28th JASIAS Conference
Aaron Gerow
gerow
Wed Jun 5 23:54:49 EDT 2002
>Did anyone go to this that could report?
Hard to give a report, especially since I was involved. The symposium was
pretty good this year. The Monkasho has changed the curriculum for lower
and middle schools to include "sogo gakushu" in which eizo (image
studies) is supposed to be included. In other words, all Japanese
children are now supposed to be learning how to "communicate" in images.
The Monkasho's Terawaki Ken (also famous as a film critic) gave a talk on
the Ministry's thinking behind the change. Then there was a 4 person
panel discussing what all this means for film and image studies. One
presenter, obviously not in film studies, showed off software that
teaches beginners how to properly express a written meaning in
image--something which some of the audience really did not like.
Mizukoshi Shin gave an interesting talk on activists efforts to get
children to participate in and think critically about visual media.
>Is it my imagination, or has it shrunk in size?
Not that I can tell. This year didn't have the usual excursion and they
concentrated the papers in one day, but the number of papers was about
the same. Film papers again dominated, with some interesting work among
the papers I saw. Seems research on chanbara is popular these days.
Aaron Gerow
Associate Professor
International Student Center
Yokohama National University
79-1 Tokiwadai
Hodogaya-ku, Yokohama 240-8501
JAPAN
E-mail: gerow at ynu.ac.jp
Phone: 81-45-339-3170
Fax: 81-45-339-3171
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