The aspens in the Rocky Mountains have turned a glorious yellow, and the leaves are beginning to fall in Boulder. It won't be long before snow decorates the mountain tops. I hope your climates are treating you as well.
The ATJ seminar and nominating committees are hard at work this fall putting together programs and slates for next year. The next issue of the Newsletter will carry information on the program for the 2003 ATJ Seminar as well as on the candidates for the Board and for President-Elect.
As has been the case for several years, the ATJ Seminar will be scheduled all day March 27, the Thursday preceding the Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, and it will feature a variety of panels on Japanese linguistics, language pedagogy, and literature. In addition, the ATJ “designated panel” at AAS, “Asia in Situ: Acquiring Language and Culture in Study Abroad,” has been scheduled for Thursday evening at 7, so we’ll have a full day of ATJ-sponsored events. The panel builds on the work Susan Schmidt and many ATJ members have put into the Bridging Project in support of study abroad in Japan as well as the “advanced Japanese assessment project,” and it broadens the focus to address study abroad in other parts of Asia as well. I look forward to seeing you in New York in the spring for what promises to be an exciting program of events. I encourage you to stay for the full AAS meeting, too, if you can, as there are always many panels of interest to the ATJ membership.
As you know, ATJ members may participate in the ATJ Thursday Seminar at no charge, so please keep an eye out for your annual membership renewal notice (which should arrive in December) and return it promptly. Please also let your students know about student rates for ATJ membership, and remind your colleagues to renew, too. A lifetime or five-year membership will save you worrying each year about whether you’ve renewed. And a contribution to the ATJ endowment brings an additional tax deduction!
Finally, a piece of very good news for ATJ: the complete contents of our Journal, from volume 1 (1965) to volume 33 (1999), are now available on-line through the JSTOR digital archive. We’ve arranged to offer individual access to ATJ members only, beginning January 2, 2003—another reason to renew your membership promptly! See page 2 for full details.
Laurel Rasplica Rodd
From the President-Elect
The first six months of my tenure as incoming president have required me to synthesize an unbelievable quantity of information. In July, Laurel Rodd and Susan Schmidt hosted me for a weekend in Boulder where we held a marathon session in which I was introduced to all of the ATJ projects. Since then, we trade almost daily email on the ATJ’s and the ATJ president’s role in research endeavors, in lobbying Washington, D.C., for language education, in scholarship initiatives, and in educational proposals. I often have the uncomfortable feeling that just about the time I master all of this, it will be time to pass the baton on to someone else. Still, the information that I have synthesized has been critical to my own planning for what it is that I want to accomplish next year when I actually assume the duties of president. A year is very little time in which to try to have any genuine impact. Nonetheless, I see the ATJ presidency as a rare opportunity to leverage the resources and influence of the association in making a contribution to the broader field of Japanese language teaching and in leaving the organization in an even better place than where I found it. I have been evaluating a number of potential projects and tasks that I feel to be important to the field. My own thoughts center right now on a project to assess the long-term effects of study abroad. To that end, the ATJ has organized a roundtable discussion at next year’s AAS conference (March 27-30) in New York City. “Asia in Situ—Acquiring Language and Culture in Study Abroad” will take place on Thursday (March 27) at 7:00 p.m. in a location to be announced in the AAS conference program. I invite all of you who have an interest in study abroad to participate, or if you cannot be there, to send your ideas for what topics should be covered to the ATJ (atj@colorado.edu). Between now and the time of the AAS conference, I will be honing this study-abroad theme into what I hope is a fundable research proposal. I look forward to reporting my progress to the membership.
On a bright note, it is my understanding from colleagues around the country that Japanese enrollments are booming. I have heard this attributed to the overall rise in college matriculation that stems from a suffering economy—“No job? Go back to school.” But I have heard no one say that students are less committed than usual or that attrition is particularly high. Given the current political climate, we can only be encouraged, I think, that students are opting to study other languages and cultures and are taking an active interest in looking at the world from a cultural perspective other than their own.
I wish everyone a successful and stress-free academic term.
Pat Wetzel