One of the coolest products of teaching Humanities in the Asia-Pacific this fall was this collaboration with my friend Michael Wright and his incredible weekly letter, Still Life. I assigned one of his letters about exploring diversity locally to the class, and then Michael and I worked together to share what that experience looked like for my students.
Here’s what I wrote:
One of the gifts of study abroad as a professor is to try to connect local experiences with in-class assignments. I’m working this fall as visiting faculty for Harding University Australasia. HUA is a 3-month study abroad program focused on learning through travel in Australia, New Zealand, Thailand and Japan. I’m sharing all this with you because I assigned a recent Still Life letter to my Humanities students while we traveled.
In September we spent a couple of weeks in Sydney. It’s an amazing international, multicultural city—with its own challenges given a long history of colonialism and abuses toward some of the oldest living human cultures in the world. As US Americans, we immediately noticed a difference in the way this complex history is treated. The first thing the flight attendants announced when the plane landed was an acknowledgment of the First Peoples, the traditional custodians of the land and their elders—past, present, and emerging.
In Sydney, some students took the opportunity to visit galleries showcasing aboriginal art, such as the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Museum of Contemporary Art, Cooee Art Leven, and the Australian Museum. Just outside Sydney, we visited an aboriginal cultural center where members of a few of those people groups shared their story with our group, their traditions, food, art, music, and dance, as well as the current challenges they face in education, social services and politics.
Finally, we got to see a concert at the Sydney Opera House. It was beautiful and haunting. “Eumeralla, A War Requiem for Peace” by Deborah Cheetham Fraillon tells the tragic story of the Gunditjmara through a combined performance of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, art, and adult and children’s choirs singing in the Gunditjmara language. The creators designed it to be sung together by non-indigenous and indigenous Australians “to ease the troubled spirits” of the land.
After the performance, I assigned an episode of the Lexicon Valley podcastabout reviving dead languages as well as the recent Still Life letter “Memory Threads.” I invited students to reflect on the significance of Eumeralla being sung in Gunditjmara instead of English and to consider Michael’s own invitation to discover multicultural life around us. We closed the class session by exploring Native Land and formulating our own land acknowledgements based on where we’re from and the land on which the university sits. What a gift to see travel transform the questions we carry.
I shared with Michael some of the students’ takeaways from this convergence of art, music, culture on the other side of the world, and he wanted to share their reflections with all Still Life readers. You can read the students’ reflections below. I’m deeply grateful for Michael’s work all these years in bringing poetry into my life, and was excited to use his letter as our teacher from afar.
See the full letter (including Michael’s intro and a number of student reflections) here. This is one of the best things on the entire world wide web. The weekly dose of poetry has been so important to my own development and I think you’d like it too.