University of New England

By Steve Price

A picture is worth a thousand words, the old saw goes. So sociology professor Joel See, Ph.D., likes to teach with photos-to get his students talking, thinking and writing.

 In his Cultural Anthropology course, his students take home a camera and photograph furnishings and objects. From these photos they compose posters that See describes as "cultural texts." See does the same thing using photos he took while living in Japan. The professor and his students compare and contrast what they see.

"The whole activity becomes a comparative culture exercise," See explains. This process also engages the students in "active learning," a concept See feels strongly about and practices in his classroom. "The active components are the photography and talking about the photos with others-trying to understand their own culture," he says.

Joel See first developed this visual teaching technique at Miyazaki International College, an experimental college in Japan where he spent two years. He uses another visual teaching technique in his Sociology of Marriage and Family course, where he shows his American students videos produced by his former Japanese students. The Japanese student videos are essentially oral histories, many of them interviews with elder family members.

"My students can see that around the world people can be very different, but fundamentally very similar," he says. "That's a goal I have, and I can use visual materials to demonstrate it."

See has traveled extensively around the world since first getting the "travel bug" after college. A mid-Westerner, he chose to attend Florida State University for his graduate education because he wanted to experience a different part of the U.S. for the cultural experiences it would provide.

Later, his more adventurous trips to Peru and the Himalayas were motivated by a love of high-altitude hiking. He had planned to climb all the major mountain ranges in the world. But the travel experiences opened his eyes to something more than mountaineering. In Peru, he got out to some remote villages, and "all of a sudden I realized I was seeing the face of all the things I'd studied about the third world," he says. See had studied anthropology and sociology, with emphasis on health and demography.

So on his initial trip to the Himalayas, he was better prepared, mentally and equipment wise (a budding amateur photographer, he packed a full complement of camera lenses and film). "The climbing was great," he reports, "but it was much more interesting culturally. From that point on, my travel was much more focused with my sociological interests in mind." For his subsequent Himalayan trip he was better prepared still, having taken a photography course and setting up a shooting guide with his teaching in mind.

Longer trips to the great mountain regions of the world focused more on interviews, research and deliberate use of photography. He was doing the groundwork for his later teaching and curriculum development.

See took more trips, to West Africa where he studied development programs, and to Cuba to research that island-country's health-care system (he was teaching medical sociology at the time).

At the same time See was bounding around the world, UNE was starting to reform its core curriculum. See was a member of the Social and Global Awareness study group. One of the group's goals was to add more international material. But because the arts and sciences faculty was too small to have a host of regional scholars, they adopted what he describes as an "infusion model," which involved getting more international background themselves, then developing courses with greater global/international content. A perfect situation for See, who wanted to keep traveling and expanding his international experiences.

But he also wanted to change direction. "I realized I had a little experience in this country and a little experience in that country, and I really wanted to get some depth in one part of the world." The question arose: where in the world?

"It didn't take much thought," he confesses. "I've always had this gut-level interest in Japanese culture. I needed to find a way that I could become more formally trained, while knowing that I wouldn't ever become a Japanese specialist."

He first experienced his gut-level attraction to this ancient Far-eastern culture as an undergraduate, browsing in the library, avoiding a research assignment. Randomly pulling books down from the shelves he came across a book of Japanese wood block prints "that just blew me away." He went on to write his paper on Japanese aesthetics, and he was hooked. Something about the art and architecture of that culture just grabbed him.

Now he started looking for ways to learn more about Japanese culture. He was accepted into a five-week NEH-sponsored workshop on the topic at the East-West Center in Hawaii, based in part on his involvement in UNE's expanding global education agenda. After that, he knew he wanted to live in Japan. With a sabbatical coming up, he used his connections to get a job teaching at the Minnesota State University campus in Akita, a port city on the northwest coast of Japan's main island.

"I had some head knowledge of Japan from reading," he says, "but I really didn't have any expectations about the Japanese people or their society day to day. So when I landed there it was just so interesting to me."

He found the Japanese students to be "real troopers," as well as kind and helpful.

This whetted his appetite for more, so in 2000 he took an unpaid one-semester leave to teach at Miyazaki International College, where Japanese students study comparative cultures-a perfect fit. He describes it as "an incredible experience," and ended up staying two years. "Professionally [it was] the most meaningful experience of my life," See says. He also used this trip as a springboard to travel to a number of other Asian countries.

Now See goes back to Japan every summer to collaborate with colleagues. And he wants to learn more about other parts of Asia. This past summer he attended another East-West Center program to study urban development in Hong Kong and Shanghai. "That seems where it's going for me know," he states.

All this travel and learning finds its way back into his classroom, connecting research and theory with his own vivid experiences. In his Cross-cultural Communications course he can speak knowledgeably about "culture shock," because he's experienced lots of it. And his photographs provide his American students with a visual counterpoint to their own culture. The active learning tools he's so assiduously developed over the years directly involve his students in the pursuit of knowledge, rather than letting them be passive participants.

That's a pretty good payoff for a livelong pursuit that began with a young man's humble trip from Minnesota to Florida.