Pedagogy of Disaster: Teaching About, Through, and Beyond Fukushima

• In Event: Roundtable Session 22

Session Type: Roundtable Session

Abstract

This session examines educational projects in the US and Japan on the 2011 nuclear power plant disaster in Fukushima. The knowledge to be taught in such projects is contested because of the double invisibility of radiation and situations of the nuclear reactors. The disaster created windows to the dynamic engagements among Japanese government, energy industry, academia, media, and global security concerns and to processes of constructing, legitimizing, and contesting knowledge. The session papers analyze discourses informing/teaching the public about the disaster in Japan and the US, student research projects in and out of Japanese language classrooms in American colleges, and a symposium for an American college. This session explores little discussed “pedagogy of disaster.”

Sub Unit

• Division G - Social Context of Education / Section 4: Social Context of Educational Policy, Politics, and Praxis

Chair

• Neriko Doerr, Ramapo College

Papers

• Deconstructing the Official Statements of the Government on the Future of Nuclear Plants After Fukushima: From Safety Myth to Economic Myth - Yuri Kumagai, Smith College

• Teaching About Fukushima as Scale-Making Practice: Weapons, Energy, and Power Politics in the Atomic Age - Neriko Doerr, Ramapo College

• Multimodal (Re)Designing as a Pedagogy About, Through, and Beyond Fukushima - Keiko Konoeda, University of Massachusetts - Amherst

• Learning Japanese Language in a Community of Practice: A Case for Studying the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake - Yuko Takahashi, University of Massachusetts - Amherst

• Theory and Practice in Pedagogy: Japan’s March 11 and Its Aftermath in the United States - Haeng-ja Chung, Hamilton College