The potential of transnational history education: Attempts at university teaching practice in East Asia

Introduction

How to remember the colonial period and the Second World War is often contested within and between the countries in East Asia. The conflict over historical narratives is linked to nationalism and has been fuelled in recent decade in the region. The teaching and learning of modern history in Asia cannot be immune to what Carol Gluck (2021) has called ‘hate nationalism’ (pp. 102–103). In such an environment, global thinking about history is neither a solution to present problems nor a problematic but a necessary perspective (Gluck, 2018: 76–77). But a global turn does not happen overnight. As in the case of gender, it takes advocacy and activism to become part of every (good) historian’s way of viewing the past (Gluck, 2018: 76–77). What does it take for global thinking to be mainstreamed in history teaching? What does advocacy and activism look like in the effort to bring about a global turn in history? More precisely, how can global history perspectives be practised in everyday teaching in higher education as a place where the advocacy and activism may unfold? This article aims to explore these questions.

The article presents the pedagogy used in a China–Korea–Japan higher education initiative called the CAMPUS Asia ENGAGE Program in which students engaged in a project to write a joint history textbook ¹ and of which I was one of the instructors. Over the past few decades, practitioners and policymakers have gathered lessons on how to teach history in conflict-affected societies. ² There is also a body of scholarship on history education in divided communities (Bentrovato, 2017; Cole, 2007; Corredor et al., 2018; Hourani, 2017; Milosheva and Krushe, 2010; Pingel, 2003; Smith, 2005; Yogev, 2013). Joint history textbooks have been often used as a pedagogical tool for teaching history in divided societies (Korostelina and Lässig, 2013). In a more recent publication, Skårås (2021) offers a systemic review of the experience of teaching recent histories in divided societies.

This article builds on the literature of history teaching in divided societies, with a special focus on the pedagogical methods, combined with a joint history textbook project and other forms of active learning, and their effects on students’ approach to narrating histories. In this article, I argue that active learning methods are effective for learning about contested memories of the past in East Asia, and in this way, they are useful tools for advocacy and activism in forging global history perspectives. The CAMPUS Asia ENGAGE Program invited ‘post-memory’ students to explore the past and memories. In the classroom, the students learned to own and create their own memories. In the process of deconstructing and constructing history(s), students dissected the existing collective memory(s) framed around the nation-state and arrived at more complex and nuanced perspectives. They then constructed new ‘memories’ based on the micro-perspectives of less represented peoples such as women, marginalised communities and the working class within and across different countries.

The article continues by introducing the CAMPUS Asia ENGAGE initiatives and the active learning methods applied in the initiatives with concrete examples of teaching practice. Section ‘Course design and teaching approach/methods’ provides a detailed explanation of the course design and teaching methods. As an example, the section presents a group work exercise to produce a joint history textbook. Section ‘Deconstructing and constructing histories from transnational, intersectional and micro perspectives’ then discusses what emerged from the classroom practice of the transnational history education in more detail. The article concludes by discussing the potential of active learning methods in history teaching as tools for advocacy and activism for transnational, global thinking in memory studies.

History education as a catalyst for confidence building

The history education course was part of a multi-year, international higher education programme entitled ‘Joint global leadership development programme for multi-layered conflict resolution and social change: CAMPUS Asia ENGAGE: Empowering the Next Generation of east Asian leaders for global peace (hereafter, CAMPUS Asia ENGAGE)’. ³ The CAMPUS Asia ENGAGE Program was implemented by Korea University, Peking University and Waseda University between 2016 and 2020. The Program was designed to develop young leaders by offering conflict resolution studies and to build confidence among undergraduate students from the three universities in East Asia. My affiliated institution, Waseda University, was responsible for designing and running the history education course.

Conflicts over the bloodless but highly emotional discourse of historical perceptions have been raging in East Asia for years. Alongside these frictions between nations, young people in East Asia spend their days building friendships and spending time together, sharing a high cultural context. They share many ‘likes’ that transcend national boundaries, and in and out of the classroom, they are often excited to talk about the same anime, games and pop stars that they have been familiar with since their childhood. However, when we tried to raise the issue of history in class, many students confided that they did not want to ruin the friendship they had developed with students from neighbouring countries by going to the trouble of digging up the painful history of the past. As some of the students put, they had been ‘bothered’ by the past, but they would rather not talk about it because they did not want to damage their friendships. It was in this atmosphere that our teaching experience took place.

The CAMPUS Asia ENGAGE Program chose history education as one of the central themes in its curriculum. The choice was a deliberate one with the aim to build students’ confidence by discussing a controversial topic in East Asia: history. In other words, the course was not only about learning history but also about learning how to communicate complex and sensitive topics such as modern history in Asia. When the course was designed, it was expected that the learning objective would be difficult to achieve unless the course used unconventional teaching methods. The conventional, lecture-heavy teaching style leaves little room for students to discuss their own perspectives. The CAMPUS Asia ENGAGE Program, therefore, chose to use critical pedagogy with participatory and interactive methods, including workshop facilitation techniques. These methods, coupled with careful facilitation by the instructors, were crucial in creating safe and secure environment for students to express their own views on history.

The CAMPUS Asia ENGAGE course activities were conducted in English, even though English was not the first language of most of the students and instructors. The course instructors decided to use English because it was the working language of the CAMPUS Asia ENGAGE Program. But more importantly, in the environment where few students had English as their first language, English was considered a more ‘neutral’ language compared to Chinese, Korean and Japanese, and was expected to prevent native speakers of these languages from dominating the discussions.

Course design and teaching approach/methods

The history education course took the form of a summer intensive course. Each year, about 30 undergraduate students enrolled for the 8-day course. The course was made open to students from all disciplines. No previous knowledge of history was required. The flexibility of the requirements allowed students from a variety of academic backgrounds, not only history and political science majors but also engineering and computer science majors, to join. If there were too many applicants, students were selected by lottery. The majority of students came from the East Asian countries. There were also students from other geographical backgrounds, such as Europe, North America and Southeast Asia, who made up about 15% of the total. While most of the students had received their secondary education in their own countries, some were International Baccalaureate students. The mixture of students from different secondary education backgrounds enabled them to recognise that their approaches to learning history varied from one educational system to another.

Through the course, students were expected to learn how various factors such as subjectivity and individual and collective perceptions contribute to the construction of history. The overall learning objective was for the students to be able to deconstruct existing histories and for participants to construct their own histories. During the intensive course, the students engaged in a variety of course activities to examine how post-war history in East Asia is constructed and what elements construct history.

The pedagogy of the course followed an active learning approach. The course had two instructors who also acted as facilitators during group discussions. The number of lectures was kept to a minimum in order to maximise the time for group discussions and project-based learning activities. The course consisted of three components: field visit activities, project-based activities to produce a joint history textbook and group discussions on and during these activities. The course also incorporated reflective learning. Each of the components ended with a reflection session to allow students to reflect on their actions.

The first 3 or 4 days were usually devoted to a series of group discussions. Students were divided into smaller groups according to their location and the type of schooling they had received. They were then asked to reflect on their own experience of learning history up to high school and to compare their experiences with those of the other groups. This exercise enabled students to look at their history learning experience from a distance. The exercise also allowed the students to learn that there were other approaches to teaching history than those with which they were familiar with. During this first phase of the course, students also visited a number of historical sites and history museums relevant to the modern history of the region. A typical list of the sites visited includes the Shūyūkan Museum at Yasukuni Shrine and the Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace in Tokyo.

The second half of the intensive course was allocated to project-based learning activities. Students were tasked with producing a two-page section on modern history in Asia for a joint history textbook. The instruction was kept to a minimum: the section was on ‘August 1945’ and the target audience for the textbooks to be produced were young people in higher education in East Asia. Apart from the instruction, the students were not given any detailed instructions on what topics to include or how to present the two-page section. There were no restrictions on the purpose and format of the textbooks. For doing this exercise, students were assigned to a group of four to five, with at least one participant from each of the three universities. The students spent the last 4 days of the course by discussing, creating and revising the two-page section on August 1945 in the imagined joint history textbook. The course ended with the students’ presentations on their final product, followed by a one-and-a-half-hour session to reflect on the whole course. Students also had the opportunity to reflect on the course individually in their final essays.

Deconstructing and constructing histories from transnational, intersectional and micro perspectives

The group activity of producing a two-page section on modern history is the stage at which the students are expected to be ‘producers’ of textbooks, rather than ‘consumers’ who merely receive and consume the knowledge provided by textbooks. This was usually the most challenging period for students both intellectually and emotionally. In the beginning, some found it hard to acknowledge a certain way of looking at history, as it was very different from the perspective with which they were familiar. Through the group work, the students gradually gained different perspectives and built alternative narratives of history.

The course was designed to monitor and assess the students’ own process of deconstructing and constructing histories throughout the course, both for evaluation by the students themselves and by the course instructors. At the end of each day, there was a session to reflect on the course activities conducted on that day. In addition, the final presentation was followed by the overall reflection session examining the entire course as a whole. In the final reflection session, the students spent 60–90 minutes reflecting on the entire course activities. Students had the opportunity to further articulate their individual reflective thoughts by writing an individual essay about the entire course. Examining these reflections, there are two noticeable shifts in students’ attitudes to and perceptions about how to deal with history that emerged during the group activities.

The first shift is in the students’ attitudes to their self-identities. Initially, many of the students used their nationality as the first point of introduction. As the course progressed, they moved away from the national identity and began to refer to themselves with a transnational identity as ‘East Asian’ and ‘global citizen’. ⁴ The direct interaction among the students during the intensive course was a strong driving force for this change. The transnational identity emerged more clearly during the group work on the history textbook project. At the beginning of the joint history textbook exercise, the students spent a significant amount of time discussing the purpose of their joint history textbook. The groups often settled on the purpose of the textbooks as to promote peace in East Asia and to build a peaceful future for East Asia. Students in these groups explained that the purpose of the textbook should reflect the transnational nature of their own identity as East Asians and global citizens.

The group work exercise made the students to take ownership of the process of constructing history. As their identity shifted from a national identity to a transnational identity, the students departed from narrating history within a national framework which often inflicted a narrative conflict in the context of modern Asian history. In the process, the students began to change their perception of history, which had been a point of contention between their countries in the history narrative dispute. Instead, the students constructed history as a nexus through which they could connect with each other. The history they constructed in the group work was not about a history for someone else who already had it. It was about the new connections that the narrators of the history, the students themselves, thought should be developed in the future. In other words, history became something not about the past but about the future, as Naoyuki Umemori (2007) once put it (p. 168).

The second shift relates to the students’ attitudes towards narratives, from collective to more individual, and from monolithic to diverse ones. It was also at this stage that the participants challenged their preconceived framework of history narratives based primarily on the current national boundaries. Students became increasingly aware of intersectional perspectives for constructing histories as they continued to explore questions of ‘what’ to include and ‘how’ to describe in the textbook. Exposure to the diversity of the class participants, as well as input from the instructors and assigned readings, provided students with intersectional lenses, including gender and class, to dissect and analyse the pre-existing national history narratives.

These student groups focused on individual experiences from a transnational perspective, while the other groups remained focused on nation-based narratives of history. For example, these groups devoted a lot of space to ‘ordinary people’, especially those whom the students felt had been overlooked by the actual history textbooks that they had used. The reason for focusing on ‘ordinary people’ was to highlight the differences in experiences during the colonial period and the war between the elites and non-elites, regardless of their nationalities and ethnicities. In order to demonstrate their view of point, some student groups chose to focus on the issue of repatriates. They chose to shed light on individuals such as returnees from mainland China to Japan, and those from Japan to Taiwan, as well as ethnic Korean residents and their Japanese spouses in Sakhalin who could not or did not choose to move to the Korean peninsula. The micro-level approach allowed the student groups to dissect the collective, nation-based narratives of history with which they had been familiar, and invited them to apply intersectional lenses to individual stories.

This was clearly demonstrated when they discussed comfort women, one of the most sensitive issues that has sparked the so-called ‘narrative war’ in social and political spheres in Asia in recent years. When the students discussed the comfort women issue in the classroom, there was no dichotomy between Japan, South Korea or China as national actors, or between the right and the left in each country. Rather, they saw the suppression and sexual exploitation of women’s rights, and the social conventions and contexts that enable it, as issues of structural and cultural violence that are common to all of East Asia. Discussions there focused on the gender issues that affect students themselves in East Asia today, such as the #MeToo and #KuToo movements, issues of sexual harassment, conscription and the resulting delay in men’s opportunities to enter society and social pressures on both women and men based on stereotypical gender images. In this way, the discussion triggered by the comfort women issue has transcended national boundaries, revealing not only past but also present social issues common to East Asia.

Conclusion

This article looked at a practical effort at a university in East Asia and explored how global perspectives on history can be put into practice in everyday higher education teaching. The article examined the example of the CAMPUS Asia ENGAGE Program, which applied active learning methods to the teaching of history to undergraduate students in East Asia. Moving beyond nationalism and have a global turn in thinking history is what is particularly needed in the region where teaching history to ‘post-memory’ students is often surrounded by ‘hate nationalism’ (Gluck, 2021: 102–103). The teaching approach presented in this article suggests that students could be mediators in history teaching (Skårås, 2021: 295), and by giving students an agency in the classroom, history education could create a healing environment and an environment of hope (Corredor et al., 2018: 181).

What is needed to bring global thinking into the mainstream in history teaching? The example demonstrated the potential of active learning methods in history teaching as a tool for promoting transnational and global thinking in learning history. The active learning methods allowed for direct interaction among the participants, which led the students to become aware of their transnational identities as ‘East Asians’ and ‘global citizens’. Students also acquired intersectional lenses, including gender and class, for dissecting national history narratives as they were exposed to the diversity of the class participants, as well as inputs from the lectures and assigned readings. In doing so, students moved away from narrating history within a national framework, which often create narrative conflict in the context of modern Asian history.

The teaching approach presented in this article suggests that a global turn in history can take place in the history classroom. Moreover, it has practical implications for peacemaking efforts in divided societies. What was presented by the students in the CAMPUS Asia ENGAGE Program were multiple approaches, not only in terms of nationality, but also in terms of multiple societal layers such as gender and class, allowing the participating students to be equipped with an intersectional lens to view history. This global, multi-layered and intersectional ‘turn’ is crucial when studying recent history, as conflicts are fought not only along national borders, but also along gender, racial, class and other (potential) dividing lines.

In the process of deconstructing and constructing history/histories, students dissected what consisted existing collective memory/memories framed around nation-state and arrived at more complex and nuanced perspectives. They then constructed new ‘memories’ based on micro perspectives of less represented peoples such as women, marginalised communities and the working class across different countries. Students adopted an approach that constructed history not as a point of contention but connection. Rather than simply accepting existing narratives of history with given interpretations, the course participants challenged the narratives from global, intersectional and micro perspectives, and reconstructed their own histories. The example in this article is by no means a panacea for creating less hostile history narrative environments. But at least it shows a potential for using active learning methods as a form of activism in the effort to bring global thinking to history.