Page 147 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

134 STEPHANIE HEMELRYK DONALD
presentations and flash files are especially helpful for classes of up to 40 students.
Increasingly, too, and in accord with Ministry guidelines, large campuses at well-funded
high schools and at university level use the Intranet for class teaching, and to assist
students in the assignments. Online learning draws on teachers’ tips, assignment details
and source materials, as well as discussion forums where students can seek extra help and
exchange ideas on the subject topics. None of this is unfamiliar to tertiary teachers
elsewhere, the online subject site located on a university server is now a common
phenomenon. So too is the debate on the usefulness of such sites, the extent to which they
facilitate learning or simply reproduce paper technologies in digital format.
I do not want to engage in those debates here, but would like to suggest that the
extension of the teacher’s modality through the use of, say, after-class communications, is
a significant factor in the modernisation of the teacher’s role in the PRC. There has long
been an assertion of the teacher as both in-class figure of authority and out-of-class mentor
and political-social guide. Now, the teacher’s access to technology produces her as a
technologically skilled communicator, who is also charged with the ‘out-of-classroom’
care of the students. This embodiment of the modern is where I stake our optimism
regarding the status of the female teacher in the coming years. The outlook is especially
positive if read in relation to other modalities of pedagogy, which suggest regional
relevance and multi-literacy in teaching modes.

Gulliver’s Travels
In 2002 an international conference on Film Courses for Chinese Primary Schools was
held in Zibo, Shandong Province. The film course was set up in association with Wang
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Liuyi (from Blue Cat Productions), the China Children’s Film Association and the
project team on students’ film education at the National Audio-visual Teaching Aid
Centre under the auspices of the Ministry of Education in Beijing. The ambition of the
project was to increase film literacy in the classroom across the country, with a strong
emphasis on films as conveyors of international and historical information, and films as
sources of pleasure in learning for young people. First suggested in a discussion paper in
1999, discussed in The People’s Daily (renmin ribao) and then implemented in 2001–2002,
the programme works from the following stated motivations:

1 To increase understanding of national differences worldwide, and thus enlarge
students, horizons,
2 To develop a ‘world outlook’ in students,
3 To use film to provide comprehensive approaches to knowledge gathering—for
example, Around the World in 80 Days can be worked into course materials on
‘literature, geography, history, biology, art, music, and sports’,
4 To promote happiness in the classroom, and thereby to develop visual sophistication
in students.

The plan is to conduct experiments for two years and then extend the programme via the
mechanism of the national curriculum, and its emphasis on ‘comprehensive teaching’.