Professor of Chinese Hong Gang Jin has been awarded an $80,000 grant from the Department of Education's Fulbright Hayes Group Project Abroad program for her proposal "ACC Post Study Abroad Field Experience Program for U.S. Undergraduate Students." The project will provide 12 nationally selected students, who have already completed a term or more of a study abroad program in China, with the opportunity to participate in a language-intensive and experience-based language/culture internship in China for seven weeks in the summer of 2007.
Jin started the Chinese Program at Hamilton in 1989, and in 1996 she helped establish the Associated Colleges in China program, a rigorous study abroad consortium in Beijing. The summer term project will involve collaboration with the Capital University of Economics and Business (CUEB), a long-time partner with the ACC, and Education and Science Society (ESS), an NGO with 25 years of operating experience in China.
Jin explained that the post study abroad project addresses several pressing issues and needs in the larger field of foreign language education and of Chinese language/culture education in the U.S.: a shortage of competent and fluent speakers of critical languages, of which Chinese is one; serious language loss and maintenance every student faces after study abroad programs have been completed; the prevalence of urban-based and classroom-oriented study abroad program design; the lack of opportunities to expose students to a comprehensive and in-depth study of the Chinese culture and society; the need to develop experience-based, field learning study abroad programs; and, the need to find innovative ways to inspire more American young people to engage in foreign language/culture learning and teaching.
Jin's project is unique in that it includes field experience and travel to rural areas of China. Conventional study abroad models are often urban-based and classroom-oriented, with language and culture learning separated. The field experience will engage students in purposeful language use through project preparations, project presentations at conferences, and an internship with the NGO organization. Traveling to three rural sites of China with ESS team members and working with rural teachers and students provides students opportunities for meaningful interaction in different geographic locations. Such a program integrates the language and culture, urban and rural, classroom and field experience into one unique learning experience.
The program participants will undergo a three-week intensive Chinese language/culture training and field trip preparation. Then they will participate in a three-week field experience/internship that focuses on issues of education in rural China. Students will travel with the ESS team to three rural sites: Gansu Province located in northwest China, Jiangxi Province in central China, and Anhui Province in central east China. They will work as interns on conferences or workshop-related projects on a daily basis.
After returning to their home colleges in the U.S., participants will make a presentation to their campus community and to a local elementary or secondary school on their experience in rural China.
Jin hopes this program will address the issue of paucity of proficient foreign language experts in the U.S. In her proposal she noted, "Because of the difficulty in finding opportunities to speak Chinese in America after completing study abroad programs, many students' language skills suffer and most students struggle to reach the superior level. We hope to use our project to demonstrate that a post-study abroad program is necessary for further advancing students' Chinese linguistic and cultural ability. This project will serve as a model for other study abroad programs that may be interested in developing post-study abroad opportunities for their students.
"Because part of our selection criteria for students will be their intention to work as an educator in the fields of Chinese language and cultural studies, this project will consequently help create a pool of future professionals who will contribute to the development of modern foreign area and language studies in U.S. education," Jin wrote in the proposal.
In addition, Jin said the project will give students with advanced Chinese language skills the opportunity to experience a part of China rarely seen by those who study there. The summer program will focus on rural China because most aboard programs are urban-based. In these programs students only have the opportunity to interact with a segment of the Chinese population that generally has access to more educational, economic, and cultural resources.
The post-study abroad project will give students the opportunity to interact with communities in rural China who make up 80% of China's population, thus providing a more realistic and complete picture of China and Chinese culture. "Because of this," she said, "we believe that this project will make an important contribution our students' knowledge of China, which will help to round out their area studies curriculum."
