SGH Report on a special lesson of Asian Studies

　In the JB Course’s Asian Studies lecture, members of one of Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University’s official student clubs, a student-NGO, which is called Pregno visited our school to have a special lesson which was started from last school term. This school year there were six students in total, 2 of whom were Thai students.

Details of the class:

(1) To start things off, there was an introduction about APU.：
　Members of PRENGO, foreign as well as Japanese students, gave a presentation in English and Japanese. Thai students also introduced about the university in Japanese.

(2) Group Work (Let’s think about a Development Project)：
　Reading the summaries of the activities which the PRENGO members were doing in a city of Thai called Mahad, we thought about what kind of development could be done. This was a project in which we thought about the points of views in regards to various things we have learned in Asian studies until now such as the ways of development for each country, the things we experienced while on our overseas study trips, what takes priority, and the effects of bringing about change. With the support of the PRENGO members, we were able to come up with solid ideas. This year we were able to take a good step in the right direction as we were able to make use of the time to make presentations, and share each other’s ideas of plans.

(3) Introduction of PRENGO activities：
　Knowing that the university students of several years past went to Thai where they worked together with people of that area, the members were able to deeply understand that there were somethings that they could do.

　By this lesson they were able to deeply understand the importance of how different the Japanese people’s idea of what is good and what the people of that area desired or hoped for.

*Note: Founded in April of 2003, PRENGO is a student organization of Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University which was started as an international NGO that supports child education.
For more details about PRENGO’s please visit the following homepage: （http://prengo.org）