Page 149 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

136 STEPHANIE HEMELRYK DONALD
the children recreate the Robinson Crusoe story as a collective enterprise. They
‘survived’ the field trips and made their own film to tell the story and comment on what
they had learnt.
The teacher told the story of the project to the conference delegates, and relayed the
film through a PowerPoint using video and flash. The exercise combined the up-skilling
associated with modernisation with the management of the self in a collective society, that
is an ongoing feature of moral education (jiaoyu) and socialisation in Chinese schools. It
was facilitated by a demonstrably competent woman who manipulated technology in ways
that accomplished comprehensive learning in a specific social environment according to
state-approved and pragmatic moral standards of self-sufficiency, environmental
awareness and collective endeavour.
In Shenzhen, the Nanshan foreign languages school provides (almost) bilingual
education to children of wealthy parents. The film project at Nanshan looked at Gulliver’s
Travels and used the semester to emphasise advanced literacy in English. Despite the
‘subject’ rather than ‘comprehensive’ focus (and potentially vocational focus of the work
given the association of English with work opportunities), the project did promise a multi-
modal delivery of the text. Classes were organised around six activities and facilitated by
various media (word cards, VCR, VCD, microphone, micro-recorder, paper, video-
camera). The activities took the students through the story sequence by sequence, and
encouraged them to memorise the text through analysis, imitation, acting and dubbing.
The last activity was filmed so that the children again produced their own version of the
film. The teachers also published a short booklet beautifully illustrated with drawings by
children (mostly in manga style), and still images from a cartoon version. The project
booklet promised that there would be social as well as subject outcomes to the learning
process: ‘Students are very interested in acting. They’ll feel themselves important through
participation, they will gain confidence, and learn more from peers through cooperation.’
The relationship between specialised schools, regional schools and a national curriculum
pilot has to be understood in context; only the better schools are chosen for pilot schemes
such as the Film Course. Nevertheless, as examples of professional best practice, these
(and there were several more) case studies underline the emergence of women as
specialised teachers of multi-literacy and multi-modality in the service of the social and the
modern imperatives. Further, whilst the initiatives do not truly challenge the highly
systematic organisation underlying professionalism in Chinese schools, they do suggest a
willingness to allow children to work with a visual ‘package’ in a local context.

Conclusions
There are men and women working in Chinese schools. Nevertheless, as those of us living
in developed economies know only too well, teaching is a feminised profession, with low
wages, low social value and high levels of stress, and minimal career prospects for most
workers. Technology in the classroom does not necessarily militate against this situation.
However, the advent of multi-literacy as an articulated concept in the mediated classroom
may work to technologise teaching in useful ways. Technologisation can simply conform
to skill-based development in teaching outcomes, but it can also deepen the modality of