Teaching Japanese Tea
April 27–28, 2024
The Teaching Tea symposium and workshop took place at the Japan House Los Angeles and at UCLA April 27–28, 2024.
The public-facing portion of this event on April 27th consisted of short presentations and roundtable discussions among tea scholars and practitioners from a variety of disciplines (art history, anthropology, history, literature) on their approaches to teaching chanoyu.
A private workshop followed to workshop the teaching materials that were later uploaded to the Japan Past & Present site as open-access resources.
This project had two major goals: first, to provide an open, interdisciplinary forum for the exchange of knowledge about tea history, culture, practice, and pedagogy that bridges the academic and practitioner/public divide. Second, to create high quality lesson plans and materials for instructors both experienced and inexperienced in Tea so that they may improve the depth and clarity of their pedagogical approaches to teaching about Tea practice in and beyond academic settings.
The Teaching Tea Symposium was co-presented by the Yanai Initiative for Globalizing Japanese Humanities and JAPAN House Los Angeles. The symposium and project workshop were additionally supported by the USC Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture, the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies, the Japan Foundation, the Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies UCLA, and the Hiroshi Wagatsuma Memorial Fellowship of the UCLA Asia Pacific Center.