Reflections on Workshop Experiences

What I am learning about these Shanghai Normal University (SNU) Chinese students is evolving each day. They seem shy but that may be an accepted classroom behavior particularly when they are in a large group. The youngest do seem limited in English language skills yet many catch on to my ironies, a sign of comprehension. They certainly have perked up from the first week, when they were obviously both jet lagged and culture shocked.

From talking to some of you, what 's emerging is their reluctance or inability to think critically. Or at least to reveal that to the large group or to us, their American profs. This leads me to an anthropologic and political reading of their educational experience--it seems a very different learning process for them in China. We will misunderstand them if we think of them as fresh new kids from a far off rapidly changing capitalist land--their society has been under communist control for three generations, and I've learned from someone who was recently at SNU that there is a communist overseer in each department. Authoritarian practices die hard. Perhaps our efforts at getting them to think critically (about literature or anything else) is what we are really being asked to do. (Our own students of course are often not much more critically reflective.) Remember their university mentors facilitated this unique process--to bring Chinese English majors to the US and CSUN, not in business nor engineering, but in language and literature. In itself this seems remarkable to me.

And yes, it's mainly language and lingusitcs study with little literature at the SNU English program, but we've been requested by their dean to focus on literature and I'm to offer literature courses to them when I'm there Sept 13-Oct 31. And last year when I had planned to go, it was stressed by another SNU prof who was here at CSUN that I teach critical reasoning skills. So, at least the dean and profs who came to CSUN seemed to have a clear idea of what their students need.

I've gotten fascinating emails from some of you and had revealing conversations as well. I've set up this blog to have a dialogue about your workshop experience and your reflections on what you saw and learned. We are invited to attend a farewell lunch on Tuesday Aug 7, then their performance for us of a scene (?) from a Shakespeare play in Room 107 of Nordhoff Hall that same day at 2 and a reception following in that same room. I hope you'll make an effort to attend, and maybe we can share ideas at that time, but we really need a session to talk together about our workshop experience. Since that seems tough to set up at this point, let's try to have a blog conversation to see what we discovered.

Bob