I Want to Experience Joint Fieldwork with Chinese Students

Student Exchange at the Nanjing University Intensive Lectures
Fiscal Year 2014

2017.Dec.25

Outline

From 3rd to 28th of March, 2014, LAP offered the four week Nanjing University Intensive Lecture Series “Elimination,” an omnibus series straddling the Humanities and the Sciences. Seven faculty members from Todai visited Nanjing, and they each gave lectures for six hours spanning two days. Nineteen students from Todai (fourteen from Junior Division, one from Senior Division of the College of Arts and Sciences, as well as four graduate students) and 40-100 students from Nanjing University participated in the lectures.

While in Nanjing, the students from Todai conducted joint research projects with twenty students from the Department of Japanese, Nanjing University. Given the theme of the year's lectures, “Elimination,” the topic of the research was set as “Disposing and Living,” which focused on the act and meaning of elimination.

While the student joint research project in the Zensho Nanjing Program had previously offered opportunities for students to experience another culture through fieldwork, in the year 2014 we introduced a new method of joint research called “Fieldwork for Problem-Finding” that emphasizes cultivating students' ability to observe and think creatively. The specifics of the research method are as follows:

Team: one Todai student and one NU student
1. Without specific research objects in mind, first walk around the town and take pictures of people, objects, scenery that interest them.
2. Discuss with each other to clarify their interests and narrow down research objects.
3. In Interim Report, present about problems they want to explore and their research objects, and through discussion objectively re-examine what they have come up with.
4. Conduct more detailed research, find authentic “images of China,” and think about the difference between Japanese and Chinese societies.
5. Give presentations in public at Nanjing University

Snapshots from student guidance and preliminary discussion for student joint research on February 14th, 2014 (LAP Facebook)

Group One
Period of Visit: March 9 to 16, 2014
Lectures Attended: "Body, Mind, World." (John O'Dea)・”The Economics of Waste Management and International Recycling of Resources” (Hide-Fumi Yokoo)

Group Two
Period of Visit: March 16 to 23, 2014
Lectures Attended: “Nuclear Wastes and “Elimination”” (Satoru Tanaka)・“Disposal and Reuse of Documents in Japan” (Masao Watanabe)

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