Chinese Students and Western Teachers: Reflections on Practice
March 20, 2017
By Daryl Johnson, School of English. As the number of Chinese students attending foreign HE institutions continues to grow (89,540 in 2014-2015 up from 87,895 in 2013-2014, UKCISA), the same kinds of frustrations experienced by their lecturers and seminar leaders appear to have persisted. A relatively unanimous consensus amongst Western teachers of Chinese students is …
Education and Ideology: Paving the Way for Cosmopolitan Nationalism
January 19, 2016
By Dr Tracey Fallon, Assistant Professor, School of Contemporary Chinese Studies at UNNC. According to news reports in December 2015, the governments of Beijing and Shanghai moved to restrict international programmes at high school level.[1] These preparatory foundation programmes provide a pathway to university study abroad without necessity for the intensive gaokao entrance exam. The programmes …
Broadening my horizon: What lessons can Chinese education and their students teach me?
October 2, 2015
By Esther van Deelen, Student of UNNC Summer School 2015. As a primary school teacher I’ve been involved in the Dutch educational system since 2006. I’ve taught a lot of different classes and I’ve seen a lot of different schools. As in China, the Dutch government wants highly educated teachers and so I received a …
Singapore: China’s Ambivalent Heterotopia
December 29, 2014
By Flair Shi, Currently Studying Comparative Literature (MA) at University College London, Graduate of the School of English University of Nottingham Ningbo, BA in English Language and Literature. Any Chinese who is efficiently bilingual in both Mandarin and English should be interested in Singapore, and with the population of such Chinese, especially that of the …
Vocational education, why we need it for China’s higher education reform
April 16, 2014
By Dr. Youqing Fan, Assistant Professor at the School of Contemporary Chinese Studies, The University of Nottingham Ningbo China. China’s higher education system has long been directed towards cultivating academic talents, whilst the value of technique and skill-oriented vocational education has been downplayed. This tendency is reflected in the way that high school students are …
The Changing State of English Education in China
January 15, 2014
By Daryl Johnson, PhD student in Applied Linguistics, The University of Nottingham Ningbo China. English language has a tempestuous place in Chinese history. During and shortly after the Opium Wars, English was seen as the language of ‘barbarians’ and later during the Cultural Revolution, it was the language of the enemy capitalists and a symbol …
Reflections on being a student at UNNC
June 15, 2013
By Felicity Woolf, First Year Part Time Student, MA Contemporary Chinese Studies, The University of Nottingham Ningbo China. It’s exactly 40 years since I started my BA degree at the University of Exeter. Now, I’m enrolled as a part-time student, studying for an MA in Contemporary Chinese Studies. In the first semester I took two …