Asian Odyssey Curriculum Model
Asian Odyssey was created to promote the study of Asian art and culture in the K-12 classroom by adapting familiar curriculum and texts to include the study of art objects from the Cleveland Museums extraordinary collection of Asian art. The program allows teachers to present in their classrooms, settings that are familiar to students, comprehensive lesson plans that are uniquely museum-centric. A rich arts-based curriculum thus becomes available to students and teachers who do not have direct access to the museum.
Asian Odyssey has been three years in the making (June 2002 - June 2005). Each year, selected teachers participated in weeklong intensive workshops taught by specialists on the museums staff. The outcome of these workshops is more than 150 specific individual lesson plans that integrate Chinese and Japanese artwork in a variety of mediums into existing school curriculums for grades K-12. These lesson plans will help teachers both in this country and around the globe to teach culture, geography, history, math, science, language arts, and the visual arts in a way that enhances their students knowledge of, and appreciation for, environments other than their own.
The projects, lessons, and activities presented here are designed to reach a wide range of students in various academic settings. During the development of the curriculum for
Asian Odyssey, the participant teachers and their students attended classes both at the museum and by way of distance learning. Over the three years of implementation, the program has had direct impact on 150-200 students in the consortium school districts, who have helped test and refine the material. Global in range, this program also allowed High School students in these consortium districts to engage in an exchange program with partner schools in Takatori, Japan and the Shanghai Foreign Language School, Shanghai, China.
The aim of
Asian Odyssey is to make American students more aware of the similarities and differences between their culture and those of China and Japan. A curriculum that explores the history and culture of China and Japan will help teachers to better prepare students for a complex world in which the countries of Asia will play an increasingly important role.