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These were the students who participated in online multicultural studies, using my book, Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow: Meeting the Challenge of Our Multicultural America & Beyond, as their text. The course online was conducted completely in English, with Chubu University Women's College instructor Iwao Shinjo in Kasugai City, Japan, and Michelle in the United States of America. The course explored the feelings and histories of a variety of cultures, and both the students and the instructors grew from the experience!
Many others around the world assisted in teaching the students about themselves and their cultures, including people in Namibia; New York, Indiana, and Washington, DC, in the United States of America, and Manitoba Province in Canada.
It was especially rewarding to see the growth the students themselves experienced, however. At the beginning of the course, they were primarily home-focused, and they knew little about the world beyond them, save for their individual interests that ranged from sports to actor Brad Pitt. To most of the girls, the United States of America was much less complex than we in the United States perceive it to be. In the beginning, their questions were simple: "Tell us about America, Michelle-san!" Understanding that the United States, unlike their own primarily monocultural nation, is a wonderful mosaic of people from more than 100 cultures, was difficult for them to understand at first.
And yet these young women grew by leaps and bounds within the first three months!
From their initial I/home-oriented interests, they began to explore other cultures, the multitude of individual histories that compose the body of humankind--and they learned about the pains of war. To those of us who have lived long enough to have read about war in the papers or to have seen it on television, the thought that a lack of understanding about war might seem equally foreign to us! Imagine! These students live in a nation that was heavily involved in World War II! They don't live that far from places like Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and yet their comments and questions about war remained as innocent as all of us would hope young people might be! "Tell us about war, Michelle-san," a group of students asked. "We do not know war." They tried desperately to understand the brutalities that occurred in World War II, specifically in relation to the Holocaust.
And they did learn about the Holocaust, about the people who died, the people who killed, and the wonderful people who became the heroes, including their own Chiune Sugihara, who was responsible for saving thousands of Jews fleeing Lithuania in war-torn Europe, 1940.
One enters the study of multiculturalism and quickly realizes that the study of people, their feelings, their experiences, and their cultures, is never done.
This page, being added to the Zemi site at the end of January 1998, will stand as a tribute to the young women who participated in this exciting course. The course is nearly over for them, and soon, they will leave school and venture into the world, and a new group of students will begin the Zemi--online--for their explorations of the world. To the students who have participated in this course, they know they will never be the same because they have learned about themselves and their world!
We wish them well. We will miss them, yet we're eager to meet the new students who will join us on our ventures into the world beyond the borders they know as home.
In the coming weeks, look for more photos to be added to this site, but here's the first...just to pique your interest!
Effective immediately, I am sorry, but I've had to remove access to my guest book. I have been patient with Lycos and Gear in my effort to resolve problems their transitions have caused, but the situation has grown increasingly worse. It's been six months since I've had access to my guest book. I'm sorry for the inconvenience.
