Page 23 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

10 ANNE E.MCLAREN
project has improved the status of teachers to that of ‘a professional class of educators’.
Compulsory continued training and upgrading of teachers, especially in the use of new
technological media, has further bolstered their position.
In recent years the Chinese state has set very ambitious goals for the technologisation of
education. One goal is to network virtually all schools by 2003. Students are now taught
information technology, especially in such areas as English language teaching. Teachers
increasingly rely on the computer as an aid to teaching. PowerPoint presentations are
replacing the old ‘chalk and talk’ methods. With the increased technologisation of
learning, the teacher increasingly takes on the role of ‘a technologically skilled
communicator’.
How is the woman educator faring in the emergence of the technologically literate
teacher? In various encounters with women educators, Donald noted the high level of
competence displayed and the goal of providing self-enrichment and a happy (‘fun’)
learning environment for the students. This impression of competence was confirmed by
case studies drawn from two schools. In one case study, a teacher in a school in Jiangxi
Province, a teacher used the story of Robinson Crusoe to organise field trips to rural
regions so as to allow the students to re-create the Crusoe story by ‘surviving’ in the
countryside. The students made their own film of this event and relayed it back to the
class through PowerPoint and video. In this case, one could say that the woman teacher
was using a radically new method to transmit some ‘traditional’ Chinese values
(endurance, fortitude, ‘collective endeavour’) to a group of students perceived to be
mollycoddled, ‘spoilt’ single children. Donald concludes on a note of optimism: although
teaching in China, as elsewhere, is a ‘feminised profession’ with ‘minimal career
prospects’ and low remuneration, nonetheless, the emergence of the IT-competent
woman teacher in the Chinese classroom augurs well for her strengthening professional
status and a growing recognition of her role within ‘the modern landscape of Chinese
society’.
The final chapters return to issues of the family and domestic space, traditionally the
paramount domain of ‘women’s work’ in China. Anthropologist Sally Sargeson’s study of
house construction and domestic space in Zhejiang Province provides a dramatic insight into
the relationship between the construction of multi-storey mansions in Zhejiang villages,
household work patterns, internal labour migration, inheritance of property, and the
marital choices made by young women of the region. As she demonstrates, the
configuration of new housing in this region, not to mention the ‘embedding’ of Zhejiang
villages within a global economy, is based around one prime social fact: a young woman will
only marry a man who owns a mansion.
During the reform period, Zhejiang has seen a huge boom in household construction.
Per capita living space of Zhejiang villagers is reaching unheard sizes of 40 square metres
or more in the 1990s. Sargeson carried out a survey of 296 households in Zhejiang, followed
up by detailed interviews with forty households. She found that over half had built at least
one new house from 1990 to 2000. Some families had even demolished and rebuilt
several times. For the people in the region, the boom in household construction can be
explained very simply: ‘No woman would marry a man without a new house.’ The young
women interviewed by Sargeson confirmed this image of the power of bridal choice.