"Teaching is such a do, do, do job," said one of the participants in the Maine Humanities Council's Teachers for a New Century in Southern Maine seminars this spring. "I have experienced here a revitalization. This opportunity for reflection renews my incentive as an artist and educator."

As a middle school art teacher, she has 350 students a year. That number alone suggests the ripple effect a good professional development program can have, once the participant is back in the classroom.

Forty teachers from the greater Portland area participated in such seminars this spring as did about that number last fall. They were part of a national effort sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation to take teachers briefly away from their daily routines and offer them intellectually intense encounters with top-quality scholars. The southern Maine program is a joint effort by the Council, the University of Southern Maine, the Portland School District, and the seven districts that make up the Casco Bay Educational Alliance.

This spring, participants had a choice of three seminars taught by USM faculty. Art historian Kim Grant offered a survey of contemporary art and society, her colleague Donna Cassidy produced an interdisciplinary study of the evolution of the American home (drawing on literature, architecture, sociology, and film), and political scientist Mahmud Faksh surveyed the history, religion, and culture of the Islamic world.

Last fall, historian David Carey Jr. taught Latin American history and culture (with particular emphasis on indigenous peoples), and medievalist Kathleen Ashley explored the religious and civic dramas of the Middle Ages (her seminar staged and performed a morality play).

Typically, each seminar meets three times for a whole day, during the school week. A heavy reading load is assigned, and participants are treated as if they were in a graduate-level seminar, with much of the day spent in group discussion. The seminars, including books, are free of charge to the teachers. Their school districts pay a fee to join the program and cover the substantial cost of substitutes.

The seminars are designed especially for teachers who do not have time during the school year to take graduate courses or who are unable to attend summer institutes yet who wish to expand their knowledge base or learn a new subject. The emphasis is on their personal intellectual development, not pedagogy.

"It gives me incentive to stretch in other areas and to encourage students to do the same, reported a high school librarian who attended one of the spring sessions.

"The seminar opens doors," said another. "It succeeds in making you think. It revives a love of learning for its own sake."

Views of the East

At Mt. Ararat High School in Topsham this year, students in the Ancient World Cultures course taught by Gillian Watt and Lou Dorogi were asked to imagine themselves living through the life-stages of a scholar-official in old China. As "students" these fledgling literati studied the philosophies of Confucianism, Taoism, and legalism. As active civil servants, they served their emperor. In luxurious retirement, they devoted themselves to calligraphy, poetry, and painting.

Along the way, the role-playing Maine students learned a lot about Chinese geography, dynastic history, the Great Wall, scroll painting, and the nature of the Chinese language. Perhaps more important, they learned to see the world through the eyes of someone else.

Their teachers were able to plan and conduct this freshman course because of their participation in Views of the East. China and Japan in Maine Schools, an intensive, content-rich professional development program co-sponsored by the Maine Humanities Council and the World Affairs Council of Maine, under a grant from the Freeman Foundation, administered by the Five College Center for East Asian Studies.

Gillian and Lou attended six days of seminars last year at Bowdoin College taught by university-level experts on East Asia and were each given $200 in books for their personal libraries and $300 to purchase books and other materials for their schools. They met again this spring for a one-day curriculum workshop in which they traded notes with colleagues on how to apply what they had learned back in the classroom.

The results were impressive, not only in the teachers' imaginative application of their knowledge of East Asia, but also in the fact that teams from the same school found ways of crossing disciplinary boundaries. For example, at Belfast Area High School, Molly Dinsmore (social studies) and Bill Murphy (English) introduced a team-taught, AP-level interdisciplinary sophomore course called Global Studies. The East Asian part of it included such topics as Buddhism, Marco Polo, the Silk Road, samurai culture, the Opium War, the Charter Oath, the film Ran, a novel by Mishima, and the writing of tanka and haiku.

The Belfast team put special emphasis on "DBQ' - the document-based question that often appears now on AP exams. Students are given several pages of complicated historical texts - for example, from the classical period of Chinese history - and asked to analyze what they reveal about that particular culture's worldview thought patterns, religious beliefs, and political practices.

This spring, another group of 22 teachers - from as far away as Fort Kent and North Berwick - gathered at Bowdoin to begin the third year of Views of the East seminars. They meet again on June 23-26 for another round of lectures, discussions, and performances.

The interest in East Asia has been encouraged by the Maine Learning Results, which seek to replace traditional "Western civ" courses with a less parochial study of world cultures and their interrelationship. But very few Maine teachers have much training in non-Western cultures. Hence the value of seminars like Views of the East.

"It's important to start early," said Tom Leonard, who has his sixth-graders in Old Town reading Eleanor Coerr's Sadako and the 1,000 Paper Cranes, "so that by the time for ninth-grade social studies, they'll be ready to discuss the big questions of war and peace." (Based on a true story, the book is about a radiation-damaged child in post-war Hiroshima.)

"Asia shouldn't be an add-on, just for a few students who are interested," added Richard Joyce, who teaches at Morse High School in Bath. "It's something everybody needs to know about, as the Learning Results suggest. Views of the East gives us ammunition to go in and argue for these changes."

The reading list for the 2002-2003 program on East Asia can be found at www.mainehumanities.org.