Pedagogy 2025

Abstract

For history to be relevant for today’s undergraduate students, educators need to draw explicit connections across temporal and geographic frameworks. The use of AI technology makes this easier for students to engage with. This article explores how to draw explicit contemporary connections in a continuum from past to present history. Education in the 21st-century means alternating between discussions and activities found on text and sources from the historical past with the injection of news articles, YouTube video clips, and contemporary text sources which resonate with understanding today’s experiences. As Mark Twain once said “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Twain didn’t mean only histories of a particular place. We can locate themes and events and happenings in Japan’s premodern and modern past which can resonate and have importance when analyzed from the point of view of contemporary happenings in other countries. As some countries today slide towards authoritarianism and away from democracy, Japan’s Tokugawa era or its imperial Meiji period “rhyme” with some nationalist or authoritarian movements of today. By making this explicit to students in the classroom, instructors can make the study of Japan’s last 400+ years of history much more relevant. It will be asserted that assessments which take a trans-temporal and trans-geographical approach to analyzing Japan’s modern history can make for authentic and engaged learning experiences. The use of LLM‘s and/or AI should not be avoided, as these tools can be utilized to help facilitate possible points of comparison and analysis.