Teaching Materials

For university & professional educators

Structured approaches for using Simulating Silence in university seminars, multi-week courses, and professional development contexts. Materials span heritage studies, digital humanities, East Asian history, museum studies, and related fields.

New to this resource? Start with Teaching Pathways →

The Core Sequence

These nine modules are the content students read. Each takes 10–20 minutes; the complete sequence takes approximately 2.5 hours. Paired worksheets and discussion prompts are noted below each module. View the full sequence →

Module 00 · ~15 min

The HashimaXR Project

What was built, what was intended, and why it matters.

→ Worksheet 8: How Heritage Works
Module 01 · ~20 min

Hashima in Time and Place

From Meiji industrialisation through wartime mobilisation to UNESCO inscription.

→ Worksheet 8: How Heritage Works
Module 02 · ~15 min

How Heritage Works

Authorised Heritage Discourse, interpretive regimes, and the politics of "balance."

→ Worksheet 8: How Heritage Works
Module 03 · ~15 min

UNESCO & Contested Heritage

The 2015 inscription, Japan's commitments, and transnational counter-narratives.

→ Worksheet 6: UNESCO & Contested Heritage
Module 04 · ~15 min

Labour, Empire, and Evidence

Coerced labour at Hashima and the politics of historical knowledge production.

→ Worksheet 1: Source Analysis
Module 05 · ~15 min

Digital Histories

XR as historiography and the digital landscape around Hashima.

→ Worksheet 2: Analysing Digital Heritage
Module 06 · ~15 min

Reading Institutional Positions

Analytical tools for interpreting how heritage governance operates through documentary evidence.

→ Worksheet 5: Analysing Institutional Positions
Module 07 · ~15 min

Positions & Perspectives

Regional media discourse and institutional positions on Hashima's contested heritage.

→ Worksheet 4: Regional Perspectives
Module 08 · ~15 min

Why the Project Stayed Unreleased

Soft gatekeeping, procedural refusal, temporal drag, and the archive of obstruction.

→ Worksheet 3: Patterns of Obstruction
Companion

Social Media and Digital Memory

How platforms shape contested heritage narratives: algorithmic amplification and the testimony wars.

→ Worksheet 7: Social Media & Digital Memory
Companion

Songs from the Coalfields

An audio-based learning experience exploring the folk songs that Hashima's workers brought from Japan's coalfield regions.

Companion

Timeline: Hashima in History

Interactive timeline from 1890 to the present—filter by theme, explore enquiry questions, and hear the island's soundscape.