Reference
Japanese Art in the Edo Period is published by the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE). This unit focuses on the art that flourished during Japan’s Edo Period, a time of relative peace and stability within the country. The unit provides both written (various handouts) and visual components (overhead transparencies and CD-ROM slides) to incorporate into each lesson.
The unit is divided into five separate lessons: An Introduction to the Edo Period; Travel and Art in the Edo Period; The Development of “Official” and “Unofficial” Art in the Edo Period; Literati and Collaborative Art in the Edo Period; and Chinese and Western Influence on Edo Art, each of which are designed to be completed in a fifty minute class period. . Each lesson comes with a variety of handouts, teacher information sheets, games, primary source images (pictures of paintings or woodblock prints), optional enrichment activities and assessments for each lesson. The unit also includes a page of suggested culminating projects that can be used as assessments rather than a unit ending exam.
This curriculum unit has many strengths that warrant its inclusion in a variety of classroom settings and subject areas. Each lesson is rather thorough and comes with activities that appeal to a variety of different learning styles. The organizing questions that are provided with each lesson would serve as a starting point for some warm up activities for students. The directions and objectives are very clear. Also, because of the way the lessons are divided it would be easy to use just one or two of them as supplementary material to enrich an existing curriculum unit in either English/Language Arts, Social Studies/History, or Art.
However, the unit has a few weaknesses that need to be addressed as well. First, it seems as though it would take more than fifty minutes to complete the unit as indicated in the directions, especially if a teacher decided to include some of the optional activities into his or her lesson plan. Also, there is a great deal of vocabulary contained in the handouts that students are expected to learn. While I think high school students would not have any trouble with the reading, I could see that it would be challenging for some middle school students to get through. Finally, it would be helpful for students to have a background in art before starting this unit because they are expected to know and be able to identify terms such as distance and perspective and how they are used in a variety of images from the Edo period.
I think that this unit would be best used in 8th or 9th grade classroom. The unit’s directions say that it is appropriate for both middle and high school classrooms. However, I think that some of the reading would be a bit overwhelming for students in 6th or 7th grade. On the other hand, I do not see students after 9th grade being challenged by an assignment that requires them to make a crossword puzzle out of vocabulary words.
