US/Chile Book Project

As part of my Fulbright Teaching Assistantship in Chile I developed a classroom project involving book arts. Fulbright's mission is to increase mutual understanding through the exchange of knowledge between the US and other countries. I hope to live up this goal through this book art project. The project is designed to have people from the US make books about issues that are important to them in their community, state, country, and/or to explore what it means to be "American" and also to have the Chilean students create books in which they explore the importance of culture and examine what it means to be Chilean. They would be able to address any issue in Chilean society that they find important such as politics, class, religion, gender, and popular culture. I hope that this project will highlight the similarities between these two communities despite cultural and linguistic differences. At the end of the project, I plan to have a cross-cultural exhibition of the books- first in Chile, then in the US. After the exhibitions I'd like to give the US books to the university or to the Chilean students who participated in the project.