Week Without Walls: Nanjing & Shanghai (2019)
In 2019, I organised, coordinated, and chaperoned a Week Without Walls trip to Nanjing and Shanghai. Students spent the first day learning about the history of Japanese colonial rule in Korea, the Nanjing Massacre, and the Jewish refugees who fled to Shanghai. The purpose of these lessons was to contextualize the museums so that the students would be able to appreciate the gravity and significance of the artifacts, stories, and graves in the museums that they would visit. Students then began to write a reflection about what they learned and what they hoped to find out on the trip.
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On the second day, students visited the 1937 Nanjing Massacre Museum. It was an incredibly emotional event, as the graphic realities of the crimes committed, hit the students and teachers in the heart. The museum contained an enormous quantity of evidence for the massacre and included many videos of witnesses including those who worked at the Nanjing Safety Zone. The Nanjing Safety Zone saved the lives of over 250,000 civilians who took shelter amongst the slaughter.
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On the third day, students visited the Jewish Refugees Museum and Korean Provisional Government Museum. These museums were much smaller than the one in Nanjing, but what was special about them is that they were the real buildings that housed Jewish Refugees and the Korean Provisional Government. Being crammed in such a small space allowed students to empathize with how tightly packed people were in these buildings as they fled persecution from their homelands.
These museums embodied a message of hope: that even in such dark times, there were people willing to open their doors and shelter those who held stigmatized social identities. These were people willing to risk their lives to care for strangers from a distant land.
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On the final day, students completed their reflections and began to work on an informative memorial piece displayed on the third floor of building D. Some of the students created an art work dedicated to those who had lost their lives during the Second World War. Other students collaborated to create informative panels that explained the significance of these museums in English, Mandarin, Korean, and Japanese.
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Overall Week this Without Walls was more than simply visiting historical sites, it was about empathy and paying respects to those who fought for the privileges in which we inherit today. Click here for the original article.
