Cross Case Features: Teachers

Meridian High School: Social Studies

Janice Storm, Social Studies (Chair), Comparative Government

The Meridian High School social studies chair, Janice Storm, balances her responsibilities to the department with a full teaching load and involvement in the state social studies organization. Janice is an effective leader with a low-key style that allows other social studies teachers a lot of independence. She devotes a substantial amount of attention to curriculum development, an area where she has earned the trust of district administrators.

Integration of Asian Content in Courses

She is clearly well-versed in Asian content and its integration into a variety of courses. Janice Storm uses the NCTA China/Japan material in her Advanced Placement (AP) Comparative Government class. Although the standard AP curriculum focuses only on China, she includes sections on Japan in that content. Janice likes to use primary source materials. She finds the Education About Asia (EAA) resources from the NCTA seminar very useful.

Development of New World History/World Cultures Course

Janice Storm has a good working relationship with the district superintendent who trusts her to develop appropriate new curriculum. She is currently working with the district administration to design a year-long class World History/World Cultures class for eleventh graders. The new class would include Asian political history, cultures, and literature. While this course would be a requirement for all eleventh graders, Ms. Storm hopes to include an Honors section as well. The second new course that the school plans to offer is the AP World History course. The school is making plans to offer professional development to prepare teachers for teaching this new course.

Rebecca Faunce, Psychology

Rebecca Faunce brings a rich array of cross-cultural information into her Psychology courses at Meridian High School. She uses the NCTA material to a limited extent in her regular psychology classes. For example, she describes Japanese dating practices in discussions of cross-cultural psychology. She will expand this material in a planned AP Psychology class. By providing her with a subscription to Education About Asia (EAA), NCTA supplied her with the current cultural information she wants to include in her classes. She wishes that more cultural resources with contemporary information had been provided in the NCTA seminar itself. Rebecca Faunce expects to go to China on an NCTA study tour over the summer. Upon her return, she plans to share her experiences with colleagues.

Monica Shueller, World History, American Government

Monica Shueller teaches World History and American Government at Meridian High School. Even though she majored in history in college, she had learned “absolutely zero about anything dealing with Asia.” So in her first year of teaching World History, she skipped the chapter on Asia because she did feel knowledgeable enough to teach it. When she learned of the NCTA seminar, she was initially reluctant to participate but, once involved, found the information and resources to be “wonderful.”

Appreciation of Chinese and Japanese Civilizations

The two topics in the seminar that were of particular interest to her were the greatness of the Chinese civilization and the impressive Japanese transition from feudalism to industrialization in a matter of decades. Her goal is to share this knowledge of these civilizations with her students.

Appreciation of Haiku

Monica was surprised to discover an appreciation of haiku poetry. “It was like an epiphany....[Y]ou would never find me buying a book of poetry—ever. But when we started looking at the Japanese poetry, it was so simple and it was so easy to paint a picture in my brain of what they were saying. I could see the leaves falling, the water rippling.”

Interest in Interdisciplinary Collaboration

Monica Shueller would like to see a curriculum that coordinates the presentation of various literature and historical themes, and thinks it would be easy to accomplish with Asian literature. She says that English teacher Tony Mathews and she have talked about coordinating with each other, “but once you get back in the building, life is different. You really have to make it a part of the curriculum, i.e., this class is designed to augment that class and, if you take this class, then you must take this one also…High schools are generally not set up to do this. They are isolated in classes and it’s really hard to pull competing disciplines together.” Monica Shueller will be transferring to the new high school in the fall.