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Teacher's Guide for Caravan to America: Living Arts of the Silk Road

Compiled by Betty J. Belanus, Education Specialist, Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, and Melanie T. Pinkert, Education Consultant.

INTRODUCTION

Caravan to America: The Living Arts of the Silk Road contains a wealth of information about the historic trade route and its connections to present-day American life. The eight people featured in the book carry on the music, crafts, and other traditions of their ancestors, creating a lively link between old and new. In using the book as a teaching resource, this is perhaps one of the most important lessons you as a teacher can pass on: traditions live through the efforts of individuals and families who find their heritage important, and who give these traditions new vitality even in settings far from their origins.

This teacher's guide provides classroom ideas, resource links, and a few specific lesson plans. We are sure that you will think of many more ways to use Caravan to America in your classes. The guide is divided into four parts:
  1. The Ancient Silk Road and Contemporary Connections: Some background on the Silk Road Project and the 2002 Smithsonian Folklife Festival's Silk Road program; ideas for map activities; links to resources on Silk Road arts and culture.
  2. Interviews and Writing: Interviewing techniques used in the preparation of Caravan to America; using interviewing in the classroom as a research and writing tool; collecting information about your own family or community's connections to the past.
  3. Music along the Silk Road: Ideas for classroom projects and a brief discography of music from Silk Road countries and regions.
  4. Web Resources: Links to sites providing more in-depth information on many of the traditions featured in Caravan to America.
Caravan to America can be used in a wide variety of subject areas. Here are some suggestions:
Social Studies: Geography/History
Geography: The Silk Road encompasses a vast geographic area. The link for a mapping exercise developed by the Silk Road Project is provided in this guide. There will be many opportunities for your students to learn more about Silk Road geography while reading Caravan to America.

History: Brief historical sketches of countries and regions with which the featured artists are associated are included in Caravan to America. Students can research these areas further through books and Web sites. See the bibliographic section of Caravan to America and the Web links provided below.

Language Arts: Reading/Writing
Reading: If time does not allow your class to read the whole of Caravan to America, you might assign specific chapters to individual students or groups of students for oral or written reports. Additional research on the Web (see links below) provides an extended reading experience.

Writing: Interviewing is a great technique for teaching writing. See the "Interviewing and Writing" section of this guide for more information on interviewing techniques and suggestions for writing reports and essays using interviews.

Arts: Music/Visual Arts
Music: Many recordings of traditional Silk Road music are available, especially through Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. See the "Music along the Silk Road" section of this guide for classroom activity suggestions and resources.

Visual Arts: Caravan to America features Central Asian carpet designs, Armenian illuminated manuscripts, the art of Chinese opera makeup, and Tibetan thangka painting. Any and all of these can be an inspiration for visual arts students. For more information, see below.

Home Economics/Physical Education
Cooking: A recipe for Persian cookies is included in the book, and the cookbooks of Najmieh Batmanglij are available in many bookstores. Discussion of these recipes and Persian and other Silk Road cooking (see below for resource links) can spur a lively discussion about family food traditions.

Physical Education: Like featured artist Doug Kim, many students across America are involved in Asian martial arts as a form of exercise, competitive sport, and discipline. Demonstrations by competent students, or their martial arts instructors, could add a new dimension to a physical education program.

Math/Science
Math: Geometric patterns exist in carpets, illuminated manuscripts, and thangka paintings. See below for resource links for further exploration of these traditions.

Science: There is a great deal of science behind building an intricate musical instrument such as one of Peter Kyvelos's ouds, including the physics of sound and the mechanics of fitting pieces together.
THE ANCIENT SILK ROAD AND CONTEMPORARY CONNECTIONS

This book is about history, not just the past, but history as it is happening right now. It is about history that continues from the past into the present and is being preserved for the future.

- Yo-Yo Ma, from the Foreword to Caravan to America

For ten days in late June and early July, the 2002 Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., featured the Silk Road, a living exhibition of the music, crafts, culinary arts, and narrative traditions involved in the historical cultural interchange between East and West. The festival program was produced in collaboration with the Silk Road Project, Inc. - an organization founded by cellist Yo-Yo Ma that includes supporting concerts, activities, and educational programs across the United States, Europe, and Asia on Silk Road themes.

The Silk Road program illustrated connections between the cultures of Asia, Europe, and America based upon historical trade routes. It emphasized the development of many living traditions - from silk textiles to tea drinking, from stringed instruments to paper making, from noodle traditions to blue and white "chinaware." The program highlighted how the East and the West were brought closer together through a creative commercial and cultural exchange that still enriches our lives today. The Silk Road, as an early form of globalization, has relevance to current forms of cultural and commercial exchange as contacts between Europe, Asia, and America continue to expand.

The book Caravan to America: Living Arts of the Silk Road was inspired by the work of the Silk Road Project and the research done for the festival program. A number of the artists featured in the book performed music or demonstrated their artistic skills at the festival. Like the festival program, the book provides the reader with an engaging way to learn about the contemporary continuation of ancient skills that originated in Silk Road countries, by introducing real people who practice these arts. You can learn more about the Silk Road Project and the 2002 Smithsonian Folklife Festival's Silk Road Program by visiting the Web site of the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. A link to the Silk Road Project's Web site will allow you to download background articles about many of the traditions presented at the festival: www.folklife.si.edu/CFCH/festival2002.htm.

Silk Road Geography

It is difficult to study the historic and contemporary Silk Road without first understanding the geography of the vast area it covers. Caravan to America provides a map of the Silk Road with countries, major geographic features, cities, and trade routes marked. Your students will gain a better understanding of the geography of the Silk Road by studying more detailed maps of the region, and drawing their own maps. (Remember that most of the nations named on present-day maps did not exist as such during the various Silk Road eras.)

The teacher's guide available on the Silk Road Project's Web site provides a lesson called "The Silk Roads Big Map" in which students create their own large map of the Silk Road. This map can then be used throughout study of the Silk Road. New information may be added as students learn more. If students are reading Caravan to America, they can locate and mark all the geographic locations mentioned in the book. A map of the United States would be helpful as well, to track the places where the people in the book live.

Here is the link to the Silk Road Project's teacher's guide: www.silkroadproject.org. Click on the "Teachers" section.

A great source of maps is the "Ask Asia" section of the Asia Society Web site: www.askasia.org/teachers.

Further Resources on Silk Road History, Art, and Culture

Other general resources for studying history, art, and culture along the ancient and contemporary Silk Road are available on the Web.

The Smithsonian's Freer and Sackler Galleries have a vast collection and great exhibitions on Asian culture and art. Their Web site, www.asia.si.edu, includes on-line teacher guides and gallery guides and information on ordering other resources.

Interesting reading for older students about a trip across the Silk Road: www.sallys-place.com/travel/asia/china_silkroad_p1.htm.

A great site, with good photos as well as historical and present-day descriptions of the Silk Road and a bibliography: www.ess.uci.edu/~oliver/silk.html.

Description of travel along the Silk Road, featuring particular cities and archaeological sites, with photos: www.alumni.caltech.edu/~pamlogan/srart.html.

This Silk Road Timeline gives students a thumbnail sketch of important dates: www.schirmer.com/silkroad/timeline.html.

From California Online Resources for Education, an interactive lesson plan: http://score.rims.k12.ca.us/activity/silkroad.

These sites will link you to others, providing a wealth of information about the Silk Road. Since Internet addresses are subject to rapid change, we apologize if some of these addresses cannot be accessed.

INTERVIEWS AND WRITING

Interviews by authors John S. Major and Betty J. Belanus form the basis for Caravan to America. With a little help, students can conduct their own interviews and write their own reports or essays based on those interviews.

There are many interview guides available to give students the tools they need to get started (see links below). Here are a few pointers for your students, based on the experience of the authors of Caravan to America. Please feel free to print out these helpful hints and hand them out to your students:

Helpful Hints for Interviewing
  1. Before you begin an interview, do some background research so that you know something about the topic of your interview. The authors of Caravan to America were not experts on all of the traditions featured in the book. They researched topics such as Asian martial arts, Tibetan thangka painting, and Beijing Opera in books, on Web sites, and by consulting with experts before talking to the folk artists.
  2. Get to know the person you are going to talk to before you do the actual interview. Of course, if this person is a close personal friend or member of your family, you might already know them well. But before you sit down with a tape recorder between you and the person you are interviewing, it helps to visit awhile, put the person at ease, and learn something about their personality, interests, and life.
  3. Form a list of questions to guide you through the interview. These should be basic questions - "How did you learn your art?" - that will open an interesting aspect of the topic. Avoid questions that can be answered by a simple "yes" or "no."
  4. Use a tape recorder to get exact quotes, and to make sure that you get all the information correct. Practice with the tape recorder to make sure you know how to use it before you go to your interview.
  5. During your interview, ask for clarification if something is unfamiliar to you (like certain terms, or how to spell names). There were many unfamiliar names of instruments, places, and techniques that the authors of Caravan to America had to ask about.
  6. Ask whether the person you are interviewing has any photos or other items relating to the topic. You will notice that there are many family photographs and other illustrations that make Caravan to America's interviews come alive.
  7. Follow up your interview by gathering more information about the topic and by asking the person you interviewed for more information if necessary. If possible, give the people you interview a copy of the transcript (see below) to check for accuracy.
In writing a report or essay based on an interview, you will have to edit a great deal of what is said so it makes sense to the reader, and so it is not too long. To illustrate this, let's take a look at one of the interviews done for Caravan to America and compare it to what was written for the book.

Here is a section of a transcript (the word-for-word written version of a taped interview) of the interview with Doug Kim, martial artist, conducted by Betty Belanus on February 2nd, 2002.

Betty Belanus:Were there any elements of Korean traditional life in your family?
Doug Kim:There were and there weren't. My mom cooked traditional Korean food; my dad was a strict Confucianist in the way he raised us. By that I mean he was very much concerned about respect for the parents, respect for the elders.

I remember one time being spanked because my younger sister, the youngest of four, did something wrong. My father hauled all four of us into the living room and spanked all four of us. And he never took the time to explain to us - it never occurred to him to explain to us - that in the Confucian sense, we as older siblings were responsible for our younger sibling. More importantly, he never explained to our younger sibling that she had to listen to us! So that was a problem.

But that was the environment I was raised in. Communications were from the top down and decisions were very unilateral. And a lot of this I didn't understand until I majored in East Asian Studies in college and I discovered my parents weren't crazy, they were just sticking to a prescription that was a couple hundred years old, and the culture they grew up in had very different orientations than American culture.
Betty Belanus:How did you become interested in the martial arts?
Doug Kim:I was born and raised in the Midwest. I was born in St. Paul, and every five years we would move for my dad's medical education. And so we moved from St. Paul, Minnesota, to Madison, Wisconsin, and then to Munster, Indiana, which is near Gary, outside of Chicago, and then to Farmington, Michigan, outside of Detroit. So basically every five years we moved, and we were always the only Asian family in the community, till high school. And certain parts of the Midwest were not as enlightened as one would hope they would be. And so I had a lot of difficulty both with identity and with being teased by my peers.

Which kind of brings us to the question about how I got interested in the martial arts. In fourth grade, we moved from St. Paul to Munster. And I distinctively remember fourth grade because, as the new kids on the block, my brother and I got beaten up for being Asian, and it got to such a point that my father got frustrated and took us to Hammond for judo lessons.
Betty Belanus:Oh!
Doug Kim:And basically it was more self-defense than judo. But we learned finger twisting and arm twisting and so forth. That helped. Although I must say that by the time it really helped we had gotten bigger and we weren't being picked on so much. We had gotten bigger and we were more accepted in the community.

But when we first got there, we were teased mercilessly by - and this goes back to the point about my parents being incapable of explaining their pride in being Korean, because kids would taunt us and say, "You're a Chink, you're a Jap," and we'd say, "No, we're Korean!" And we'd fight about it. Then we would go home and my mom would say, "Dougie, how come you got beaten up?" And I'd say, "Well, they called me a Chink or a Jap," and she'd say, "No, you're Korean!" And you'd say, "Okay." But she never had the ability to explain, or it never occurred to her to say, "Well, you're Korean and it means this," and how it's different from being Japanese or Chinese. She didn't give us any ammunition to defend ourselves with.

Here is how the author edited and interpreted that information when writing the section of the book on Doug Kim:
When Doug was growing up, his family followed many Korean customs: they ate traditional Korean foods and celebrated Korean holidays. His parents spoke Korean to each other, were proud of their native country, and often (it seemed to Doug) disciplined their four children more strictly than his friends' parents did. Yet Doug felt that his parents, who had moved to the United States when they were in their early twenties, could never really explain what it was (or meant) to be "Korean." While his father was studying to be a surgeon, the Kims moved around the Midwestern United States about every five years. They were usually the only Asian family in their area. Other children would taunt Doug and his siblings, calling them "Chink" and "Jap." "I would say, 'No, I'm Korean,' and we'd fight about it and I'd get beaten up," Doug recalls. When the family moved to Munster, Indiana, in the 1960s, neighborhood kids didn't like the "new Asian kids on the block." Doug and his brother got beaten up often. Doug's dad decided that his sons needed to learn some self-defense, so he took them to nearby Hammond, Indiana, for six months of Judo lessons.
Think about the transcription and the written piece. This section of transcription only covers a few minutes of an interview that lasted over an hour. How long do you think a full transcription of the interview would be? What did the author leave out, and why? What information is included in the written piece that does not appear in the transcript and where did the author get that information? What is interesting to you about the word-for-word version? How many stories does Doug Kim tell within this short section of transcription?

Here is a link that will give students more information about conducting interviews and using the information in your class: www.carts.org. This site features an on-line catalog full of resources and information on many student projects that have been done around the United States. The "Resources" section links teachers to many other useful Web sites.

MUSIC ALONG THE SILK ROAD: SOME TEACHING IDEAS
Compiled by Melanie T. Pinkert, Education Consultant, Montgomery County, Maryland

Music has been a vital part of the cultures along the Silk Road. Musical instruments, songs, and playing styles - like fabrics, herbal medicines, and precious stones - traveled the route. They were adapted and reinvented by many performers. The music traditions are as diverse as the artisans you will meet in Caravan to America.

Below are some ideas for connecting the music of the Silk Road to lessons in your classroom. Whether you use the ideas or just play some of the selections from the CDs, you can give your students a more in-depth look at the rich heritage of this geographic and cultural network. A list of selected recordings follows, with a link to the Smithsonian Folkways Recordings catalog.

Ideas for Classroom Projects
  1. Music Listening: Have students listen to music from a particular area or region you are studying. Discuss what you hear. Is the music high or low? loud or soft? slow or fast? Compare the music of two different regions or countries. How are they the same or different? What types of instruments and voices do you hear?
  2. Literature Connection: How do nomadic cultures along the Silk Road describe nature? Listen to a song about a natural subject (sun or moon, trees, birds or animals). Discuss with students what songs they know and can sing on this topic. Ask students to write their own stories about nature.
  3. Art/Design Connection: Traditional dress plays an important role in music performance. Listen to the music and look at pictures of the performers. How are the clothes they perform in decorated? Have students describe what traditional dress or uniforms they see when they attend a concert. Have students design and draw performing clothes they would like to wear.
  4. Music/Geography Connection: Have students construct a map of the Silk Road and musical instruments that come from different regions. Trace the travels of one type, such as stringed or air-blown instruments, or drums.
Music from Countries and Regions of the Silk Road

The Silk Road: A Musical Caravan (SFW 40438). A two-CD sampler of twenty-three pieces representing the musical traditions along the Silk Road. Includes pictures of instruments and performers, and descriptions of the music.

Bukhara: The Musical Crossroads of Asia (SFW 40050). Ancient musical traditions still practiced in 1990, including family celebrations, Uzbek court music, and religious chant. Extensive liner notes and colorful album cover of performers in traditional clothing.

Tuva among the Spirits: Sound, Music, and Nature in Sakina and Tuva (SFW 40454). The music of Tuva, just north of Mongolia in eastern Siberia. Vocal overtones are a hallmark singing style of the nomadic Tuvan people. Extensive liner notes.

Classical Music of Iran: The Dastgah Systems (SFW 40039). The dastgah systems are used to compose melodies and phrases in Persian music. Explanations of the musical system and compositions.

Richard Hagopian: Armenian Music through the Ages (SFW 40414). A variety of traditions from this small country bordered by Turkey, Azerbaijan, Iran, Russia, and Georgia. Extensive liner notes.

Link to more information about Smithsonian Folkways Recordings:www.folkways.si.edu.

WEB RESOURCES FOR TRADITIONS DESCRIBED IN CARAVAN TO AMERICA

The "Suggestions for Further Reading" section at the end of Caravan to America has a useful list of books and Web sites to visit to learn more about the traditions in the book. Here are some other links to help your students find more information.
Beijing (Chinese) Opera
Links to Beijing Opera articles and sites from about.com, very useful in learning more about the tradition: http://chineseculture.about.com/cs/beijingopera.

From Ohio State University, a good overview of Beijing Opera: www.cohums.ohio-state.edu/deall/bender.4/perform/pg1opera.

A professional photographer's gallery of Beijing Opera photos: www.mir.com.my/rb/photography/portfolio/ricky/opera.htm.

Asian Martial Arts
A wealth of resources on Korean martial arts, including histories, descriptions, and videos of martial arts moves: www.martialartsresource.com/korean/korframe.htm.

Tibetan Thangka Painting
A step-by-step guide to thangka painting: www.chopa.com/thangkapainting.htm.

General information, as well as photographs of 257 thangka paintings from the Dharmapala Thangka Centre: www.bremen.de/info/nepal/Inhalt-e.htm.

Persian/Silk Road Cooking
From the publishers of Najmieh Batmanglij's cookbooks, excerpts of her books and some sample recipes as well as links to many sites about Persia and Iran: www.mage.com.

Bukharan Song and Dance
See the "Music along the Silk Road" section of this guide for more information and links.

Armenian Calligraphy/Illuminated Manuscripts
General information about Armenian arts and culture: www.hyeetch.nareg.com.au.

General information on the art of calligraphy: www.clas.co.uk and www.calligraphyonline.org.

Greek/Middle Eastern Oud Making and Playing
A history of the instrument and many links to other oud-related sites: http://website.lineone.net/~david.parfitt/links.html.
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