One event, two national textbooks

From East Asia·An enduring case

Japanese and Chinese school treatments of the 1937 Nanjing atrocities have differed for decades in wording, casualty figures and space allotted, and textbook approvals in one country trigger protests in the other. Students in each system inherit not just an account but a controversy about the other side's account.

The concepts this raises

Each of these gives a class a different way into the same case.

PerspectiveThe Knower's Lens
The position from which a knower encounters something, made up of their history, training, interests and situation. A perspective is not only a limitation: it can make features of a problem visible that no view from nowhere would pick up.
PowerKnowledge and Society
The capacity to shape what counts as knowledge, who is heard, and what gets funded, published or taught. Power is not only censorship; setting an agenda, controlling a platform or being granted authority all change the knowledge that a community ends up with.

Where it sits in the knowledge framework

Perspectives
Whose viewpoints have shaped this knowledge, which viewpoints have been absent, and how the discipline handles internal disagreement. This element includes the historical dimension: how the standpoint of a field has moved over time.
Ethics
The ethical questions internal to the knowledge itself: what may be investigated and how, what obligations the knowledge places on those who hold it, and the ethical constraints the discipline imposes on its own practitioners.

Areas of knowledge

Themes

Cases that raise a concept this one raises, but in a different area of knowledge or a different part of the world. That contrast is the point: it is what shows a student the concept travels.