December 5, 2007

Bringing Chinese Culture to the Classroom

BROOKLINE - Jane Leo, a first-grade teacher at the Heath School, loves to teach 6- and 7-year-olds because of their fearlessness and confidence. “The sky’s the limit in terms of what they believe they can do,” she said.

Leo is a lifelong learner and pretty fearless herself. Her most recent exploration was inspired by a course on Chinese literature given at Primary Source, an education foundation dedicated to teaching through original texts. After the course, Leo applied to visit China as part of a Primary Source study tour. A grant from the Brookline Education Foundation supported this trip in July 2007. Leo talks about her travels:

How did you become interested in studying about China?

In my freshman year of college, I was a waitress at a Chinese restaurant. I had to translate my orders into Chinese because the cooks’ English was as limited as my Chinese. If business was slow, I could ask one of the other waitresses to translate the order for me. But when they were busy, I was forced to use a much less efficient system I called the “clothespin system.” Clothespins were labeled with both the English and Chinese name for a particular dish. With clothespins lining both edges of the paper, my orders resembled large centipedes. As I handed this absurdity over to the cooks, I vowed to learn Chinese. It was an exhilarating challenge. Never before had a foreign language seemed so useful. My co-workers were more than willing to help. I realized it wasn’t the novelty of learning the language that excited me, but being able to connect with people who might otherwise be inaccessible to me. My curiosity and willingness to learn proved to be enough to open the lines of communication.

Can you describe the course at Primary Source that was the precursor to this trip?

The course, “From Monkey King to Misty Poets: Bringing Chinese Literature to K-12 Classrooms,” was a 10-day institute offered during the summer of 2006. We studied literature starting with ancient Chinese poetry from the Tang Dynasty, and working all the way up to memoirs of the Mao era.

One of the genres you studied was Shi poetry. How do you use this material with young children?

What struck me about Shi poetry is how accessible and meaningful it is today, even though it’s 1,500 years old. Adults can glean deeper meaning from the poems, but at face value, they capture slices of life that children can relate to. In the classroom, we read Shi poems and look for common threads in the structure and meaning of the poems. The kids identify that many Shi poems have four lines; the first two lines describe something — a place, a thing, a person. The third line offers a question about our chosen topic; and the fourth line sums up our feelings about the topic. We write Shi poems about animals, objects and places using this format.

One goal of your trip was to learn about how people live in both urban and rural areas of China. What did you observe?

We visited some of the wealthier cities in China: Shanghai, Beijing and Huangzhou. By contrast, the rural villages we visited were like walking back in time at least 30 years. The tour highlighted these disparities. From talking with the local villagers in Huangcun, we learned that many family members were working in the cities as migrant workers to support their families, or had studied hard and gone to college to start a new career.

How will this trip enrich your teaching about China?

A recurring theme in my travels was the importance of education in China. Education is seen as a way to a better life. I plan to develop lessons on what school is like for children in China. I would also like to teach the numbers in Chinese with sign language, hand signs for numbers 1-10 that are often used in the marketplace for bargaining. I would like to highlight the differences between the English language and Chinese — it matters how you say it!

In Brookline, the first-grade unit on China focuses on things that a tourist would experience in China, such as calligraphy and food. I’m looking to give my students a deeper understanding of Chinese culture by exposing them to Chinese literature, art and my own personal experience. That I’ve visited China adds a lot of credibility to my lessons.