Tuesday 28th October 2014 - What I did in China

This time yesterday I was on the 11½ hour British Airways through flight from Beijing to London.  This had been my first visit to China since 2007, and my first to Hong Kong since 2006.  There were several of us from the University involved in a wide variety of tasks. So what was I doing during the 9½ days of my travels?   The menu reads as follows:

3 group dinners at which I sat next to representatives of organisations such as the British Council, the British Consulate, and the Chinese Ministry of Education.  These were working dinners, drawing out aspects of our plans but also listening to local intelligence on the higher education (and wider political) landscape in China (in both parts of the ‘one country, two systems’ arrangement).

3 working meals with colleagues from the new operator of the University’s pathway provider college, and various of the agents they are working with in recruiting overseas students to come to Sheffield.  These were 'getting-to-know-you' sessions involving lots of explaining Sheffield's approach to a multitude of issues around both undergraduate and postgraduate education.

2 private meals with significant alumni of the University who have in some way indicated an interest in assisting their alma mater.

2 meetings with current Sheffield students taking a year abroad in institutions in Hong Kong or Nanjing

2 major alumni events, for graduates of the University to get together for networking and to hear about developments back in Sheffield.

2 half-day visits to Chinese universities that we see as major partners.  In both cases I was the leader of a Sheffield delegation, discussing a wide variety of connections and possible future plans.  Such visits customarily involve an exchange of gifts between universities, with appropriate photo opportunities.  I had brought our gifts from the UK and am now returning with others which will adorn my office.

2 graduation ceremonies for students who had studied in Sheffield but who now had the chance to be presented to the Vice-Chancellor in front of their parents and friends.  At one of these I gave the oration for an honorary graduate.

2 post-graduation receptions for those presented, parents, VIP guests and friends.  These also involved innumerable photos taken with graduates in their gowns.  I had carried my own gown and cap from the UK.

One presentation to a symposium on global issues.

One visit to a joint Canadian – Chinese research facility.

One synchronous on-line discussion session delivered to my students back in Sheffield from my hotel room in Beijing, at the time when we normally meet in the UK – thus necessitating staying up until one in the morning Chinese time.

That adds up to 21 events in 9½ days, but it should be added that some days were taken up with a fair bit of travel.  Two days were chiefly used up in flying from Hong Kong to Shanghai (especially as the flight was delayed) and from Shanghai to Beijing.  And there was also rail travel to and from Nanjing on two mornings.  There were events in my list above every evening

But although I was working every day, including the weekends, I wouldn’t want to suggest that there was no relaxation.  Four of us went up the Peak by funicular in Hong Kong, and three of us explored the Hong Kong Park.  I had two trips on the Star Ferry across from Hong Kong Island to Kowloon with three different colleagues. I paid two visits to old Shanghai, again with three different colleagues.  I spent part of an afternoon in the Temple of Heaven Park in Beijing.  And the leisure highlight was the day when three of us hired a driver and guide to take us out to visit the Great Wall at Mutianyu.  Finally, on a complex visit like this, with various people involved, it was good to get together in the bar at the end of the day.  Particularly memorable was an evening in the hotel in Beijing with a 5-piece group playing American standards to an international group of colleagues drawn from China, Mexico and the UK - the musical group having a superb female singer with a smoky voice, and a fantastic lead guitarist in the style of Eric Clapton or Jeff Beck in their heyday.

But now the most gruelling part begins – finalising the reports and action points that result from all the things we have done.

Thursday 23th October 2014 - Two days in China

I am currently in China on a multi-purpose visit.  Something of the variety of activities can be discerned in the timetable of the last two days.

Wednesday 22 October

0630 Leave my hotel to travel by metro to Shanghai Railway Station.  The metro is half full but there are no westerners at this time of the morning – tourists are probably still in bed.

0700 Arrive at the station and go through the airline-style security clearance to check in.  Our group of three for a visit to Nanjing assembles from different hotels.  We have all been told that the journey to the station, plus the security check, will take an hour and a half: in reality we could have done it all in 45 minutes.  We have a long time to wait.

0800  The high speed train for Nanjing departs.  I am very impressed by the style and speed of the train – but the wifi isn’t working.  Spend the journey discussing the day’s itinerary with a colleague, and reading the excellent briefings prepared back in Sheffield.

0940 Arrive in Nanjing.  Last time I travelled from Shanghai to Nanjing was in 2007, by car, taking nearly 4 hours on an empty motorway (it was early on a Sunday morning): this journey has been less than 2 hours by train.  After some confusion over which station exit we are being met at, our group of three from Sheffield splits with two of us visiting Nanjing University and one heading to another institution.

1015 Arrive at Nanjing University campus after a ‘challenging’ car journey.  I certainly wouldn’t like to drive in China.  We are allocated a student guide for a campus tour.  I am surprised how much I remember of the University’s beautiful campus from my visit 7 years ago – including some of the more interesting features that our guide would otherwise have omitted. 

1100 We meet with three senior colleagues – a Vice-President (who is, like me, a geographer), a senior member of the Nanjing University international office team (a law professor) and an administrative assistant.  At 1230 we head to a multi-course working lunch.  Over a three-hour period we review all the activities that currently link Nanjing and Sheffield, talk about possible future developments, and discuss the wider higher education landscape in our countries.  Sheffield has a long history of collaboration with Nanjing, and they are co-sponsors of our Confucius Institute (which we are currently considering expanding).  But we also send to Nanjing many of our students taking degrees in Chinese.  And we have a joint postgraduate degree in Applied Linguistics, as well as significant research collaborations in Physics and Engineering.   My colleague and I both take extensive notes of the discussions, and we will need to spend some time afterwards writing them up and allocating who should take various actions.

1400 We are driven to our nearby hotel.  My room is not ready so I spend an hour doing emails in the lobby.  We have set up a Virtual Private Network on my laptop, so I can ‘pretend’ I am in Sheffield and thus avoid the ban the Chinese authorities are placing on the use of Google products.

1500 I can have my room.  I spend the next three hours preparing a PowerPoint presentation to be given tomorrow in Shanghai.

1800 My colleague has been setting up an alumni event in a private room in the hotel.  She has had some difficulties over the arrangements and has asked me to test whether the hotel concierge can give the right directions to the room (it has been changed from the invitation).  In the lobby I meet the third member of our Sheffield party – she has spent the day on a quality assurance visit to another of the 53 universities in Nanjing, at which we have two articulated programmes whereby students spend 2 years in Nanjing and 2 in Sheffield.

1830 The alumni event starts.  About 30 Sheffield graduates living in or around Nanjing arrive.  They are superb networkers and a buzz very quickly develops, despite the fact that they are from very different cohorts – the oldest graduated around 25 years ago and the newest this year.  They all exchange business cards, in the formal Chinese manner, and so do I.  My card has my name in Mandarin (or at least a phonetic version) on the reverse.  We have also asked our current students in Nanjing (those on the Chinese Studies degree in Sheffield) to come.  They have only been here about 6 weeks and look a little shell-shocked by the culture change they are experiencing.  I make a brief speech about what is happening in Sheffield, and about how important our international community of Sheffield friends is, and at the end of the event my colleague who has organised the evening indicates how we want to support an alumni network in Nanjing, and how it could be mutually beneficial  to all concerned.  She speaks Mandarin, and later shows me how active the network’s ‘We Chat’ pages are (We Chat is the Chinese version of Facebook).

2100 The event was badged as finishing at 2100, and on the dot our guests all leave.  The three of us staff from Sheffield repair to the hotel buffet restaurant for a slightly dismal meal – everyone else in the hotel has eaten earlier and what is left has been kept heated for some time.  It takes the waitress nearly half an hour to bring us a bottle of wine – but it’s good and we feel we deserve it.  We split up to go to our rooms at 2230, the last to leave the restaurant.

Thursday 23 October

0630 I get up to do emails, including setting up a discussion forum for students on my module back in Sheffield for whom tomorrow is the day when I would normally be fully available all day for consultations about their projects.  We are going to try to maintain communication via an internet discussion forum, but it will depend on me having wifi access and using the Virtual Private Network.

0845 The three of us meet in the hotel entrance to be driven back to Nanjing station through appalling traffic.  On arrival there I buy a packet of biscuits which will have to suffice for breakfast.  Our train leaves at 1000.  En route I discuss a number of staffing issues with the colleague who visited the other university yesterday.

1140 We arrive at Shanghai and have to queue a long time for metro tickets to take us back to our respective hotels.  It’s 1230 before I get back to mine.  I get on the internet to take forward some of the issues discussed on the train.

1330 I now have a few hours of ‘down time’.  With a colleague who has a similar break in schedule we have a bite of lunch, take the ferry across the river, visit a park, a market area and some of old Shanghai before catching the metro back to our hotel.

1700 I prepare for a graduation ceremony and symposium on global affairs this evening.  The Sheffield party meets up at 1815 to get our robes on.  Guests have been arriving since 1700 and eventually there are about 50 students to be graduated in front of their friends and family.  In total there are around 200 people there, including some invitees from other universities and various alumni living in Shanghai.

1845 The degree ceremony. I am grateful that I am not reading out the names – we have a local person from the British Council to do that.  I later find out that she took a postgraduate degree in Oxford and that we have a mutual acquaintance there – someone who taught me when I was an undergraduate many years ago.  The ceremony does not exactly run in the same way as at Sheffield – parents are much more active in bouncing up and taking photographs, and one man contrives to cross the platform twice because the photos taken of him on his first visit were not deemed good enough.  The Vice-Chancellor does part of his speech in Mandarin, which is greatly appreciated.  At the end of the ceremony there is a queue of students wanting photographs of me and a colleague, both dressed in our academic robes.

1945 We have a brief pause, and then hold a symposium on global problems.  I am the second speaker up, dealing with global population change.  I am surprised and delighted by how attentive the audience is, despite the fact that some must have very limited English.  I deliberately made my presentation quite visual, with a lot of illustrations, and it seems to have paid off.

2030 Following the symposium we move to a buffet reception.  Many students and parents want to talk and they are all immensely grateful for having studied at Sheffield, and proud that their university has come out to Shanghai to visit them.  They are all in employment and feel their degree got them there.  (I suppose those who are now unemployed or underemployed probably wouldn’t have come along.)  We move out onto the hotel terrace looking across the water to the Shanghai Bund (we are staying in Pudong, in the hotel where the ceremony has been held.).  It is a warm and still evening, and the buildings are beautifully illuminated.  There is something magical about the whole setting.  The international friendships formed through education can do nothing but good in the world.  But at 2200 the lights go out on the Bund (Shanghai goes to bed early).  We stay talking – Sheffield staff, Chinese graduates, UK graduates from Sheffield who are now working here, colleagues from other local universities and from the British Council – and it looks as though some will make a late night of it.  But at 2245 I collect my gown and head for the lift and my room on the 28th floor.

Thursday 16th October 2014 - Having too small a group of students

(This blog was written on the train to London on 16 October - hence the date.  However, wifi wasn't working on the train so it is only being uploaded on 21 October - from a hotel room in Shanghai.)

I know that many lecturers are delighted when the size of their specialist final year option class drops.  They look forward to greater interaction and more intense discussion with students.  This year I have the smallest final year class I think I’ve ever had – twelve in total.  (Perhaps there’s a message there, that’s it’s time for me to go!)  Over the years I have averaged about 25-30 in my classes – although one year it did go as high as 84.  But even so I have always maintained what has basically been a seminar format for the teaching.  In the year I had 84 students I split them into four separate groups and did 8 hours a week teaching (2 hours per group) although I was only credited with 2 hours in the departmental workload allocation. 

But my small group this year of 12 creates some problems for me because I have based the teaching methods and the student tasks for the course around much larger numbers.  Contributing to wikis and other collaborative activities has in the past been based on splitting the total group into 8 or more groups of 3.  Should I reduce the number of tasks (and therefore reduce the coverage of the final piece)?  Should I make students work on their own in the production of the initial materials to be edited by everyone?  That would seem somewhat burdensome on individuals since they would be needing to cover, on their own, tasks which in the past have been dealt with by three.  That would mean an aggregate of less reading as background to what is produced by the students.

My solution so far is to reduce the number of tasks to be undertaken in small groups, and to compensate for that by dealing with the extra topics from previous years through class discussion.  I am reluctant to reduce the syllabus just because there are fewer students this year.

But I realise that in saying that I am reflecting ways of teaching that I never used earlier in my career.  Then I was the prime educator, with some student support.  Now I set the framework but I encourage the students largely to educate themselves, and each other, through collaborative activities.  And hence the more students the more potential learning there can be.  That in itself is an interesting reflection on new pedagogies of enquiry-based learning.

The most tricky topic will come later in the semester.  Normally the session on the break-up of the former Yugoslavia (a very relevant and contemporary topic given the abandonment of the Albania-Serbia football match earlier in the week) depends on role play.  And I need students to play the following roles: Slovenes, Croats, Serbs in Serbia, Serbs in Bosnia, Serbs in Kosovo, Bosniacs, Albanian Kosovans, Montenegrins, Macedonians (I can say that on a UK blog, but couldn’t use that term on a Greek site), Albanians, Greeks, Bulgars.  That totals 12 – 1 role each!  But it wouldn’t be a very fair division of labour.