China experience helps internationalize classroom
By KELLY ROHDER, Published May 10, 2009

When describing his recent trip to China, Kueiming “Max” Lee looked to this ancient proverb: Travel broadens our horizon, far superior to wide-reading.

“Or literally,” Lee said, “‘You can know more by traveling thousands of miles than by reading thousands of books.”

Lee was one of eight Joliet Junior College (Illinois) employees representing several academic departments that traveled to China last October—a trip supported by a federal grant from the U.S. Department of Education—to gather information to help the college continue internationalizing its curricula and to create new world language courses.

The trip was so influential that Lee, a physics professor, came back and began reading Fareed Zakaria’s new book, The Post American World.  Lee explained that the book is not about the decline of America, but rather about the rise of other countries, such as China and India and the formation of a true global society. Now, he wants his students to understand this shift and to be prepared to successfully traverse the new international terrain.

“We need to teach our students how to think and how to be creative and imaginative,” Lee said.

Berta Arias, JJC’s international education coordinator, wrote the grant and spearheaded the trip. JJC was one of four U.S community colleges to receive the $150,000 grant in 2007.

Arias said the goal of internationalizing curriculum is to bring perspectives from all over the world into courses so they present a broader spectrum of world viewpoints.

“We live in an interconnected world,” she said. “Our curriculum needs to reflect that we want to educate and train the students of tomorrow. If our instructors have that firsthand experience, it adds a rich dimension to classroom work.”

Lee and the other JJC faculty members attended lectures and visited cultural and historical sites while partnering with instructors from Xi’an University to learn about the institution’s academic practices and Chinese pedagogy.  

The group’s general consensus was that the U.S. is fortunate to have the resources it does. Susan Prokopeak, a JJC librarian who was part of the delegation, said that Chinese educational resources are scarce. For instance, in the Xi’an library, there was no wireless network and library patrons had to pay to access some materials.

“All of it was enormously helpful,” she said. “There isn’t a thing I learned that I won’t use in my classroom. It’s all about perspective.”

Prokopeak, who teaches library and tech classes at the college, said the photos and experiences she plans to share will supply a new framework of theories and concepts.

“In China, they have different ways of organizing and arranging their materials and different ways of using technology and infrastructure,” she said. “This gives my students context.” 

Besides broadening their global education perspective, the group learned first-hand some of the ancient country’s paradoxes.

“There are beautiful gardens, exquisite ancient art and architecture and unforgettable works such as the Great Wall and the terra cotta soldiers of Xi’an alongside incredible crowding, filth and pollution,” said Roxanne Munch, chair of the college’s English and world languages department.

Munch’s colleague, Julie Delfinado, said the disparities she encountered tested her initial thoughts about China.

“I pay attention to the details that challenge my perspective. There’s nothing like experiencing the energy of a place first-hand,” she said. Despite the uber-modern skylines of Shanghai and Beijing, Delfinado noticed that the interiors of many of the buildings were bare and antiquated.

“It made me wonder if the stories presented by the media are true,” she said. “China didn’t seem like an emerging global superpower that could represent an economic or political threat. You wonder how the aging infrastructure handles this amount of people.”

For Lee, that question was answered while reading Zakaria’s book. Like Delfinado, he saw great disparity. But through his readings, he now concludes the country is in flux and is beginning to invest more in its educational system. Because of that, Lee said his approach to teaching has changed.

“On the first day of the spring semester, I told my class that our outside world is rapidly changing and that we have to compete,” Lee said.

Through the support of the grant, the college has added international components to course content in art history, biology, English, horticulture, literature, physics and veterinary science. 

“At the federal level, there is incredible support for this,” Arias said. “They see the value in it. China is a major power and an emerging economic force. You understand something differently when you experience it viscerally—it becomes authentic.”

Munch, who has spoken about the trip to students in her technical writing class, said she will continue to refine her teaching of non-Western literature.

“I think that we all acquired a deeper level of global awareness and it will have its influence on all of us,” she said. “I pay much more attention to news about China now, and I feel like I can speak from experience a bit when I’m teaching the literature.”

Rohder is a communications and media specialist at Joliet Junior College (Illinois).