Oscar 2024

This presentation reports on “travel-reading” as an approach to teach Asian literature. Travel-reading was a humanities grant project and implemented in a summer study abroad program in Taiwan in 2022. Reading Interior Chinatown worked as a pedagogical mechanism that helped students stay thematically engaged with a text while abroad. Students strategically interpreted and evaluated what they heard and saw in the country in comparison with their reading and developed an evolving framework that enabled them to appreciate differences, examine their beliefs, challenge the stereotypes that they had held about East Asian people, and reflected on how the invisibility of certain minorities can affect our consciousness and distort reality in our society.