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Teacher Programs

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About Teacher Programs

NCTA provides content rich professional development programs for K-12 educators and pre-service teachers in all fields. This includes face-to-face college level seminars, online courses, workshops, book groups, webinars, and among other opportunities. Below are current offerings both locally and nationwide:

Event/Opportunity Type: 
Teacher Programs

Minority Literatures of East Asia: Diversity and Difference - An NCTA Workshop Series for K-12 Educators

 

 March 27, April 22, May 15 & June 17, 2025

6:00pm - 7:30pm (Eastern Time)

 

Great works of literature like The Tale of Genji and Dream of the Red Chamber have influenced the way that many of us think about the culture, history, politics, and traditions of China and Japan. Yet these and other canonical works are largely the products of highly educated social elites. What might culture, history, politics, and tradition look like when viewed from the vantage point of marginalized or disempowered populations within those countries? This is the question that underlies this thematically linked series of book workshops on minority literatures of East Asia. The series will introduce teacher-participants to literary works by members of Tibetan and Uyghur populations in China as well as members of Zainichi (or resident) Korean and Okinawan communities in Japan. Each workshop will feature a presentation by an expert in the field on several focal short stories or chapter excerpts, in addition to time for Q&A and facilitated dialogue on potential classroom adaptation. Teacher-participants will be asked to prepare select materials in advance.

Educators can register for individual workshops or choose to register for the entire series. For each workshop in the series that an educator attends, they will receive a complementary book recommended by our expert presenters and a certificate of completion at the conclusion of the entire workshop series. PA teachers will also receive Act 48 hours.

 

All Workshop Sessions will take place on Zoom from 6:00pm - 7:30pm (Eastern Time)

  • March 27, 2025: Tibetan Literature (feat. Dr. Christopher Peacock, Dickinson College)

  • April 22, 2025: Uyghur Literature (feat. Dr. Darren Byler, Simon Fraser University)

  • May 15, 2025: Zainichi Korean Literature (feat. Dr. Cindi Textor, University of Utah)

  • June 17, 2025: Okinawan Literature (feat. Davinder Bhowmik, University of Washington)

 
After you register, we will send you a confirmation email. Educators who attend and participate in a workshop will receive a Certificate Completion and a copy of a book recommended by our speakers focusing on the literature of that minority group.  
 
You will also receive information on accessing the Zoom meeting for the mini-course after registering.
 
If you have any questions, please contact Dr. Shawn Bender as benders@dickinson.edu
 
 
 
 

Learn More About our Presenters & Facilitator

 
 

 

 

Moderator/Organizer: Dr. Shawn Bender is Associate Professor of East Asian Studies at Dickinson College. Trained as a cultural anthropologist, Dr. Bender teaches courses on contemporary Japan, cultures of care and the family, and the social effects of digital technology. His research examines the use of robotics in fields as diverse as eldercare and agriculture. He is the author of Taiko Boom: Japanese Drumming in Place and Motion (California, 2012). His most recent book monograph Feeling Machines: Japanese Robotics and the Global Entanglements of More-Than-Human Care is under review at Stanford University Press. 

 

 

 

 

 
 
Featured Presenter: Davinder L. Bhowmik is an associate professor of Japanese at the University of Washington, Seattle. She teaches and publishes research in the field of modern Japanese literature with a specialization in prose fiction from Okinawa, where she was born and lived until the age of 18. Other scholarly interests include regional fiction, the atomic bombings, and Japanese film. Her publications include Islands of Protest: Japanese Literature from Okinawa (co-edited with Steve Rabson, 2016); Writing Okinawa: Narratives of Identity and Resistance (2008); and “Temporal Discontinuity in the Atomic Bomb Fiction of Hayashi Kyōko" (in Ōe and Beyond: Fiction in Contemporary Japan, 1999). Currently she is writing a manuscript on military basetown fiction in Japan.
 
 
 
 
 
Featured Presenter: Darren Byler is Assistant Professor of International Studies at Simon Fraser University. He is a sociocultural anthropologist whose teaching and research examines the dispossession of stateless populations through forms of contemporary capitalism and colonialism in China, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia. He is the author of In the Camps: China’s High-Tech Penal Colony (Columbia Global Reports, 2021) and an ethnographic monograph titled Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City (Duke University Press, 2022). His current research interests are focused on infrastructure development and global China in the context of Xinjiang and Malaysia.
 
 
 
 
 
Featured Presenter: Christopher Peacock is an Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies at Dickinson College whose research focuses on modern Chinese and Tibetan literatures. His recent work has examined the interactions between Chinese and Tibetan intellectual traditions in the 20th and 21st centuries, considering how concepts of national identity have taken shape in Tibetan literature in the PRC. As a translator, he has published translations of modern Tibetan writing in a range of journals and literary magazines, as well as the book-length publications The Handsome Monk and Other Stories (Columbia University Press, 2019) and The Red Wind Howls (Columbia University Press, forthcoming), both by Tsering Döndrup, and Tsering Yangkyi’s Flowers of Lhasa (Balestier Press, 2022), the first novel by a Tibetan woman writer translated into English and recipient of a PEN Translates award.
 
 
 
 
 
Featured Presenter: Cindi Textor is Associate Professor in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at the University of Utah. She is the author of Intersectional Incoherence: Zainichi Literature and the Ethics of Illegibility (University of California, 2024), which stages an encounter between the critical discourse on intersectionality and texts produced by Korean subjects of the Japanese empire and their postwar descendants in Japan, known as Zainichi Koreans. Her work on the literary production of the Japanese empire and its postcolonial legacies, including Zainichi and Okinawan fiction, has appeared in positions: asia critique, Journal of Korean Studies, and Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus. She is also the translator of several works of Zainichi fiction, most recently Nabi T’aryŏng and Other Stories by Lee Yangji (Seoul Selection, 2022).
 
 
 
Event/Opportunity Type: 
Teacher Programs
Type: 
Online Workshop Series

Poppies, Power, and Profit: the Opium Wars and Its Global Legacies - A Mini Course for K-12 Educators

 

April 4 & 5, 2025

Session One - April 4 from 5:00pm - 8:30pm (Eastern Time)

Session Two - April 5 from 8:00am - 4:30pm (Eastern Time)

4130 Posvar Hall, University of Pittsburgh and Virtually

 

Join us for a free two-day K-12 mini course exploring the Opium Wars of the 19th century, their causes, and far-reaching consequences, connecting historical events with modern global issues. Through examining the relationship between imperialism, trade, and culture, participants will gain insight into how the Opium Wars reshaped international dynamics, especially between China and Western powers, including the emerging empire of the United States. In collaboration with the Global Studies Center and World History Center at the University of Pittsburgh, sessions include presentations, activities and teacher-led strategies for curricular development.

This mini-course will be hybrid, and you may choose to attend online or in person. We have a limited number of travel subsidies available for those outside of the Pittsburgh area who wish to attend in person. If you are interested in requesting a travel subsidy, please contact Cathy Fratto at CAF166@pitt.edu

All participants who fully attend and participate in the two-day mini-course will receive Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories after the program. Benefits include a Certificate of Completion and Pennsylvania teachers will also receive Act 48 hours.

 

Event/Opportunity Type: 
Teacher Programs
Type: 
Hybrid Mini-Course

Mascots, Cryptids, and UFOs: Civic Monsters in Contemporary Japan - An In-Person Lecture & Reception for K-12 Educators

 

 

Thursday, April 10, 2025

K-12 Educator Dinner with Speaker: 5:00 - 6:00 p.m. Eastern Time
 in Room 4217 Wesley W Posvar Hall
(Registration Required; Space Limited)
 
 
Lecture: 6:30 - 7:30 p.m. Eastern Time
in the Alcoa Room, Barco Law Building
(Registration Required)
 
University of Pittsburgh Oakland Campus, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213
 
 
 
Why are cute and creepy mascots so ubiquitous among Japan’s cities and regions?  
 
Is there a Japanese Bigfoot?  
 
Have extraterrestrials ever landed in Japan?  
 
Join the NCTA as we welcome Dr. William Tsutsui (Chancellor of Ottawa College, professor, and author of Godzilla on My Mind and Japanese Popular Culture and Globalization) for a lecture tracing the history of Japanese mascots, cryptids, and UFOs, exploring how invented, imagined, and unexplained creatures have been deployed in tourism campaigns, the creation of regional identity, and local commercial boosterism.  These “civic monsters” grew from Japan’s rich and distinctive monster culture of folkloric yōkai and cinematic kaijū but are also deeply woven into global circuitries of politics, capitalism, media, and play. 
 
Please join us at 5:00pm for an exclusive NCTA Educator Dinner with Dr. Tsutsui where you will get the chance to sit down with our speaker to discuss classroom applications for engaging students using Japan's "civic monsters" in your classroom. 
 
Educators will receive Act 48 hours and free parking at Soldiers & Sailors Garage in Oakland.  
 
 
 
About the Speaker
 
Bill Tsutsui has served as Chancellor and Professor of History at Ottawa University since 2021, after more than 30 years teaching modern Japanese history and holding a variety of administrative positions at the University of Kansas, Southern Methodist University, Hendrix College, and Harvard University.  Among the nine books he has written or edited are Godzilla on My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters (called a “cult classic” by the New York Times) and Japanese Popular Culture and Globalization.  He continues to speak, write, and teach on the Godzilla movies, monster culture in Japan, and the environmental history of Japan and the Pacific Ocean.
 
 
Event/Opportunity Type: 
Teacher Programs
Type: 
Lecture

Global Issues through Literature Series: Exploring Labor - K-Pop Confidential by Stephan Lee

 

Global Issues through Literature Series: Exploring Labor

K-Pop Confidential by Stephan Lee

Thursday, May 15, 2025

6:00pm - 7:30pm (Eastern Time)

Online via Zoom

In collaboration with our colleagues at the Global Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh, this professional development workshop series is designed for K-12 educators seeking to deepen their understanding of global labor issues through literature. Utilizing young adult novel, K-Pop Confidential by Stephan Lee, this contemporary work examines the high-pressure world of K-pop training, offering insights into the demands of creative labor, cultural identity, and personal ambition set against the backdrop of contemporary South Korea.

By exploring compelling stories from diverse cultural perspectives, educators will gain insights into the complexities of labor, its impact on individuals and communities, and how to engage students in meaningful discussions around these topics. Each session features a carefully selected book, paired with interactive discussions, teaching strategies, and cross-disciplinary activities to inspire classroom implementation.

Through the lens of this year’s theme, educators will explore how labor intersects with identity, resilience, inequality, and justice. Participants will examine the personal and societal dimensions of work and its implications for young people across the globe.

Three Act 48 credit hours (for PA educators) and a copy of the book and are provided for each session.

 

Event/Opportunity Type: 
Teacher Programs
Type: 
Online Book Discussion & Workshop