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Nira SunHi Carissa,
I’m impressed with how close you got to the purpose of this poster. You also brought up a good point regarding the gun, knife, and note. The guy in brown is actually a criminal. He was being persuaded by his relatives in the first picture. As he was sitting there, his wife standing next to him and trying to talk him through. Of course, in the second picture, he decided to turned himself in as he accepted the consequence of his behavior. Hence the gun and knife. Basically this poster meant to encourage citizens to talk to their relatives who have committed crimes so that criminals can turn themselves in to authorities where they can get help.
Nira SunHi Kim,
I love the idea of collaborating with an Art teacher. What about me joining your collaboration with our Art teacher? I can help with explaining the structures of Chinese characters and how it can be done. With the help of the art perspectives, we can organize a school-wide event to introduce this interesting and wonderful art where students learn to design their own “Chinese names” with their own names hiden in. The decoding and designing parts will attract lots of young teenagers. I think this will be a great opportunity to build a unique school culture which exposes our students to art concepts and Chinese culture as well as finding connection with their own cultural backgrounds.
Nira SunI was really surprised to find out from Prof. Berry’s lecture that these many movies were produced by Chinese companies. My students always love to talk about popular movies in theatre. I’m thinking that I can have my students do a little research on recent-year movies and their production companies to see how many of them were Chinese companies. I believe that my students would be as surprised as I was. With class discussion, we can also talk about the surprising parts or plots that they find challenging to understand and whether they have anything to do with having Chinese productions.
Nira SunAs a Mandarin teacher, I often use movies as a media to introduce Chinese culture values and perspectives to my students. I found that as an engaging and helpful way for students to truly understand different values and how they are presented in movies. However, I have never been exposed to the concept of “soft power” until today’s afternoon lecture. On the slide, it was mentioned that “Chinese soft power is focused on the domestic audience since political and social stability are higher values to China”. I can’t agree with this statement anymore. I remember when I was little, we used to watch lots of cartoons about historical events, idioms, myths, and legends. What we were asked the most was “What did you learn from the story?” or “What is the educational purpose of this story?”. Instead of serving as an entertainment product, the function of the cartoons changed.
Nowadays, I use movies and stories in my classroom to help my students understand the values and concepts. Certainly, we do not intend to use cartoons or movies to enforce any mentality or values to our students. However, stories are undoubtfully the most engaging way to get students involved. Most of my students comprehend the cultural values more effectively by remembering the plots in the stories or cartoons they watch. We have done a comparison between the Chinese comic books/cartoons with American ones in the classroom. Students found out an interesting fact that in Chinese comic books/cartoons, animals are usually being personized by having the power of talking and thinking like human beings. The most famous one was the monkey and the pig in the Journey to the West. The Monkey King is specially considered as a superhero because he fights against bad guys and saves his Master all the time with his countless changes of tactics. In comparison, humans are usually given special powers to become superheroes in American comic books. I guess we can tell by the names of “superman”, “batman”, “Iron man”, and “wonder woman”. They have to be men and women to begin with before they are given special powers. We use visual arts in classroom mainly to discover similarities and differences between eastern and western cultures. With these many Chinese movies played in theatre now, I don’t know how much Chinese soft power has been imposed into the society or our students’ minds. However, as classroom teachers, we sincerely hope all the visual arts we introduce to the classroom can help our students to become open-minded human beings who embrace and appreciate different cultures.
Nira SunWhen SARS broke out in China back in 2003, I was a junior in college. Looking back on those days, a lot of the images were still quite vivid. For our safety and to prevent any possible outbreak, the entire university was on lockdown. It was quite a challenging situation for university due to the mobility of students and staffs. What we were notified was that "If you lived in the dorms, you were not allowed to go back home" which I used to do once in a week. I remembered my Dad stopped by and dropped off fruits and grocery for me. I also had very good friends of mine who got ice cream (even though it was Spring time) for me and we were eating together while sitting on two sides of the fences.
There were so many different versions of rumors going on about how people spred the virus which got everyone so alerted. The internet was not that popular at that time, and definitely no smart phones in 2003 either. All our news resource came from radio stations. Luckly, it didn't last very long before we were released back home.
Nira SunAnd that definitely is a "life" lesson that worth of elaborating in class as well. Each person has their own point of view and they stand for what they believe is right. When disagreement arises, It is important for us to acutally practice to "be in another people's shoes". My students are high schoolers, so once in a while I will have a tiny cute little disscussion whenever we encounter some topics/incidents that are worth of going into details about. Students try to be mature but sometimes don't really know how to be. They tend to believe that adults can express whatever and however they want. The truth is that "listening and accepting the differences" are the challenging part of being a mature adult.
Nira SunHi Eric,
Yes! I am planning a field trip with one of our Spanish teachers here. We will take our Mandarin 3 and AP Spanish students to Chinese American Museum and the LA Plaza De Culturas Y Artes.
This plan was based on two considerations: One of the requriement in AP testing is culture comparison. 100% of our students has Hispanic descent.
We hope students will benefit from this field trip by learning and comparing two different cultures.
Nira SunWhile reading everyone's comments on foot binding, it makes me thinking maybe this topic can be extended to "body image". Positive body image, which can be built from self-perception and peer perception, has been a popular topic recently. Along with the popularity of all kinds of social medias, students tend to "abuse" the freedom of speech creating negative comments on their peers' appearance. For middle school and high school students, a debate probably will be a great opportunity to do research and present information. Even a simple discussion can get students gain deeper insight on a topic that is crucial to teenagers.
Nira SunThe hukou system is indeed quite interesting. Within each city, there were good school "districts". However there was no school district concept in China. I remembered that when I was school-aged, my parents would try to get our hukou moved to an area where had "better" schools with better resources even though we had city hukou. People with hukou in the suburban area would try to get a hukou in cities. Sometimes it took them life time just to get to stay in the city. Without a city hukou, people could not purchase houses even if they save enough money for it. I guess this is a way for a city to protect its residents' access to benefits and resources. What's ironic is that migrants are the ones who contribute to the development of the city.
One thing I'm not quite sure is whether marriage will grant a city hukou.
Nira SunI shall totally thank my colleague who recommended me to attend this program. Our school site locates right in the center of the downtown LA where has Little Tokyo and Chinatown nearby. Even though 100% of our Mandarin students are Hispanic, they, somehow, were exposed to certain aspects of Asian cultures before they took the Mandarin courses. However, I always felt that I could help them to understand and appreciate more about the Asian culture. This program definitely gave me more detailed and organized information about East Asia which I can take back to my classroom.
Finding Connections:
Embracing Differences:
At the beginning I thought this seminar was more suitable for Social Studies teachers. After 2 months of the seminar, I felt there are so much I can take home to my students. I will definitely recommend this seminar to my colleague.
Nira SunThanks for liking the idea. The challenging part of teaching a foreign language that's quite different from students' home language is to find ways for students to truly embrace the differences in cultures. Finding connection sometimes helps students to "accept" the facts that "there are always differences". Even though students will tend to choose their favorite out of these two movies, I still think this will be a great oportunity for them to be exposed to some authentic Chinese cultures that are embeded in the movie. It depends on how we guide them to take the first step towards appreciating and embracing the culture, doesn't it? : )
Nira SunI think bringing the history of Asian American, especially the racism against Asian Amerians, to a language class is a great idea. Even though it seems to be unrelated to the language learning, however, finding the connection between the targeting culture and students' own culture has always been helpful for students to relate to the language they are learning. I have 99% of Hispanic students in my classes who are always on top of the racism against the "brown people". If I was able to apply this part of the history to my class, it would help students to understand that racism exists in againsting all minorities.
I have always tried to help students to find the similarity between the Asian culture and Hispanic culture. However, this would be a great addition to my resources that would benefit students' learning and understanding of Asian history and its connection to their history.
Nira SunSpeaking of Korean Wave, I clearly remembered how it was hitting China back in mid of 1990s. When Prof. Kim mentioned it in class, I had the urge of sharing what I experienced about Korean War.
At the beginning of the Korean wave in China, I was a college freshman in China. My college was a foreign language studies university where it took lots of international students to come and learn about Chinese language and culture as well. Majority of the international students we had back then were students from South Korea. In order to practice the Chinese language in a more economical way, they usually paired up with local Chinese students who were fascinated about Korean language culture. This was what I did back then. I helped them to learn Chinese and they taught me Korean. 
Learning Korean language was mainly for us to understand the Korean dramas which I didn't really like due to its slow pace. I think I just wanted to learn a different language and Korean was the popular option back then.
When I lived in the dorm in China, we didn't have TV nor smart phone back in 1997ish. All I had was a radio which I listened to every single day. I listened to stations in English which was my major requirement. Other than that, I also listened to lots of music station. To exaggerate the influence of the Korean wave, there was even a special station or radio program solely broadcasting Korean music known as the K-pop this day. I even asked a friend bring up a whole set of cassettes of South Korean songs which I still have today.
Nira SunI also like the reading of these diaries because of the special perspective. Whenever war is mentioned in any topics, people tend to focus more on how each country sees the war from its own angle instead of how its civilians feel and see the war. The intention of the Japanese government was to expand their power and authority over Pacific area and other Asian countries. However, it didn't bring any good to common Japanese civilians. They lost the regular peaceful life because the entire country is under the preparation of war. They lost their relatives because most of the males were sent to war far in China or other Asian countries.
Even though I don't teach history, this is still a great reading for my sophomores who are taking World History to read about what really happened back in Japan when the government was so devoted to the war up in the front line.
Nira SunWhat's interesting is that Chinese also has the proverb of time is gold. However, from Chinese perspective, time is as precious as gold. The next line of this proverb is "Productivity is life". One of the function of this proverb serves as a warning to people to become aware that once you lose the time, it goes away and will never come back. Just like once you lose your gold, you will never get them back either. This proverb also encourages people to be more productive and stop being procracinating. The underlying intention of being productive has nothing to do with making money, especially before 1990s. Being productive means that you are able to contribute more to the collective benefit. (collectivism of Chinese value)
It's quite amazing that with one proverb, we could have two different perspectives. Xu's understainding of American's "time is gold" was about the obsession of money making. This projected with the individualism of the American value.
