Teacher StoriesCrossing the River, feeling for stones
How many teachers have been clapped by 1,000 students as they enter the school building? Clapped at the end of a lesson? Mobbed for autographs? I ponder this as I walk up the stairs of the four storey Yuan Jiang No 1 Middle School. It is a boarding school overlooking a lake and dotted about with orange and raspberry coloured bougainvillea. There are one thousand students crowded onto the walkways of each storey and they are clapping and cheering. My eyes are unexpectedly teary. "Get a grip, Jill" I mutter to myself as I climb the stair to my first teaching experience in China. It is Sunday and they are keen for their English classes to start. Keen to meet their 'Warmly welcome visitors from Australia'. Ao-da-li-a. About a million miles away from this rural school in the remote province of Yunnan. Twenty five teachers
of all persuasions, sectors and states combine together in January
of 1999 to go on the TICFA tour of China. Beginning in Kunming,
the tour takes us to a variety of rural schools over ten days then
on to Chongqing, Beijing and Shanghai. It is an intense and powerful
1 experience. It begins in the Yuan Jiang classroom. Sixty students
seated in pairs in old On return to Australia, the experience continues to reverberate. Two Year 10 students, Alice Li and Lan Lu hand up their autobiographies. Both girls were left in China with their grandparents for a number of years when their parents migrated. I am instantly back at the creche in Moijiang, watching a toddler progress along the cobbled back lanes. At parent-teacher night the reserved, distant face of the Chinese father comes to life when I ask him where he lived in China. Something about having seen three thousand people marching along a railway station platform, about a winding, nine hour journey through Yunnan hills, about the thriving chaos of Shanghai sits between us. Making contact. Looking around the sparse walls of my secondary classroom, I think of team-teaching in Moijiang. Di Murphy, a primary teacher from NSW has a large hand painted picture of a beach scene. We add lifesavers and fish and 'swimmers' and create a wild drowning scenario. It's fun. She teaches me to go slowly, to use repetition to reinforce the learning. I go to China to learn about teaching in an Australian primary school. The picture has been widened for all of us who went to China. Oddly enough, it has all broadened our picture of Australia as well. Teachers talk shop. Everywhere. Late at night amidst skewers of chicken, chilli potatoes and Chinese beer, we all, Chinese and Australian teachers, talk shop. The experience is lived. not through the windows of a tour bus but in the contact with the many people that we meet along the way. What does it mean to have only one child, to be looking to a society with no aunts and uncles? What happened to your family during the cultural revolution? Why is Titanic the favourite film of all the sixteen year old girls I meet? What do students think about Mao? What happens to your marriage when your husband has to work in a distant town for two years? I become fascinated with the role of women in China and continue to read and prepare curriculum materials in this area but the experience leaks out in many other ways as well. In class. In the 'World News' section of the newspaper. In conversation over dinner, the China trip looms large, as the best life experiences do. In Beijing, China was described to us as a country in a state of flux; China is "crossing the rivet feeling for the stones". And this metaphor describes the impact of the trip; an impact the size of the Yangtze and I'm still feeling it underfoot. Jill Wilson Further information on
the TICFA program is available from: |
