Japanese Culture Presentations
Dave Pite
Pite explained that 5-minute videos about Japanese culture are a project that put students in the experts' chair and give practice in explaining their own culture that comes in handy during later homestay experiences or intercultural interactions. Tenth-grade students in groups of 4-5 choose a topic—not necessarily related to traditional culture—and take on the roles of manager, director, designer, and writer(s) in order to plan a video in which all of them will have speaking parts and which will be judged on the basis of originality, communicativeness, and fluency. Pite shoots and edits the videos at the end of a seven-week term and the best ones become a 45-minute Culture Video Festival shown during a grade-wide assembly.
Showing copious clips from his eleven years of utilizing this project, he pointed out possible pitfalls and explained how he deals with them. The walls of the meeting room were decorated with posters and other student-produced visuals, and we received handouts of the planning and evaluation forms he uses. Despite the technical headaches involved, Pite feels that these culture videos are a useful learning experience, which he hopes to use as a basis for Skype-based discussions between his students and those in a New Zealand school.
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