The academic year is drawing to a close and first year students in my English Skills class have been making presentations. For the final presentation I asked them to use Power Point. However, experience has taught me that students often struggle the first time they try to make a presentation with Power Point. They tend to include too many words and too much information on the slides. Many of them simply present their script on the screen, not really understanding how to best exploit this type of visual aid.
To help them with their presentations, I introduced the class to PechaKucha. PechaKucha is a style of presentation created by two German architects in Tokyo in 2003. They designed it to avoid a phenomenon commonly referred to as ‘Death by Power Point.’ This, as perhaps you can guess, means long and boring presentations that often send the audience to sleep! In a PechaKucha presentation you have 20 slides and you can show each slide for no longer than 20 seconds. There is also a limit to the number of words you can put on each slide, which encourages you to include lots of images. You can learn more about PechaKucha and see some PechaKucha presentations, if you go to this link: www.pechakucha.org . PechaKucha has become very popular and special PechaKucha Nights are now held in over 600 cities around the world, where presenters share their ideas and introduce their research, work, etc.
One of the PechaKucha presentations in the English Skills class that I particularly enjoyed was about Japanese cuisine in the U.S. The students were interested in how original dishes imported from Japan have been modified to suit the American palate. They introduced items such as soba salad, California rolls, sushi tempura and honey green tea. Some of them seem to reflect American tastes for heavier and sweeter foods. Members of the audience asked if they could try these dishes in Tokyo but it appears that they haven’t yet made the journey back to Japan. I’m sure that if they do come back, a Japanese twist will be added to them. Will they then become Japanese-American-Japanese food, I wonder? In the case of sushi tempura we would have to add Portuguese to that list, since tempura was first introduced to Japan by the Portuguese in Nagasaki. As you can see, much can be learned about immigration by looking at a nation’s food culture.
(Susan Edwards)
