On February 12, 2016, the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE) and Stanford Live (in collaboration with the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia) co-hosted a teacher professional development seminar that focused on the Silk Road. The seminar was held just prior to a Stanford Live performance by the Silk Road Ensemble at Stanford Bing Concert Hall on February 24, 2016 and a student matinee on February 25, 2016. Made up of performers and composers from more than 20 countries, the Silk Road Ensemble was formed under the artistic direction of Yo-Yo Ma in 2000.

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Jonas Edman (SPICE) and Ben Frandzel (Stanford Live) organized the day-long seminar. The morning featured a two-part lecture by Professor Emeritus Albert E. Dien, Stanford University. Part one focused on a general overview of the history and geography of the Silk Road and part two focused on a specific introduction to the religions along the Silk Road. Dr. Dien highlighted religion as an example of the many ways that the Silk Road helped to facilitate cultural exchange for millennia, resulting in the tremendous diversity one witnesses today in the region.

The afternoon featured a presentation and performance by composer and santur player Faraz Minooei, and a curriculum demonstration by SPICE staff. Minooei gave an overview of how the Silk Road played a role in the transmission of musical tradition, and also shared his personal story from his birth and childhood in Tehran, his immigrant experience in the United States, and his musical discoveries along the way. In particular, he shared his reflections on his deep spiritual desire to study music, seeing music as an “unexplainable souvenir from the eternal truth.”

Reflecting on Minooei’s presentation, Frandzel commented, “Faraz’s presentation really embodied the ways in which the Silk Road’s tradition of cultural exchange is a living story that continues to this day. His performances of Persian classical music and of his own compositions were entrancing, ear-opening experiences. As Faraz discussed his background and the musical forms that feed into his current work, his personal history and music seemed to encapsulate, in a fast-moving way, the kinds of cultural mixing that would have happened along the historic Silk Road. In our teacher workshops, we aim to provide teachers with arts-based teaching tools, and also to provide a larger social and cultural context for the art forms under discussion. The wonderful opportunity to partner with SPICE on the workshop, and the presence of this fascinating and brilliant musician, made this so much more possible.”

The curriculum demonstration was led by Rylan Sekiguchi, Naomi Funahashi, and Johanna Wee, who introduced both print- and web-based materials from the curriculum unit, Along the Silk Road, which were developed in collaboration with the Silk Road Ensemble and Dr. Dien. The 20 teachers in attendance interactively engaged with the materials and each received a complimentary copy of the curriculum unit as well as a large wall map of the Silk Road. The development of such materials has been a hallmark of SPICE for 40 years. The materials help to make content from teacher professional development seminars accessible to students.

Following the seminar, Edman reflected, “It is always such a pleasure to share with teachers the curriculum we produce here at SPICE. And to be able to collaborate with Stanford Live on a professional development workshop in conjunction with the Silk Road Ensemble’s visit to Stanford was a wonderful opportunity and experience. The Silk Road—with its themes of cross-cultural communication, exchange, and understanding—seems like an ideal topic for middle school students trying to understand today’s globalized world. We hope the speakers and pedagogical strategies and materials shared at the workshop will help teachers bring the topic to life in the classroom!”

"What do I do about the chickens?"

When assistant professor of medicine Eran Bendavid began a study on livestock in African households to determine impact on childhood health, he'd already anticipated common field problems like poorly captured or intentionally misreported data, difficulty getting to work sites, or problems with training local volunteers.

But he'd never gotten that particular question from a fieldworker before. It didn't occur to him that participating families, in reporting their livestock holdings, would completely omit the chickens running around at their feet, thereby skewing the data.

"They didn't consider chickens to be livestock," recalled Bendavid. Along with Scott Rozelle, the Helen F. Farnsworth Senior Fellow at FSI, and associate professor of political science and FSI senior fellow Beatriz Magaloni, Bendavid spoke to a full house last week on lessons learned from fieldwork gone awry. The return engagement of FSI's popular seminar, "Everything that can go wrong in a field experiment” was introduced by Jesper Sørensen, executive director of Stanford Seed, and moderated by Katherine Casey, assistant professor of political economy at the GSB. The seminar is a product of FSI and Seed’s joint Global Development and Poverty (GDP) Initiative, which to date has awarded nearly $7 million in faculty research funding to promote research on poverty alleviation and economic development worldwide.

Rozelle, co-director of the Rural Education Action Program, spoke of the obstacles to accurate data gathering, especially in rural areas where record-keeping is inaccurate and participants' trust is low. Arriving in a Chinese village to carry out child nutrition studies, said Rozelle, "we found Grandma running out the back door with the baby." The researchers had worked with the local family planning council to find the names of children to study, but the families thought the authorities were coming to penalize them for violation of the one-child policy.

Cultural differences make for entertaining and illuminating (if frustrating) lessons, but Beatriz Magaloni, director of FSI's Program on Poverty and Governance at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law had a different story to tell. Over the course of three years, her GDP-funded work to investigate and reduce police violence in Brazil - a phenomenon resulting in more than 22,000 deaths since 2005 - has encountered obstacle after obstacle. Her work to pilot body-worn cameras on police in Rio has faced a change in police leadership, setting back cooperation; a yearlong struggle to decouple a study of TASER International’s body worn cameras from its electrical weapons in the same population; a work site initially lacking electricity to charge the cameras or Internet to view the feeds; and noncompliance among the officers. "It's discouraging at times," admitted Magaloni, who has finally gotten the cameras onto the officers' uniforms and must now experiment with ways to incentivize their use. "We are learning a lot about how institutional behavior becomes so entrenched and why it's so hard to change."

Experimentation is a powerful tool to understand cause and effect, said Casey, but a tool only works if it's implemented properly. Learning from failure makes for an interesting panel discussion. The speakers' hope is that it also makes for better research in the future.

The Global Development and Poverty Initiative is a University-wide initiative of the Stanford Institute for Innovation in Developing Economies (Seed) in partnership with the Freeman Spogli Institute (FSI). GDP was established in 2013 to stimulate transformative research ideas and new approaches to economic development and poverty alleviation worldwide. GDP supports groundbreaking research at the intersection of traditional academic disciplines and practical application. GDP uses a venture-funding model to pursue compelling interdisciplinary research on the causes and consequences of global poverty. Initial funding allows GDP awardees to conduct high-quality research in developing countries where there is a lack of data and infrastructure.

The threat of a pandemic claiming millions of lives and devastating economies around the world is as serious as the potential perils of global climate change, renowned economist Larry Summers told a Stanford audience during a recent visit to campus.

The world is taking dramatic and costly steps to prevent the calamitous impact of climate change on the economies and national security of most countries. Yet preparations for a worldwide pandemic on the scale of the 1918 flu are vastly underfunded and ill-formed.

“My biggest fear is that the world is way short of focus on all the issues associated with pandemic,” said Summers, former treasury secretary in the Clinton administration and Harvard president emeritus, who in recent years has focused on the economics of global health care.

“We are talking about something that could kill surely tens of millions and perhaps 100 million people, and the Stanford football program is substantially more expensive than the WHO budget for pandemic flu,” he said. “It’s just crazy that we are so underinvested and underprepared.”

Summers, the Charles W. Eliot University Professor at Harvard, also served as director of the White House National Economic Council in the Obama administration. He was in conversation with Stanford Health Policy’s Paul Wise for the March 8 event co-sponsored by the Stanford Institute of Economic Policy Research for faculty and students.

The World Health Organization budget for outbreaks and crisis response has been reduced by nearly 50 percent from 2012 to 2015. Some global health experts blame these cuts in part for its slow response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa and the ongoing Zika crisis in Brazil.

In Brazil, Zika has been linked to a spike in cases of microcephaly, a birth defect marked by small head size and underdeveloped brains. Brazil has confirmed more than 640 cases of microcephaly and is investigating an additional 4,200 suspected cases. Puerto Rico is now preparing for an expected outbreak there.

Summers said the mortality rate from the great flu pandemic was far greater than the recent Ebola outbreak in West Africa, which killed some 11,300 people mostly in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea. Some 50 million people died worldwide during the 1918-1919 flu pandemic.

‘I don’t want to minimize in any way the significance of Ebola, but there are things to worry about that are vastly larger,” said Summers, who gave the keynote address for the January unveiling of the National Academy of Medicine’s report on global health risks.

That report by the Commission on a Global Health Risks Framework for the Future found that, compared with other major threats to global security, the world has “grossly underinvested” in efforts to prevent and prepare for the spread of infectious diseases. The commissioners — some 250 independent experts in health, governance and research and development — estimate $60 billion in annualized expected losses from pandemics.

“Pandemics cause devastation to human lives and livelihoods much as do wars, financial crises and climate change,” the report said. “Pandemic prevention and response, therefore, should be treated as an essential tenet of both national and global security — not just a matter of health.”

Summers estimates that pandemic flu risk is in the same range of global climate change in terms of expected costs over the next century. Yet a potential pandemic is getting only 2 percent of the attention and resources that global climate change has today.

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Summers also chaired the Lancet Commission on Investing in Health, an independent group of 25 leading economists and global health experts from around the world. Their landmark report, Global Health 2035, provides a specific roadmap for this achieving “a grand convergence” in health within our lifetimes. Ahead of the U.N. General Assembly last fall, Summers led a joint declaration together with economists from 44 countries calling on world leaders to prioritize investments in health.

Wise, in the Department of Pediatrics at Stanford and senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, asked Summers how one plans for pandemics when faced with so many failed governments and conflicts around the world.

“One of the central challenges that I worry about a lot in the deliberations of pandemic control is that many of the (regions) of greatest concern are characterized by chronic political instability, conflict and very weak governance,” said Wise, who for more than 30 years has been traveling to rural Guatemala to provide medical care to children there for his Children in Crisis project.

Summers said the world has been fortunate that there are so many brave and devoted medical workers who are trained to go into these conflict regions to try and contain outbreaks.

“But I think it would be disingenuous of me to say that you can solve these problems without in some way containing the failed state,” he said.

Wise then asked Summers what sort of advice he would give to the Stanford students who were trying to decide between a career in which one might use economics to make a fortune on Wall Street, or use economics for the greater good.

“I have always believed that you can count — and you can care,” Summers said. “There is nothing about counting and using numbers and analyzing the math that means you don’t care in a moral way.”

When a physician works with a patient and saves her life, he said, that has a profound and direct impact on both the patient and physician. But working on a vaccination program that has the potential of saving thousands of lives one day comes with delayed gratification.

“But the impact of making the world a better place and enabling people to survive and avoid grieving the loss of of a family member is as great — or greater,” he said.

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My daughter, Emily, was teaching English at a middle school in Asahi City, Chiba Prefecture, on the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Program when the 2011 Tohoku earthquake struck on March 11, 2011. Tohoku is a region in the northeast portion of the island of Honshu, the largest island in Japan. Though Asahi City, a coastal city, is not in the Tohoku region, it was still heavily damaged by the resulting tsunami. Several of Emily’s students lost their homes. She was emotionally shaken, of course, but was fortunate not to sustain any injuries.

With the fifth anniversary of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami approaching, I have been reflecting upon the tremendous anxiety that I felt that day about Emily’s safety, my wife’s family in Tohoku, and the people of Japan in general. My reflections deepened last week while observing the interaction of SPICE’s Reischauer Scholars Program (RSP) students (American high school students studying about Japan) with SPICE’s Stanford e-Japan students (Japanese high school students studying about the United States) in an informal online “social hour.” The RSP and Stanford e-Japan are distance-learning courses that are offered by SPICE.

Stanford e-Japan instructor Waka Brown and RSP instructor Naomi Funahashi organized the social hour to help to build bridges between youth in Japan and the United States. During the latter part of the social hour, RSP student, David Jaffe (Mesa, Arizona), posed the question, “How is 3.11 remembered today?” Among the many Stanford e-Japan students who spoke was Minoru Takeuchi (Sakura City, Chiba Prefecture), who stated, “When the earthquake happened, I was an elementary school student (12 years old). I still remember very well… at that time, I was in school. Some students were very afraid and crying… Maybe after the earthquake, many Japanese noticed the importance of working together, the preciousness that they could meet their friends…” The Japanese students’ sharing of their experiences related to 3.11 extended the social hour far beyond the hour, and the gratitude expressed by the American students to their counterparts in Japan flowed for many minutes in a text-chat box.

Observing the students was one of the most rewarding experiences of my career at SPICE. The Japanese students’ remembrances of 3.11 brought back poignant and difficult memories for me but also provided me with hopeful thoughts on the future of the U.S.–Japan relationship as I witnessed students from across the Pacific forming budding friendships and discussing topics of mutual relevance.
 

Resources for the classroom
 

My hope is that teachers will carve out some time in their curriculum to engage their students in a study of 3.11 as well as its legacies. The study of natural hazards ought to be a core part of school curriculum. SPICE has undertaken many curricular projects related to 3.11. I would recommend that teachers show the film, After the Darkness, which was produced by Risa Morimoto and Funahashi. After the Darkness is a documentary film that touches upon the events of the disaster itself but also focuses on the experiences of two survivors in particular. It is accompanied with free curricular lessons that are accessible to students of various ages. I also recommend a lecture by Professor Emeritus Daniel Okimoto, Stanford University, on “Japan’s Geological Factors,” which is accompanied by a free lesson plan. Another recommended curricular unit is SPICE’s Examining Long-term Radiation Effects, which was produced prior to 3.11 but can help students understand the radiation-related concerns following the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. In addition, the film, Live Your Dream: The Taylor Anderson Story, is about one of two American JET Program teachers who lost their lives during 3.11. SPICE developed a teacher’s guide for the film that can be freely downloaded from the Live Your Dream: The Taylor Anderson Story website. Lastly, I recommend the use of the films from the 113 Project in classrooms. Earlier this week, I moderated a panel discussion that included Wesley Julian (director of the 113 Project), Andy Anderson (father of Taylor Anderson and board member of the Taylor Anderson Memorial Fund) as well as other Americans and Japanese who continue to contribute to relief efforts in the Tohoku region.