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JAIMS Coordinates StarFestival Pilot Test in Hawaii
HONOLULU —
More than 40 teachers from public and private schools throughout
Hawaii participated in a two-day workshop at JAIMS on a multimedia
curriculum being developed under Shigeru
Miyagawa, a linguistics and Japanese professor at MIT.
Patterned after Miyagawa's
own search for identity in Japan, StarFestival is a K-12 multimedia
social studies curriculum with two overarching themes: cultural/racial
identity and modern Japan. The heart of the curriculum is the award-winning
CD-ROM, StarFestival...a Return to Japan, which tells the
story of a young Japanese boy who comes to the U.S. when he is 10,
then returns 30 years later to his homeland to find his roots.
While the CD-ROM is already
available, the StarFestival curriculum is still undergoing testing
as an MIT research project. K-12 teachers who teach social studies,
language arts, history and related subjects are currently pilot
testing the curriculum. JAIMS is serving as the host facility for
the training and is helping Miyagawa with the coordination of the
the pilot test in Hawaii.
Hawaii teachers at the workshop
on January 21-22 were given an overview of the project and a hands-on
session in lesson planning working in teams. They also had an opportunity
to meet with two teachers from Boston—Deborah Washington, senior
program director of social studies at Boston Public Schools, and
Maria D'Itria, fifth-grade teacher at Harvard Kent School, who has
taught with StarFestival for the past three years.
The StarFestival CD-ROM was
awarded "Best of Show" at the 1997 MacWorld Exposition.
An extensive StarFestival Curriculum based on the Learning Standards
of the National Council of Social Studies is being developed for
MIT by The Children's Museum of Boston.
For further information,
including system requirements for the CD-ROM, please go to: www.starfestival.com.
This website also contains Tanabata, an online guide for
the study of the completely natural and spontaneous language in
the CD-ROM.
Shigeru
Miyagawa
StarFestival's executive producer, Dr. Miyagawa, who is facilitating
the workshop, is also a guest lecturer for the Japan-focused MBA
program. At MIT he currently holds the Chair, Kochi-Prefecture John
Manjiro Professor of Japanese, which is intended to support application
of technology to education. In 1995 he was awarded the Irwin Sizer
Award for the Most Significant Improvement to MIT Education. Miyagawa
is also the executive director of JP NET, an online service for
Japanese language and culture specialists (web.mit.edu/jpnet).
Miyagawa's research on educational
technology has been supported by the National Endowment for Humanities,
U.S. Department of Education, Nippon Foundation, and Canon, among
others. One of the Japanese culture courses that he teaches, "Japan
in Real Time," is designed around the StarFestival CD-ROM.
His book on linguistics, Structure and Case Marking in Japanese,
is a standard textbook for graduate courses in Japanese linguistics
worldwide.
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