[Lesson Plan Reflection] Shinto And Japanese History Lesson Plan Reflection (Made 2024 Spring Semester)

History of Premodern East Asia 

Final Project Reflection

1. My project is titled “Shinto and Japanese History” and is a lesson plan designed to be used with 9th-10th grade high school students. At its core this lesson was an attempt to connect Shinto to Japanese culture, politics, and history, however it wound up being more of a look at the way Shinto’s development connected to those things with a potential for talking about Shinto’s cultural impact within that framework. I wanted to communicate to my students that Shinto is important to Japanese history and that a lot can be learned from both Japanese history and Shinto, and I believe that I did that even if not in the way I expected to. The lesson plan centers on a presentation to be delivered over 3 days of class, with the idea being that I will start off with a retelling of the story of Amaterasu and the Cave and then walk my students through the development of Japan and Shinto over the span between the Asuka Period and the Edo Period, intertwining the two throughout the presentation and encouraging questions, hypothesis, and observations from my students throughout. The students will also have a note sheet that they will be filling out, but along with sections to fill out that are guided there is room for additional notes which will be required because some important things are not included in the guided areas. This is in order to develop their note taking abilities and critical thinking skills. The idea with this lesson is that I will not be “lecturing” my students, I think “lecturing” is a fundamentally incorrect way of approaching history. History is a story, and I want to tell my students the story of Shinto and Japan, about how Buddhism influenced the fledgling nation, about how it fell apart and built itself back up, about how it constructed the idea of an indigenous religion from practices that had long been considered Buddhist, and I want to enthrall them the way I was enthralled learning about this myself. I wanted to use stories of gods and monsters to get my students interested and use those stories to encourage them to want to learn about Japanese history and culture, but ended up finding another core to build the lesson around, a core that I think will connect to them in a similar and more personal way while still keeping them invested. I believe that by telling the story to my students and encouraging them to interact with it I will deliver my message quite successfully.

2. I absolutely believe that my project succeeds in creating an evidence-based argument in presentation format using reliable and varied sources including the Kojiki itself. I believe it also creates a powerful narrative about the development of religion and how it reflects society at the same time. I am not entirely sure how I would say this demonstrates an ability to analyze and/or interpret sources, since teachers cannot really teach interpretations, they need to try and teach accurate truth, but in that regard I believe I have connected various perspectives together into a coherent pseudo-truth that is close to what is reality, which is really the best a history teacher can do in my opinion. I dealt with sources that disagreed on what Shinto was and its value and I was able to blend them together to create a presentation to reflects both ideas while staying true to what reality seems to agree upon. I believe this reflects a successful analysis and interpretation of sources and I believe that during the presentation itself I would be able to show that even moreso by talking about the research I did and the connections between the stories of the Kojiki and the events being talked about. I believe that my lesson plan does demonstrate my ability to put historical evidence into its context, however a lot of that does come from an assumption that I have already discussed many things in the past, such as Buddhism and the history of China. But beyond that I also believe that my entire lesson plan itself is historical evidence put into context, a combining of perspectives on historical events combined with a discussion of historical events surrounding those and the development of a central idea throughout it all. I believe that this is a successful demonstration. Creativity is where I feel I must put myself down. I am a very creative person, but when it comes to some things I can be quite bland, I suppose. A simple presentation filled with bullet points and only a few images is hardly creative, my notes sheet includes two venn-diagrams, a map of Japan to mark the locations of its historical capitals on, and a pyramid to use to depict the Edo period’s social hierarchy, but aside from that it’s just boxes to write things in based on different prompts. All of that said, I believe my exit tickets do give my students a chance to flex their creativity and show their understanding on a deep and contemplative level befitting high school students. Further, I believe that combining the development of Shinto with the development of Japan over its history is a creative idea and a good solution to the problem of students often being uninterested in history. I think that the information I communicate is partially fresh in terms of the way Japanese history is taught while also teaching the traditional and necessary information one must include, and I think that I combine my sources and ideas very well to create a final product that is not overtly creative but that does have creativity running through its veins.