In the summer of 1998, I presented a paper at the International Society for Education through Art Asian Regional Congress in Tokyo. My paper concerned the possible implications of Discipline-based Art Education for Japanese art educational reform. Because of his interest in learning about new ideas in art education, including DBAE, Mr. Yasuhiro Maeda attended this congress. In preparation, he visited the website of the conference, saw my listing, and decided to try to contact me over e-mail. His use of this increasingly common technology to communicate with an unknown person far away turned out to be the beginning of a very fruitful friendship.

After several weeks of corresponding with one another over e-mail about our common interests, Mr. Maeda and I finally met in person at the InSEA Congress in Tokyo. We spent many hours talking about common art educational concerns, eventually deciding to collaborate on several projects. First, Maeda-sensei allowed me to begin interviewing him for a study in progress regarding a paradigm shift in international art education. Second, we shared lesson plan ideas to engage students in learning about visual culture from around the world. I sent him a copy of a lesson I had developed for my elementary students to compare and contrast dragons from European and Asian traditions. My lesson resources about Asian dragons included stories and images of primarily Taiwanese origin, to which Maeda-sensei added specific art historical information about dragons in Japanese artistic traditions to make it more relevant for use with his own fourth grade students. They enjoyed comparing culturally different dragons and the values they represent. The results of this lesson are posted on Maeda’s website at www.aminet.or.jp/~yasu.

The third aspect of our collaboration is a continuing dialogue over e-mail about issues related to using technology as a tool in the classroom. As McEneaney, et al, (1999) point out, travel to distant destinations is outside the means of most people, but many of the benefits of travel, such as friendships with people outside of one’s traditional ingroup, communication about universal concerns, or the awareness that one’s world view is not necessarily shared by others, can be accrued through the use of technology. McEneaney, et al, assert that creation of a “global community of learners” is dependent more on the “transmission of information than on the movement of people" (p.1).

In response to our conversations about art education, I wanted to put Mr. Maeda in touch with an art teacher in an elementary classroom, so that his students could make personal contact with their peers in America. Because I left teaching to attend graduate school and had no elementary art students of my own, I introduced Maeda-san via e-mail to Mrs. Lynna Woolsey, the art teacher at South Knox Elementary School in rural Monroe City, Indiana, with whom I had collaborated previously.

From that point, Mrs. Woolsey and her school’s technology specialist, Lisa Wilson, took full advantage of the available technologies to bridge the miles between their school in southern Indiana and Mr. Maeda’s school in Kumamoto City. At first, these teachers exchanged e-mail just to get to know one another, then, they began planning ways to utilize e-mail, the Internet and other technologies as cross-cultural learning tools. Ms. Wilson had a project in progress sending a small stuffed animal to different parts of the country to visit and learn about different areas. She sent “Tuffy” to Kumamoto to Maeda’s school, where he was greeted with enthusiasm! This began a flow of artworks and letters exchanged over the Internet and by post between classrooms in both settings.

Mrs. Woolsey and I had earlier developed an art educational unit for her students based on using the Internet to research specific aspects of other cultures. Given a willing partner in a distant place, Lynna implemented parts of this curriculum as a test run for future application and expansion. In response to the questions asked by Lynna’s fifth grade art students, Mr. Maeda’s students demonstrated traditional games, toys, and sports over a live Internet teleconference between the schools. This event received media attention on both sides of the ocean. Television news programs in Japan showed snippets of the exchange, and the local school board officials in southern Indiana began exploring ways to enhance the technological capabilities of their schools. Parents were invited to the school to participate in "Japan Night” and sample Japanese cuisine, view the artwork and messages from Maeda’s students and participate in the teleconference.

This extraordinary event was followed with an even more elaborate video conference. Because his school is a laboratory school affiliated with a university, it hosts a teacher’s conference every year. In 1998, over 1300 Japanese teachers viewed a live video conference between Maeda’s fourth graders and the students from South Knox elementary school. The theme of this exchange moved beyond exploring cultural differences, and began to focus on common human concerns, as the students shared different strategies for recycling materials with the goal of preserving the natural world.

Although the teachers at South Knox Elementary School unfortunately could not join us in Washington for this conference, I will share below some of their comments about the positive outcomes of this exchange. As McEneaney, et al, (1999) stated “the currency of human communication in the global community is electronic.” Students are well-served by efforts to enhance cross-cultural learning through technology. The skills and understandings developed through such projects are increasingly necessary for students to participate in the local, regional, national and international discourse.

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