JapanLab aims to reimagine Japanese Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and in the process to establish a template that can be replicated at other institutions across the country. Our goal is to use faculty-led, student-driven collaborative teams to generate a steady stream of Japan-focused educational video games and other Digital Humanities content that can be used in classrooms across the world. That mission has two branches: providing practical and fulfilling hands-on experiences to the undergraduate students who develop our digital resources and providing innovative digital resources for teaching Japanese studies.

People and Participants

JapanLab is a collaboration between the Department of History and the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. The founding directors are Adam Clulow, Kirsten Cather and Mark Ravina and the lab operates under the umbrella of the Center for East Asian Studies. The current executive director is Jessa Dahl. The program also works closely with leading industry professionals including writer and narrative director Clay Carmouche.

History

In Spring 2020, the Department of History asked Adam Clulow and four undergraduate History majors with no specialized games design background to develop a fully functional video game built around a specific historical topic and using only freely available platforms. The game had to draw from the latest scholarship and to incorporate a series of teaching points, allowing it to be deployed in high-school or college level classrooms. This pilot program resulted in The Tale of Ako, a compelling exploration of life as a samurai during the Tokugawa period, which has now been used in classrooms across the country.

After the success of the pilot program, the JapanLab initiative was created by Adam Clulow, Kirsten Cather, and Mark Ravina with the generous support of funding from the Japan Foundation and matching funding from the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. The original vision of the JapanLab responds to two key needs in the post Covid-19 pandemic educational landscape. First, undergraduate and graduate students today require a suite of digital skills, often labelled as digital dexterities, to compete in a modern labor market in which they will be called upon to move between different platforms while engaging in frequent upskilling. These dexterities can and should be merged with the traditional skills taught in a humanities classroom. JapanLab facilitated this transformation by creating resources to integrate Digital Humanities across the Japanese Studies curriculum and give undergraduate students first-hand experience developing digital resources under faculty supervision.

Second, the COVID-19 pandemic forced educators to reimagine their classrooms almost overnight, and created an unprecedented demand for free digital teaching resources vetted by scholars. The pandemic set in motion an educational revolution that shifted the parameters of the traditional lecture/seminar model. There is a clear and expanding need to engage students with high-quality, interactive digital content.  JapanLab produces a range of stand-alone digital content developed via semester-long collaborative student projects that is distributed for free using the JapanLab portal.

After the end of the initial round of funding from 2022-2025, JapanLab was sponsored for another three years by the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. In seeking a sustainable and productive long-term model, the current project centers the most successful aspects of those first years: faculty-student collaborative teams and educational video game development. As the program continues to grow at UT Austin, JapanLab hopes to make its successful framework accessible and applicable to faculty and institutions across the globe.