Teach 3.11 Project Update: One Year after the Triple Disasters in Eastern Japan

Vol. 41, No. 2, April 2012
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Lisa Onaga

Following the disasters in eastern Japan on 11 March 2011, social media and news outlets carried videos of the earthquake's devastation and the horrifying tsunami that followed it. Instant replays of an explosion at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant heightened concerns about the events unfolding. How prepared were teachers around the world to talk about this event in classrooms? How ready were historians of science, technology, the environment, and medicine to offer analysis during this period of crisis? The multilingual educational project Teach 3.11, conceptualized a little over a week after the earthquake struck, responded to these concerns. The project aims to make it easier for students, teachers, and the public to learn about the historical and social issues related to the earthquake, tsunami, and ongoing nuclear disaster. It also taps the collective wisdom of scholars working, in various languages, at the intersections of history of science and technology and Asia.

Teach 3.11 launched its website in the spirit of international cooperation and solidarity under the auspices of the Forum for the History of Science in Asia, a special interest group of the HSS, on 14 April 2011. Teach 3.11 features resources to "teach the disaster" through the lens of the history of science, technology, and medicine in global East Asia. The site, a simple blog, publishes brief, lay summaries of pertinent books, articles, films, and other works. These annotated citations help teachers choose material for their classrooms. The site's content comes from students and scholars from different universities, colleges, and countries who volunteer their time, expertise, and language abilities. Multilingual volunteer editors work with contributors to edit annotations and undertake translations in order to ensure the international accessibility of each work. Teach 3.11 volunteers represent multiple fields, including East Asian studies, science studies, political science, film studies, communication, and architecture, in addition to the history of science, technology, and medicine.

One year after its launch, the project has continued to grow, gaining momentum after the co-located HSS/SHOT/4S meetings in Cleveland. New annotations appear weekly during the academic year, and the site has received 11,000 hits to date, with recent months averaging 300 hits per week. Twitter helps the project reach broader audiences (@Teach_311). The project's more intangible successes stem from the flexibility of its online format, which has made it possible for readers around the world to find new uses for Teach 3.11. For example, two students in Japan created much-needed English subtitles for a 1985 TEPCO documentary about the construction of Fukushima Daiichi. Graduate students who have contributed to the project have found that annotating books and articles is a rewarding way to progress through their reading lists. Faculty have informed us that they perused the site to seek inspiration for course assignments and syllabi. Other scholars peruse the site as part of their research activities, or to let us know of relevant titles, or take translation assignments. Many volunteers have simply wanted to help the victims—somehow—and to regain hope.

Not all of Teach 3.11's posts focus on Japan, however. Fully understanding the historical context of the triple disaster in Japan requires an engagement with all of East Asia, and with disasters more generally. As Teach 3.11 commits to a second year, adding new content and increasing translations of existing content in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean remain important goals. These new postings add to an already-vibrant online resource: a multilingual, multimedia annotated bibliography that people with various disciplinary interests may continue to find useful.

Though Teach 3.11 is a young project and the occasion of this one-year anniversary is too soon to forecast the next step for its volunteers, the project will likely play a role in remembrance of the triple disaster, fostering collaboration among scholars, teachers, students, and others who want a greater and more nuanced understanding of the earthquake, tsunami, and ongoing nuclear disaster. Teach 3.11 cordially invites HSS members to volunteer to write short annotations (and translations of existing annotations) in English, Japanese, Korean, or Chinese. Students as well as faculty are invited to contribute through the webpage.

For more information, to volunteer, or to send the Teach 3.11 team feedback about how you have used the resources on the website, please email teach3eleven@gmail.com or "follow" @Teach_311 on Twitter.

This newsletter entry is adapted in part from a longer essay first published in EASTS (Lisa Onaga, "Teach 3.11: Participatory Educational Project Puts the Kanto-Tōhoku Disaster into Historical Context," East Asian Science, Technology and Society 5.3 (2011): 417-422.). Lisa Onaga is a co-founder, managing editor of Teach 3.11, and a postdoctoral fellow of the D. Kim Foundation for the History of Science and Technology of East Asia, in residence at the Institute for Society and Genetics at UCLA.

History of Science Society

Teach 3.11 Project Update: One Year after the Triple Disasters in Eastern Japan

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