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 Keiko McDonald
Professor
Japanese Literature and Cinema
1503 Cathedral of Learning
412-624-4923
Fax: 412-624-3458
keiko@pitt.edu
Office Hours
Wednesday and Friday, 1:30-2:30 p.m., or by appointment
Professor Keiko McDonald has written extensively on Japanese cinema and literature, lectured widely in both the U.S. and Japan, and received a number of teaching excellence awards, including the Tina and David Bellet CAS Undergraduate Teaching Excellence Award. The following are her teaching goals and approaches she would like to share with students. Teaching Goals and Approaches
This academic year is my 26th at the University of Pittsburgh. As everyone knows, this last quarter century has been a time of rapid change, even of revolution. Every year now we see educational and technological meet, merge, and sometimes muddle in our thinking and re-thinking about ways to improve the university experience.
And through it all we go on teaching as individuals whose lives and values are challenged in so many ways by our experience in the classroom. I say challenged, not changed, because looking back over the years, I see myself testing (and being tested by) the resilience of certain ideals derived from my experience living in two very different worlds at once—countries as far apart as Japan and America, cultures as foreign to one another as East and West.
Those ideals have guided me in ways like the following:
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As Cultural Ambassador
Any Japanologist working in the West is in some sense a cultural ambassador. I have had a great many opportunities to exercise that privilege in and out of the classroom. My aim is everywhere the same: to bring the best possible understanding of Japanese culture to Western audiences.
To that end I have lectured widely East and West as an invited speaker at conferences, film festivals and a variety of cultural events. I have, for example, been a guest speaker at a number of Japanese film series organized by the Japan Society of New York. These events are designed to promote better understanding between the USA and Japan. For the last three summers running, I have appeared as an invited speaker at the Hakodate International Foundation, Hokkaido. The audience consists of American college students from all over the United States, who are taking intensive Japanese language classes.
Since my Japanese film course was the first to be offered at an American academic institution, I am frequently asked to help others set up similar programs. Very often this leads to demonstration lectures like those I offered recently at Tufts University and the University of Alberta.
Here in Pittsburgh, I have worked at fundraising in support of our annual Japanese Film Festival. This collaborative effort between the University of Pittsburgh and the Carnegie Museum of Art has elicited generous contributions from the U.S. Department of Education, the Toshiba International Foundation and the Japan Iron and Steel Federation.
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As Teacher/Researcher
Here at the university, I seem to be known as a teacher dedicated to exploring and explaining the complex interaction between language, literature, and cinema/drama. Such is my aim, at least, as I work and re-work my lecture notes. Students today quite rightly refuse to sit still for stale or poorly organized classroom materials. I use lecture notes to prepare for a class, but never read from them. I think eye contact and a relaxed, person-to-person style of delivery are important aids to classroom rapport.
My "other" life of scholarly research makes it easier to look my students in the eye and talk in terms of easy familiarity with my subject. The longer I teach and research, the more convinced I am that (as the song about love and marriage says) "you can't have one without the other." As I understand it, a well-researched book does its best work in the classroom, either directly as text, or indirectly, through the author whose teaching it has enriched.
In my case, work in print and work viva voce both bring me back to the same basic question I have been asking myself for years now: "How does a teacher coming from a non-Western tradition teach Western students how to 'read' a Japanese film or literary work?" All my books address that question one way or another. Titles like Cinema East: A Critical Study of Major Japanese Films, Mizoguchi (1984), getsu (1993), and Japanese Classical Theater in Films (1994) will obviously interest scholars and students of cinema. But I also try to write in a style accessible to the general reader and student with wide-ranging interests.
A number of critics and reviewers have praised my effort to put aside specialist jargon in favor of challenging, but accessible, cross-cultural synthesis. My latest attempt in this line is From Book to Screen: Modern Japanese Literature in Films. It was published in January, 2000. I am currently completing How To Read a Japanese Film, a textbook for Japanese cinema classes.
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As Student of Students
As every teacher/author knows, response to works in print seems cut-and-dry compared to the real-live response of a classroom when a course is going well. I am grateful to my students and sometimes astonished by their frank and energetic engagement with a culture so different from theirs. I see this at all levels. I see it in the highly motivated majors who take the two advanced Japanese language courses I offer each year. I also see it in the generalized enrollment for the "culture" courses I offer. There, something like 180 students a year let me know how I am doing. In any event, the longer I teach the more like a student I feel--the one most exposed to the need for humility.
It takes some doing to meet the challenge of present-day work loads, but I think it best to handle all aspects of a course myself. I ask each student to write three or four critical essays in addition to a final essay exam, so it seems only fair (not to mention educational for me) to read those papers myself. It is also gratifying to discover that the course at hand has some bearing on a student's academic progress in general. I design assignments with that in mind and do my best to offer written commentary which encourages students to connect and expand their interests.
I do wish my weekends could expand accordingly. Getting students to see (as it were) how cinema fits the larger picture is engaging, not to mention time-consuming. As it is, I seem to devote Saturdays and Sundays to housework, running for exercise, and student papers and more papers.
As a product of the autocratic Japanese system of education, I am especially grateful for the congenial collegiate atmosphere that prevails on a campus like ours. It is a pleasure to schedule crowded office hours for students so refreshingly forthright, so eager to make contact with teacher and subject matter. Japanese students, I fear, would never dare to make suggestions for improving a class they are sitting in. Our students at Pitt do this so naturally, and so helpfully, that I no longer find myself surprised to be a teacher learning in such a non-Japanese way.
Now that higher education is hi-tech saturated too, e-mail gives students access to teachers to a degree unthinkable not that many years ago. I must say, I'm not persuaded that this new mode of access is all that wonderful. E-mail strikes me as a sadly remote convenience, a poor substitute for plain old-fashioned face-to-face conversation before or after class or in the teacher's office.
Another consequence of student/teacher rapport possible in the USA strikes me as quintessentially American too. I find myself taking an interest in all aspects of student life. Two years ago I sat on the Campus Climate Subcommittee organized by the Office of the Provost. The committee read through piles of documents on the subject and met with student representatives from various disciplines. It was a chastening experience. We met with students who clearly had reason to see faculty as inaccessible, even intimidating! I doubt that students in my classes feel that way.
As a native of Japan, I am especially proud to be part of a Japanese language program considered one of the best in the nation. A world-famous Japanese linguist (director of the Middlebury Japanese language summer school) has recently evaluated our efforts in a report that is nothing but positive.
All the more reason (I think) for our program to be actively recruiting the best and brightest. The young are famously quick when it comes to language aptitude so it has to be good news that so many high schools in Western Pennsylvania are offering Japanese. Three of my own former students are teaching it now in Pittsburgh.
Most recently, my own mission to attract new recruits put me in the position of moderator for the 2002 Japan Bowl, an experience I'll be happy to repeat this year. This event, sponsored by the Japan-America Society of Pittsburgh, is a Japanese language contest. Many high school students participate, the best fourth-level team of students being chosen for the final competition in Washington D.C. I was amazed by the energy and joy these youngsters brought to their quest for competence in a language so difficult to learn. I was not the only participant encouraged to think that we need to press even harder for foreign language instruction at earlier ages in American schools.
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As Teacher On the Run, Body and Mind
This may be the place to mention that I have been nominated three times for the Chancellor's Distinguished Teaching award. My students put my name forward in 1989, at what seemed the lowest point of my life. My father was dying in Japan. I flew there four times, on weekends, missing class only on the day of the funeral. I was deeply touched that my students saw fit to honor our commitment to one another with that nomination. I think it also owed something to their awareness of the importance of exercise to my physical and mental stamina in that time of crisis.
I doubt that students in Japan would think to think of a professor as physically fit, but that too is part of my reputation at Pitt. My excuse for being seen to run some miles a day through local streets and parks is an ancient one: the hope of having "a sound mind in a sound body." In an article from Pitt Magazine, a student describes me as "the happiest professor on campus." I do in fact believe that teachers owe their students an appearance of balance—good humor and self-discipline, say, no matter how dark the day or strained this or that temper or ligament.
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As Inheritor of the Confucian Ideal of Benevolence
I see my Japanese heritage at work in this. Both Confucianism and Bushido emphasize balance. The virtue of benevolence so highly prized by both these ancient schools of thought is seen as combining rectitude and compassion. My aim as a teacher is to strike that same balance. Here in America we might call it aiming to be tough but fair. That's how a student evaluating me put it: "She's tough, but her grades are fair." I hope to continue earning that good opinion.
Issues of fairness have acquired a new edge, now that university education has become far more of a challenge to students who work to pay their way. Every year I find more reason to look for ways to ease that burden on students. For three years now I have been able to get NRC (National Resource Center) funds for student research assistance for course improvement. In the last two years I have also supervised student research projects made possible through the Honors’ College. I also find myself putting more time and energy into writing letters of reference in support of outstanding students and advisees who also stand in need of grants and scholarships.
As a native-born Japanese, I take special pride in sharing my heritage with an adoptive country whose students continue to edify me with their eagerness to encounter and learn. Many of them take two of my classes. Some take more. I cannot say how pleased I am that such dedicated students have seen fit to nominate me for a number of teaching excellence awards.
Education
- Ph.D., 1974, Department of English, University of Oregon
Dissertation title: "In Search of the Orient: W. B. Yeats and Japanese Tradition."
- M.A., 1966, Department of English, State University of California
Thesis title: "The Japanese Tradition of Ezra Pound's Poetry: The Effect of Haiku and Noh Plays on the Formation of His Theory of Poetic Imagery."
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B.A., 1963, Department of English, Osaka University of Foreign Studies, Osaka, Japan. (Minor in Liguistics)
Awards
2002 — Fulbright Senior Fellowship 2001 — Faculty Honor Roll 2000 — Faculty Honor Roll 1999 to present, "Toshiba International Grant"
(jointly with Drs. Thomas Rimer and Mae Smethurst) 1998 — Research-in-Japan Grant from the Japan Iron & Steel Endowment of the University of Pittsburgh 1998 — Asian Studies Teaching Excellence Award
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