CU Boulder students engage in conversation while studying abroad in China. The program to send students abroad to China has been buoyed by a $1.2 million gift from the Tang Fund of New York. This group was led by journalism Professor Meg Moritz in 2011.
Some years ago, there was a student at the University of Colorado Boulder who had never spoken Mandarin and never been to China, who had the opportunity to study abroad in China and then to major in Chinese at CU after returning.
The experience was life-changing and horizon-broadening—not only for that student but also now for those who benefit from that alum’s generosity.
Four years ago, the CU-Boulder Center for Asian Studies received a $1.2 million gift from the Tang Fund of New York. The largest endowed gift ever made to the center was designed to allow students to experience China through a study abroad program.
The anonymous donor’s gift stemmed from the first-hand experience of studying abroad and the desire to share that experience with those who might not otherwise have the chance.
The program has been even more successful than anticipated, say the center’s director and faculty members who have led the resulting study-abroad courses.
“The gift has been doing exactly what it was supposed to do,” said Laurel Rasplica Rodd, the center’s director. Three summer programs have been led by a diverse group of faculty members including those specializing in journalism, geography and the humanities.
After returning from studying in China, students characterize their experience with words like “transformational,” Rodd said. “It opens their eyes to an area they had not considered.”
Rodd began teaching in 1974, a time when her field, Japanese, was a “really exotic language.” Now, Japanese is the fourth most-studied foreign language in the United States. And today, Asia is “central to just about every decision we’re going to make in the future.”
The new program is not restricted to students majoring in Asian Studies and seeks to expose a broad spectrum of students to Chinese culture, Rodd said. The program also differs from many study abroad programs in that most expenses are covered by the endowed gift.
Anja Lange, instructor in CU-Boulder’s Herbst Program for Humanities for Engineers, led the first summer study abroad session funded by the Tang Fund.
“What I really enjoyed is that I got to take students who could otherwise not afford to go,” Lange said.
Lange’s course included about half engineering students and half non-engineering students. A dozen joined her in China in 2010.
“It’s a course that appeals to everybody because it’s an introduction to China. But once we are on-site … I can actually challenge each student individually, because the course is so small,” Lange said.
Lange took her students to Jiatong University in Xi’an, famous for its terracotta warriors inside the Qin Shi Huang Mausoleum.
The course took place on Jiatong University’s campus. The students lived in dormitories and fraternized with Chinese students, most of whom study engineering.
“They can really experience, to some extent, the life of a Chinese student,” Lange said. In the process, students study contemporary and historical China. Most students couldn’t distinguish dynasties when they apply, she said.
“But by the time they leave Xi’an, they know what the Tang Dynasty is, and they can even tell you what makes Tang Tang.”
“I had many students who had never been abroad, who had never experienced jet lag.” Once they recover from the journey, they begin an intensive program of language and other instruction, along with academic excursions in the evening.
The course itself is in cultural studies. Lange uses text that explores “the other” and the perspective one takes on another culture. One example is “The Good Earth,” the controversial novel by Pearl S. Buck.
After CU-Boulder students are introduced to real Chinese students in their homeland, they discuss “The Good Earth” from the divergent vantage points of America and China.
“It all depends on perspective: Who are we? Who are they?” Lange added: “So the course really aims at breaking down barriers of prejudice, fear … and you see how comfortable (the students) feel after four weeks, when at first they were very fearful about even venturing out, because it’s a different place,” and because western students tend to look different from their peers in the East.
“If you have a 20-year-old student who’s never been abroad, China is quite a leap to take.” But for those willing to take that jump—to grapple with a difficult language, to be an object of curiosity, to feel extraordinarily out of one’s element—it can be rewarding, Lange said.
She cites one student of applied mathematics who now works in Namibia. The student told Lange: “I always imagined my life to be in some little cubicle, but now I realize there is so much I can do with my applied-math degree. I had no idea I could go out and help the world with a math degree.”
“I’m not making Chinese experts. You come home, and you know a little bit about Chinese culture,” Lange said. “It’s really about navigating culture.”
Meg Moritz, a journalism professor who led the 2011 Tang Fund study-abroad course, helped her students view China through the lens of the mass media.
Moritz’ course was called China through Time, which examined China from the different viewpoints of Time magazine and the nation on which it focused much of its journalistic energy. Through the decades, Time has dedicated more than 100 cover stories to China, and the magazine’s founder Henry Luce, was born in China.
“Throughout most of the 20th Century, Time magazine was extremely influential and Luce was fiercely anti-Communist. Almost every reference to China was a reference to ‘Red China,’ a term journalists no longer use.”
Moritz took 11 students to Beijing and Shanghai after guiding them through several seminars in Boulder.
Students met with western and Chinese journalists, including the Beijing bureau chiefs of Reuters, CNN and The Christian Science Monitor along with correspondents from Time and Al Jazeera, the Arabic news outlet based in Qatar.
Students also had thoughtful discussions with journalists from CCTV, China’s major broadcaster, China Daily, Beijing News and Shanghai Media Group.
Students would compare two different media outlets, say NPR or CCTV or China Daily. They follow the itinerary of President Nixon’s landmark 1972 visit to China. “By time we ended, we’d met with 15 journalists and writers,” Moritz said.
Additionally, CU students met with Chinese students for journalism exercises at four different universities. Besides the classroom portion of the course, CU students mingled with Chinese students their own age.
In the process, they had to reassess or at least defend their views of the respective virtues of the American and Chinese press. “I tried to get them to look very hard at ways in which the U.S. press exercises censorship,” Moritz said, adding:
“This idea that the U.S. has a free press and China does not is simplistic.”
Some of Moritz’ students say the experience transformed their view of China and the world. “Travel is an education experience in and of itself.”
For more information about the CU-Boulder Center for Asian Studies, see.
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