Curriculum Building: A Creative Act

Next school year, I will be teaching a course entitled Asian (American) Literature. It is new to my school, and I will be designing it. I already have the student list: 10 Asian students and 1 non-Asian. I have been working all summer to curate and build the text list.

In Thomas Xavier Sarmiento's article "Course Design as Critical Creativity: Intersectional, Regional, and Demographic Approaches to Teaching Asian American Literatures," he explains his process in designing his college-level Asian American Literatures course. It was fascinating to read about his process in choosing and selecting texts, and how the course becomes it's own narrative: "I view course design [...] as a form of art curation, as I arrange and assemble artistic works to communicate a different story than perhaps intended by the artist/author and/or traditionally received by audiences" (48). His process reminded me of Arola's discussions in her "Composing as Culturing" article, and I found it fascinating how Sarmiento's diction on making and "doing" course design mirrored Arola's term of culturing.

I also enjoyed how Sarmiento brings his own positionality into his work, placing the voices of an often underrepresented group within the Asian American minority in conversation with and countering dominant understandings. Much of what they choose to do in their course design, I also hope to do in mine, though our focuses and demographics are different. While his course purely deals with the Asian American context, mine is meant to examine the bridges and gaps between Asian and Asian American literatures. There is a lot to pack into a trimester course, and I wish I had the time to teach more than a single novel. As it stands, my course will have a larger portion of works from East Asia and East Asian American voices, it part because this reflects my own personal expertise and positionality. My Japanese minor included a course in Japanese literature, and then I lived, worked, and studied in South Korea for seven years. The novel I will be teaching, Forgotten Country by Catherine Chung, in some way, though I am not Korean, feels a bit like home to me.

However, it is also important to bring forward voices that reflect other parts of Asia, as well as other intersectionalities, not doing so, as Sarmiento points out, "can result in representing Asian America as a monoculture" (61). I was excited to see among the titles of the works his course is built around are two texts I am hoping to incorporate: The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen and Patron Saints of Nothing by Randy Ribay (I taught the latter in a 10th grade course, and absolutely loved it). Though I cannot teach these texts in their entirety, I am hoping the excerpts I choose can bring more diversity into our exploration of the vibrant tapestry Asian Literature comprises.

What follows is my brief - and still evolving - plan for the course.

We open with a short unit examining the philosophical roots and literary traditions in Asia, from mythologies and legends to Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian texts to poetry, theater, graphic novels (manga), and animated films. We also discuss concepts, such as the Floating World and familial piety. Then, in the second unit, we dive into our novel study of Forgotten Country to examine how these roots manifest in Korean American writing, including the referencing to traumatic history and the splitting of the peninsula. Lastly, we focus in on South and South East Asia, exploring the diversity of the region and discussing the impact of colonization and war, and the refugee narrative. We end the trimester with a synthesis paper where students will work to examine thematic threads present in the texts we read.

I would love for this course to extend the full year to allow more space for more voices to be centered. However, teachers must always work within the confines of the institution. Hopefully, though, we push ourselves and our students to be visionary as bell hooks describes: "to root our imagination in our concrete reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond that reality" (51).