Since its inception in 2016, the Educational Arm has developed instructional materials to accompany select pieces from the nonfiction, fiction, poetry, drama, and visual sections of each issue of Asymptote. Now with twenty Educator’s Guides in our archive, and over one hundred lesson plans based on translations from over fifty different languages, teachers can truly experience the world with their students. We encourage educators to explore the myriad of ways Asymptote content can be adapted and used in their curriculums; most lessons can be readily applied in literature courses at the high school or university level, but are also flexible enough to be adapted for a variety of humanities classes such as English, creative writing, cultural studies, and modern languages. They can also be easily applied to engage lifelong learners at community centers or arts organizations.
The Summer 2021 Educator’s Guide features lesson plans based on a diverse array of texts from the latest issue of Asymptote, including nonfiction translated from Czech and Spanish, poetry from Brazil and Iceland, and visual art inspired by China and the U.S. In these lessons, students are invited to observe urban life through the lens of psychogeography; explore the multifaceted relationship between art, memory, and cultural identity; research poets and critically examine the concept of literary canon; and delve into the translation process while reflecting on their own experiences reading works in translation. We hope that the Educator’s Guide will serve as a springboard for the use of world literature in your own classroom.
In this following roundtable, four members of the Educational Arm—representing a variety of teaching contexts—sit down for a discussion about the Educator’s Guide. Anna Rumsby (English language teaching, U.K./Germany), Mary Hillis (English language teaching, Japan), Kent Kosack (creative writing, U.S.), and Kasia Bartoszynska (literature, U.S.) discuss their favorite lessons from previous Educator’s Guides—why they chose the pieces in question, how they adapted them, with additional discourse on teaching through the pandemic and the importance of reading world literature.
Mary Hillis (MH): How does translated literature fit into your teaching practice? Have you taught any lessons from the Educator’s Guide, or do you have any favorite lessons from previous guides?
Anna Rumsby (AR): I teach English to German speakers; most of my lessons revolve around the German school system, and therefore involve rather more pedestrian areas such as grammar and traditional style essays. As a relatively new addition to the Education Arm, I was deeply impressed and invigorated by the creative freedoms we enjoy in producing the incredibly unique material at hand, working from some incredibly talented authors and translators. It definitely highlighted what had sometimes been lacking for me in my other work. I suppose that, in a way, working on the Educator’s Guide means I can design lessons which I would love to teach, rather than those I teach day to day.
In the Fall 2020 Educator’s Guide, I was particularly struck by the lesson plan called “Writing About What is Lost,” on “Living Trees and Dying Trees” by Itō Hiromi, translated by Jon L. Pitt. I am a great lover of both folklore and the botanical world; my MA dissertation involves a lot of Black Forest folklore, and my partner is a gardener, so the exercise on the importance and meaning of trees in Japanese culture really struck me. It reminded me of strolling through botanical gardens in the pre-COVID age, being told the Latin names and significance of all the trees I pointed at. I love how the lesson plan uses Itō Hiromi’s work as a springboard for further research, which in turn explores specific topics in more depth.
Kent Kosack (KK): I’m glad you mentioned “Writing about What is Lost.” It’s a great example of what teaching world literature and literary translation can do—letting the students explore a different place, a culture or sensibility, and using it to learn more about the wider world. By the end of the lesson, they’re making connections to their own lives and—in this case—reflecting on what’s been lost. It’s difficult work, but especially during this pandemic, necessary and potentially cathartic.
MH: Like Anna, I teach English language learners, and I have been able to employ several of the lesson plans from the Educator’s Guide, especially those related to poetry. The poem “Aboo” by Osaki Sayaka (tr. from Japanese by Jeffrey Angles) and its accompanying lesson plan “The Body Escaping Confinement” were interesting for my Japanese university students because of their cultural familiarity with the subject—the poem is about the news of a tortoise that escaped from a zoo in Okayama prefecture. Operating from this idea, the students wrote a poem based on a current news story, which gives them an opportunity to examine writing conventions in different genres and to experiment with language.
I have also taught poems from “House to House,” by Shamma Al Bastaki, with the lesson plan “Language in Transit: Understanding Ethnographic Poetry”—dealing with themes related to memory and language (which I discuss in more detail in a previous blog post). The author transcribed interviews with people in the Dubai Creek area, and then presented her ethnographic research in poetic form, blurring the boundary between academic and creative writing.
AR: I think it’s great that you’re able to put the Educator’s Guide into practice! I have found that teaching English to speakers of other languages is particularly prescriptive in some ways, as there is a nervousness about writing creatively in a second, or further, language. However, I would not be able to say definitively whether that comes more from the students themselves or from outside expectations about privileging one’s first language in literature. This would also be an interesting topic for discussion. I am on the MA literary translation course at the University of East Anglia, and many of us get extremely nervous when it comes to writing poetry and prose in our second or third languages!
KK: I teach creative writing classes at the University of Pittsburgh and at a local arts organization, utilising translated literature in both settings. Lately, in particular, I’ve been drawn to writing that focuses on and has a strong sense of place. Perhaps because the pandemic has made my world so small—my screen, my office, my neighborhood. Stories set in other places and cultures, written in different languages, widen the world; I try to bring that feeling into the (virtual) classroom.
With this in mind, I’ve used a lesson from the Spring 2020 Educator’s Guide on Durian Sukegawa’s “Cycling the Narrow Road to the Deep North” (tr. by Alison Watts), which explores the area around Fukushima and its legacy. I’ve also taught from the Fall 2020 Educator’s Guide on Karin Amatmoekrim’s “Concrete: Ode to Biljmer Flats” (tr. by Sarah Timmer-Harvey), which asks students to close-read a building in their community, investigating both its appearance and the lives of its inhabitants. Both lessons start in a really specific locale—a bike tour of northern Japan or modernist apartment buildings in Amsterdam—but go on to encourage students to respond by more deeply examining their own environs. For example, I adapted the lesson on Amatmoekrim’s essay, “Beyond the Façade: A Multitude of Lives.” It called for a research project and presentation about a specific local structure, using it as a lens to look at the students’ surroundings. I turned this into a creative writing assignment by having students compose braided essays: weaving together personal narratives with outside research to examine their current homes—the histories hidden in them. They came up with some interesting work, looking at gentrification in Pittsburgh, segregation, protests, labor unrest, and the decline of the steel industry. I think they appreciated the chance to see through another writer’s—and translator’s—eyes, to learn about another culture and, by doing so, get to know their own city, to see it afresh. It also helped us all feel more connected despite how isolating the pandemic has been, which is something I value in literature and teaching more generally—that sense of human connection.
Katarzyna Bartoszynska (KB): It’s so interesting to hear about the kind of teaching all of you do, because I think I tend to assume that the lesson plans we create are primarily for English/literature classes, but I can so readily see how they might even be better suited to English language teaching, or creative writing. But this makes me wonder—how would the lessons be different, in these various contexts? I wonder if you all feel like your lesson plans are created or adapted specifically to the kind of teaching you do, or if you have thoughts on what adaptations could (should?) be made to make them more useful for those classrooms.
MH: One useful strategy is using concept maps, such as charts, maps, or timelines. They are visual representations of ideas and their relationships, and also effective ways to help students connect previous knowledge with new information. One of the overarching goals we keep in mind while developing lesson plans for the Educator’s Guide is to design activities that forge connections between what students already know and what they are learning. In the lesson plan for the poem “Aboo,” for example, a Venn diagram is used to note similarities and differences between different genres of writing.
When adapting lesson plans from the Educator’s Guide, I tend to add vocabulary and reading comprehension sections because these types of activities prepare students for more complex tasks, like participating in discussions about the text or composing their own original work.
AR: I think Mary has expressed succinctly what I would say if I were to adapt a lesson plan from the Educator’s Guide for German students; warming-up and pooling vocabulary is definitely more important in another language, so that students feel comfortable about participating.
KB: I mostly teach eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature (at Ithaca College), so haven’t gotten the chance yet to use the Educator’s Guide for my own classes, but my previous jobs (at Monmouth College and Bilkent University) both involved more core humanities courses, where I was teaching a broad variety of texts from many different places and time periods, so it’s a kind of teaching I’m very comfortable with.
So often instructors will use a single poem or short story to help their students work through a particular idea, and they typically draw from whatever canon they’re most familiar with—I think Asymptote can be a terrific resource for reading more globally. In the Winter 2021 Educator’s Guide, for instance, we have a lesson plan based around a short story by Anna Mécs (tr. Owen Good) entitled “Drexit,” which is all about social media and identity. The story is Hungarian, and though it references Brexit and issues of immigration, the questions related to how you present yourself online, and how you appear in day-to-day life, are not so culturally specific—they’re accessible to digitally fluent students anywhere in the world. So often, if a person is teaching a text from a different country, they do so specifically to teach about literature from that country, while texts from Britain, or the U.S., are treated as if they were universal.
KK: I wonder if any of you have actually taught the act of translation? Or taught literature via the activity of translation? I’m not a translator myself but have tremendous respect for the craft, and often try to get my students to think about their own writing—even in their native language—as an act of translation. Translating feelings into thoughts, thoughts into words, words into stories.
KB: I’ve never taught a translation course, and I’ve never taken one either, though I have done quite a bit of translation (mostly of academic texts, not fiction or poetry). I was teaching college in Turkey for three years, and it feels like a lost opportunity not to have done a bit of that with my students there, but my own Turkish was so rudimentary that it didn’t occur to me to do it, because I wouldn’t have been able to read what the students wrote!
AR: Although I would love the opportunity to teach translation, the closest I have come in teaching German speakers is mediation! There is a creative element to this—students have to read a text (often a speech) in German and bring across the main elements of this in English for a new brief.
MH: Because the students in my class share Japanese as a common language, after we finished reading and studying the English translation of the poem “Aboo”, students read the original in Japanese. They were interested in sharing their observations, especially about word choice, and the discussion developed awareness of not only language, but also of reading and translating literature.
As Kent mentioned, many learners could benefit from thinking about the act of translation. For teachers who are interested in exploring translation with their students, the Summer 2021 Educator’s Guide has two lesson plans which focus on its practice, drawing on information from translator interviews on the Asymptote blog, as well as the translator’s notes which accompany each piece published in the issues. One lesson plan is based on Julia and Peter Sherwood’s translation of “Island of Circumscribed Hope” by Dora Kaprálová, and the other on Larissa Kyzer’s translation of “Glacier Lines” by Kári Tulinius. Both of these lessons highlight the interplay between writer, translator, and reader, prompting students to consider the multifaceted choices translators make.
During the process of creating the Educator’s Guide, we work collaboratively to design lesson plans that challenge learners to connect their previous knowledge and experience with new ideas gained from reading globally. And as we’ve discussed, the activities can be adapted to suit the individual needs of the teacher or class. In this way, the lessons from the guide can be viewed as a point of embarkation to another time, place, or language. I think I can speak on behalf of all of us when I say that we are inviting students and teachers, no matter their level of familiarity with world literature, to join us on this journey.
Anna Rumsby is an MA student in literary translation at the University of East Anglia. She translates fiction from German and writes poetry and historical fiction in her spare time. She teaches English to German-speaking students online.
Mary Hillis is an educational arm assistant at Asymptote. She has an MA in English with a specialization in teaching English to speakers of other languages. She lives in Japan, where she teaches English language and literature at the university level.
Kent Kosack is a writer living in Pittsburgh, PA. He has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Pittsburgh where he teaches composition and creative writing. He also serves as director of the Educational Arm at Asymptote, designing lesson plans to promote world literature in the classroom. His work has been published in Tin House (Flash Fidelity), 3:AM Magazine, Hobart and elsewhere. See more at: www.kentkosack.com
Katarzyna Bartoszyńska is a professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Ithaca College. Her book, Estranging the Novel: Poland, Ireland, and Theories of World Literature will be published by Johns Hopkins University Press in August. She also works as a translator, from Polish to English—she translated a few of Zygmunt Bauman’s essays for the collection Culture and Art, recently published by Polity Press.
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