical Gazetteer

The World Historical Gazetteer is a web-based platform that offers infrastructure and content for linking knowledge about the past via place. The global content of the WHG offers a platform for conducting world historical reasoning and teaching. Given that the names and attributes of places vary over time and between communities, and places often change names in the context of conquest or oppression, the World Historical Gazetteer is also a platform for sharing information about names and places that may be forgotten or suppressed.

Place names—their origins, change over time, and reflections of identity—can provide a fascinating and revealing lens through which to explore history. Used with the interactive tools of digital history, the study of place names brings new, deeper, and broader connections to our understanding of patterns of historical change.