Workshops and Seminars
SAI hosts and co-hosts a number of teacher training workshops on the UT campus during the year. We design our professional development opportunities to address the TEKS and TAKS objectives for social studies. At our training events, teachers gain knowledge from Institute guests and faculty experts, teaching materials and strategies to use them in the classroom, and CPE hours. Below is a listing of our current and recent professional development opportunities for K-12 teachers.
*****Upcoming Workshop on Bhutanese-Nepali Refugees- REGISTRATION OPEN*****
The greater Austin area is experiencing an influx of refugees who have been through decades of struggle, transit and discrimination in the Himalayan region. Many of those arriving have been living in refugee camps for more than a decade, including large numbers of youth. There are currently more than 500 Bhutanese-Nepali refugees in Austin, many of whom have spent their entire lives in the camps, knowing little of the history of migration, but with important stories to tell. Our workshop seeks to inform Austin-area educators about the plight of these refugees, and provide them with information about this community and the history and culture of the Himalayan region.
This workshop is designed for all K-12 educators interested in producing young global citizens in central Texas, who have cultural knowledge and awareness of theHimalayan region of South Asia and diaspora/refugee populations in their own communities. This training event will be especially useful for ESL educators, and other teachers, who have Bhutanese-Nepali refugee students in their classrooms and wish to be more successful educating them. But the workshop also will interest to social studies teachers, in that it addresses Texas and national social studies standards cover that the meaning of the meaning of citizenship and the ways in which cultures change and maintain continuity due to the impact of general processes such as migration, political conflict and the diffusion of ideas.
Space is limited to 35 participants who will be chosen on a first come first serve basis. Attendance is free of charge to all teachers, but pre-registration is required.
Date: Saturday, February 23, 2013
Time: 9:30 am – 3:00 pm
Place: Will C. Hogg Building Room 4.118
Attendees will receive:
• Professional Development Hours (CPE)
• Teacher materials
• Lunch and other refreshments
To register and for more information on the workshop please contact:
Peggy Robinson
AISD Refugee Family Support Specialist
peggy.robinson@austinisd.org
or
Rachel Meyer
Senior Program Coordinator, South Asia Institute
rachelmeyer@austin.utexas.edu
AIM: South Asia Workshop (Spring 2013): Tibet and Buddhism
This workshop was designed for K-12 educators, in conjunction with the exclusive presentation of Tibetan Buddhist art at The Blanton Museum of Art. The exhibit explored the rich art and religion of this fascinating region through five mandalas and three thangkas dating from the 15th to 20th centuries. Originally used to explain Buddhist teachings to early nomadic Tibetans, thangkas are meticulously detailed hanging scroll paintings on silk that also serve as meditation aids in Buddhist ritual practice. Mandalas are elaborate, intricate circular diagrams reflecting a sacred, idealized universe.
Hemispheres Summer Teachers' Institute 2012: The City
Cities reflect their surroundings: they are centers of population, government, economics, religion, and, ultimately, culture. Similar in basic composition but divergent in their personalities, cities mirror the characteristics and chronicles of the people who inhabit them. The highs and the lows of history are captured in our cities. They wax and wane. They are the nexus of change and development. They allow us to explore the many intersecting aspects of societies, from urban planning and architecture to art, migration, and revolution.
This year's Hemispheres four-day workshop was geared toward world cultures, world geography, and world history educators in which we explored the meaning and place of the city—and all that it encompasses—in human history. We provided content lectures, teaching materials, and classroom strategy sessions to prepare you to present the city as a lens through which your students can better understand the world.
Hemispheres Summer Teachers’ Institute 2011: Cold War Cultures
The Cold War was one of the most influential events in American and world history. In addition to shaping generations who came of age between 1945 and 1990, its legacy continues to affect us today.
Hemispheres and the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library and Museum teamed up to offer an unprecedented global look at the Cold War and its lasting economic, political and social impact not only on the two major players in the conflict— the U.S. and former Soviet Union—but on the rest of the world as well. In addition to a lineup of engaging speakers, primary documents from the library archives were used to enhance our program.
AIM: South Asia Workshop (Spring 2011): Another Kashmir: Beyond the "Security" Paradigm
“My memory keeps getting in the way of your history….” – Agha Shahid Ali from The Country without a Post Office
This workshop was designed for high school social studies and English teachers who are interested in incorporating the region of South Asia into their curriculum. Workshop speakers attempted to intervene in recent conversations regarding Kashmir that have spoken of Kashmir’s relevance to the nation-states of India and Pakistan, more then they have the dynamics of religious identities or the cultural artifacts and aesthetic concerns of the Kashmir people. Moving away from depictions of a homogenous Kashmiri Muslim identity and related issues of territorial claims and security concerns, the workshop placed Kashmir within a larger context to provide alternate understandings of Kashmir and its peoples.
AIM: South Asia Workshop (Fall 2010): Understanding Photographs: India and the History of Photography
Photography was first introduced to India in 1840, only a year after the announcements of the daguerreotype and calotype processes in France and England. The study of 'photography in India' should take place within the wider context of the growth of the history of photography. For instance, the tension between a focus on the subject versus the aesthetics of a photograph can reveal interesting dimensions of social history. The workshop built upon the opportunity provided by a current exhibition (at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin) that traces the history of photography, combining a tour of the exhibition with presentations by scholars whose expertise includes India and photographs. The workshop intended to provide a significant foundation upon which participants will be able to use photographs as primary documents that can enhance an understanding of the production of culture.
Hemispheres' Summer Teachers' Institute 2010: Unraveling Race and Ethnicity
What is race? What is ethnicity? What's the difference between them? In addition to shaping the world in which we live, they continue to affect our lives and our perceptions of other people and places. And although they come up in classroom discussion frequently, they are sensitive topics that make even the most confident educator tread lightly.
This workshop from Hemispheres looked at race and ethnicity in a global context, from the historical to the contemporary. We began by exploring theoretical issues that addressed what these terms mean and how that meaning can change in different contexts. We then looked at the ways societies around the world both define and deal with them, both positively and negatively. Finally, we facilitated audience discussion and development of classroom strategies that will helped teachers unravel the complexities of discussing race and ethnicity effectively in their classroom.
AIM: South Asia Workshop (Spring 2010): The Empire Writes Back: Teaching Postcolonial Literature from South Asia
This workshop was designed for high school social studies and English teachers who are interested in incorporating literature from South Asia into their curriculum. Faculty speakers explored an understanding of post colonial writing and theory in a literary, historical and social context. The event starts from the idea of post coloniality as a global condition affecting not only literature but also the categories we use to think about human experience: relations between colonizers and colonized; between culture and power; ideas about identity, authenticity and hybridity; notions of roots, motherland, nationality; and conditions of migration and cosmopolitanism.
AIM: South Asia Workshop (Fall 2009):Global Flows and Local Impacts: Stories from South Asia
This workshop, designed for middle and high school teachers, explored the global nature of contemporary social change in South Asia. It took globalization as major force that reshapes social life in the region, while recognizing that social outcomes are shaped through interaction with other processes as well. The workshop brought together UT faculty expertise and perspectives from geography, cultural studies, anthropology, political science, and economics to explore the meanings of globalization and its local impacts within South Asia today. Through presentations and discussion, we examined the relationship between globalization; inequality and poverty; the fate of cultural diversity; and issues of identity, the environment, and human rights.
Hemispheres' Summer Teachers' Institute 2009: Sense of Place: Intersecting geography, History, and Culture
How have our changing perceptions of our geographic surroundings led to changes in human society? How do cities and urban spaces reflect the societies that build them? How do those spaces in turn serve as vehicles for creativity, production, and social change? How is the character of a place related to its political, economic, social, and cultural characteristics?
The fields we farm, the cities we build, the spaces we preserve, the borders we protect‹within each set of choices we make, we reveal our perceptions of and relationship with the land that surrounds us. By studying the connections between natural geographic features, human settlement, and cultural identity, we can begin to see landscape not as background scenery but as an expression of ourselves and of our historic development. Between the core disciplines of World Geography, World History, and World Cultures, few fields of study are beginning to emerge that explores ways that these fields (once studied in isolation) influence each other.
AIM: South Asia Workshop (Spring 2009): Beauty in the Worlds of Islam
"Beauty in the Worlds of Islam" was a two-day K-12 and post-secondary workshop designed to explore the manner in which beauty is created, judged, negotiated, and relayed in Muslim societies from Asia to the Americas. The conference will emphasize the range of ways in which the diverse imaginative spirit of Muslim peoples is manifested in architecture, music, poetry, rhetoric, and calligraphy. It also hoped to draw attention to issues of gender, sexuality, disenfranchisement, and modernity as they shape the ideas of "beauty." The conference took on the twofold task of enriching American high school and college pedagogies pertaining to social studies and of enhancing interdisciplinary conversation among scholars of history, culture, language, literature, and religion.
AIM: South Asia Workshop (Fall 2008): Land and Landscape in South Asia
Landscape forms the conceptions we have of place or places, propped upon, yet largely independent of, what is meant by "land." It is how we imagine a place, how we picture it to ourselves. "Landscape" thus covers a mental idea - the image of land, something conceived of and therefore made operable or controllable as a concept. "Nature knows nothing of what we call landscape." Landscape is largely an aesthetic, mental concept with great implications for how we structure our lives.
This K-12 workshop addressed topics concerning land and landscape that are often studied separately. Participants were exposed to ways of thinking about their importance in order to understand the significance of culture (including religion, literature and art) and geography in South Asia.
Hemispheres' Summer Teachers' Institute 2008: Recognizing Rights and Responsibilities in the 21st Century
“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” - Article 1 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights
In what ways are governments and other powerful institutions responsible to act toward individuals and each other “in a spirit of brotherhood”? How do we define human rights, in the most expansive sense of the term? And how are rights and resources being claimed and fought for around the world? Hemispheres Summer Teachers’ Institute 2008 explored the international context for the rights-related challenges we face today. We looked at specific cases that illustrate how people conceive of and struggle for crucial rights in civil, political, cultural, and economic realms.
AIM: South Asia Workshop (Fall 2007): East Asian Buddhists Pilgrims in South Asia and the Significance of Xuanzang
Pilgrimage is an important practice in many religions, and Buddhism is no exception. Indeed, it is a significant factor in this religion’s phenomenal spread throughout the world. Xuanzang, who lived in the seventh century, was only one of many such Chinese travelers to India in search of “sacred traces” of the Buddha, but his written account of an amazing journey helped to ensure his long-lived fame. His record provides many details of Buddhist practices as well as the appearance of Buddhist sites and images that would otherwise be unknown. Xuanzang’s particular views of Buddhism and Buddhist India have had a profound impact on practioners and scholars alike, and today he is widely invoked as the paradigmatic figure of a Buddhist pilgrim. This one-day symposium considered the significance of the sacred land of the Buddha through a focus on Xuanzang.
Hemispheres' Summer Teachers’ Institute 2007: Restoring Women to World Studies
In much of the social studies—especially courses focused on world history, geography, and culture—there is a growing awareness that the experience of women has been left out of the narrative. As a primary organizing category in our world, gender is a crucial concept in understanding other nations, cultures, and people. Women and gender often appear in the standards and as a theme in courses, but textbooks and other traditional resources do not adequately cover women around the world. This workshop addressed the need to increase global awareness in an increasingly interdependent world, while also responding to the need to consider women and gender in a global cross-cultural perspective. Hemispheres 2007 Summer Teachers’ Institute explored the situation of women—historical and contemporary—in Latin America, the Middle East, Russia, East Europe and Eurasia, and South Asia. We discussed the contributions of notable women to historical and artistic movements, talked about concepts of gender roles and gendered spaces, looked at issues that are driving women’s movements today, and examined the greater context in which all of these take place.
AIM: South Asia Workshop (Spring 2007): The Significance of Ashoka, first Emperor of India
Emperor Ashoka (273-232 BCE) is held to be one of India’s greatest rulers. UT professors from the Department of Asian Studies guided participants in an examination of what we know about Ashoka and the time in which he lived, in order to gain a better understanding of his significance in ancient Indian history. The workshop introduced participants to the political and religious developments that appear to have occurred under Ashoka’s rule, the problems scholars face in assessing the exact features and impact of Ashoka’s reign, and the nature and significance of surviving texts and visual evidence used to define the importance of Ashoka.
AIM: South Asia Workshop (Fall 2006): Photography as Evidence: Interpreting South Asian Photographs
This workshop, specifically designed for high school teachers, provided strategies for teaching about and using photographs as primary source documents. Members of UT faculty guided participants in an analysis of the use of photographs as historical evidence, focusing on a collection of 19th-century photographs and albums of India held at the Ransom Research Center on the UT campus. The workshop also introduced the uses of historical photographs to reveal insights into imperial-colonial relationships on the Indian subcontinent and the impact of historical photographs in continuing to shape understandings of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
