A chorus of snapping rubber bands fills Leighton 426, followed by a long pause as seventeen students carefully reposition their faux bows for another practice shot. Carly Born, a co-teacher for RELG 282 Samurai: Ethics of Loyalty and Death, as well as a dedicated kyudo practitioner and Carleton Academic Technologist, strolls through the rows of students, navigating between outstretched arms, readied rubber bands, and chairs pushed to the edges of the room. Every so often she stops in front of a student to guide their arms to the proper position, as they continue to focus their gaze ahead.
“When I move your arms, don’t look at me!” Carly calls out to the classroom, holding one student’s elbow level, “I’m trying to teach you how to feel your body.” Embodied understanding of kyudo is integrated into this course, which meets two other days of the week for lecture and discussion with Asuka Sango, Associate Professor and Chair of Religion and Director of Asian Studies, and one weekday evening per week for two-hour kyudo practice. This deeply integrated learning is a critical aspect of the course, one Carly and Asuka have built into the term not only through weekly kyudo sessions but also through intentional reflection discussions which guide students to make connections between Asuka’s lectures and Carly’s trainings. Asuka and Carly noted their shared pedagogical vision, explaining that “It’s never an empty ritual,” whether a reading assignment or kyudo practice.
This course was a long-time coming; in fact, Carly and Asuka began collaborating around 2007. Their work together started with a lot of logistical Moodle questions, says Asuka, and this is how she gradually learned the variety of expertise Carly had to offer.
From 1996 to 1999, Carly taught English through the JET program in Japan, where she became fluent in Japanese. At Carleton, she’s been able to use her skills to support the Japanese department with linguistic technology, as well as by “providing an example of a Westerner who has successfully learned the language,” something she and Asuka agree is incredibly motivating for students in introductory Japanese. In addition to developing linguistic software and practicing and teaching kyudo, Japanese archery, Carly also practices Japanese halberd, and had performed archery, along with her husband John Born, a number of times for Asuka’s students before RELG 282 was born.
Asuka and Carly laughed as they recalled one of their early collaborations, an elaborate zen scavenger hunt for one of Asuka’s courses. “Working with Asuka has always been wonderful and creative,” Carly shared, “That’s my favorite part.” Chatting with the two of them in Asuka’s office, the deep comfort and respect Carly and Asuka share with one another was clear. Within our short conversation, the two constantly referenced one another’s work and accomplishments, bounced off of collective ideas, and reflected on how their students were integrating course concepts. In fact, by the end of our conversation, they were already brainstorming ideas for taking students abroad together.
For some time, Carly had been wanting to incorporate kyudo into a class at Carleton. She described the moment when, speaking in Asuka’s office, she shared this vision. Asuka leaned excitedly forward over her desk, and asked if she wanted to teach with her. From there, the class took off.
There’ve been a few challenges along the way, of course. As Asuka noted, “We had to go through a lot of hoops and negotiations to allow Carly to teach, since she’s a staff person.” Carly and Asuka have faced additional institutional challenges in finding a location for kyudo to accommodate both Carleton students and community students. When Carly started teaching kyudo at Carleton, it was a club for Carleton students that practiced at the Recreation Center. However, to allow adult community members to participate, the practice has since moved to Northfield High School, working through Northfield Community Education. Carly notes that kyudo is a challenging practice that takes significant time, something many Carleton students don’t have; if she and John were going to create space for a kyudo community in Minnesota, they couldn’t just focus on college students.
This was important to Carly and Asuka because in addition to learning from Carly and John, both experienced kyudo practitioners, students enrolled in RELG 282 are also learning from their senior students. A typical Wednesday evening kyudo class has 17 Carleton students, Carly and John, Asuka, and three or four senior community students, who often drive all the way down from the Cities to participate with Carleton students.
“It’s the pedagogical idea of constructivist learning,” Carly explains, “You don’t learn in isolation, you construct learning with community around you. In martial arts there’s a sense of hierarchy, that only certain people should be teaching. But I strongly believe that you learn more if you teach someone else.”
Asuka also reflected on the importance and struggle of valuing diverse forms of knowledge within an institutional setting: “This is our challenge too—a challenge to the institutional academic monopoly of knowledge. Traditionally, you have to have a PhD to teach at a college level. With this class, it’s about everybody having something to contribute. They can’t just get something from this community, but they have to give something back.”
These broader lessons on collaboration and community are at the core of what Asuka and Carly convey in this course. Specifically, Asuka noted that Carly and John aren’t paid anything extra for teaching kyudo, and neither is Kiyomoto Ogasawara, a 32nd-generation master of a Japanese samurai family who visited Carleton and practiced with Carly and Asuka’s students. “To my students, that was a surprise, that teaching kyudo wasn’t his job,” Asuka comments, “I think they learned something about life, that what you do for your happiness, it’s not always about money. And maybe that’s very hard to keep in mind at Carleton. It’s very easy to forget that life is more than just work.”
This lesson, Carly and Asuka both explain, is something that extends far beyond a ten-week course, and it’s going to take students “a little more time to wrap their heads around this.” Asuka adds that many of our lives are infused with a model of individualism—that “everything in your life has to have some sort of investment, so you get something back out of it.” Instead, students have observed and learned from the ways that Kiyomoto Ogasawara and Carly are both “contributing to something bigger than themselves—that generational community.” Beyond the most tangible teachings about the history and culture of Samurai, and the practice of kyudo, students have engaged with the “generational community” of kyudo and learned what it means to live in community with one another.