On Sunday, July 5, Li Qin, Rachel, and I returned to Chongqing from Chengdu with a big week
ahead: a full-day professional development on Monday and then two hour classes Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. I’ve posted some pictures of the massive Chengdu train station already, but here are a couple of other features of the train stations that I captured. The guys on the left are playing Xiangqi–Chinese Chess. At the base of the stairs. Between two escalators. In a train station. No one else seemed to notice them. I guess you get used to things if they’re common where you live. Like restroom signs pointing at walls or toward nowhere in particular.
It really is almost always beautiful to ride into a sunset anywhere I guess, but I came to appreciate riding into the mountains around Chongqing at sunset. 
Monday was a full-day talk, lunch, and workshop at Huaxin Primary School in Jiangbei. Jiangbei is a district of the Chongqing municipality, like Beibei. It is the district north of the Jialing River where it runs into the Yangtze–across the Jianling from the Chongqing Peninsula (Jianbei means “River North”). Beibei is further to the north along the Jialing. (Beibei means “North Rock” and a “Bei” is a particular kind of rock that sticks out of the river–there is a “bei” in Beibei but I didn’t see it). Kitty came to pick me up in a taxi with her mom, Little Walnut, and LW’s massive stroller. Fortunately I got to sit in the front seet. It was about an hour to get to Jiangbei from the University, and of course there was traffic, so we were late, and the students were calling to check on us.
When we finally rolled into Jianbei, the taxi just dropped us off on the street in an area that looked like Tyson’s Corner, We got the stroller, Grandma, and the walnut unraveled and proceeded to hike our way through a back alley where people were cooking rice and meat, under some laundry hanging down from an apartment, and up and down some stairs, until we arrived at a gleaming new, huge school with a security gate. The school was about 8 stories, and it had a full-sized, semi-enclosed athletic field.
We rushed to the third floor to get Grandma and Che Tau settled into a day-care center and then rushed to the fifth floor where the group of teacher leaders, students, and about 100 primary school science teaching specialists were waiting for me to give a sweaty talk and for Kitty to translate breathlessly.
The morning was interesting. As usual, there were a lot of questions, and as usual, since they were teachers, they were a bit of a tough audience. But I’m used to it. We recorded the group inquiring into moon phenomena, and that has led to some interesting stuff Kitty and I have begun working on about linguistic resources in learning science and the mechanisms by which particular language resources serve particular kinds of proficiencies in science learning. I’m not telling you any more. You’ll have to come to the conference talk.
But lunchtime was crazy. In case I didn’t mention it, it was hot and humid, it felt like we were rushing everywhere, and I was sweating through my shirt. Kitty and I had been talking about the afternoon workshop, but we needed to translate some materials quickly during lunchtime and have copies made. We had discussed in the morning that we would work on some things during lunch and have Rachel do the translation. But after the talk, Kitty vanished (I think she was anxious to get back to the baby), and I was whisked away to follow people out to lunch. Rachel told me that she was supposed to go with me, and the other students weren’t invited. I figured we were going to meet up with Kitty at lunch and do our work. But it turned out that Rachel was being sent with me to translate. I thought we were going to have a casual lunch with the teacher leaders who organized the day, but it turned out to be with the principal of Huaxin, the vice principal, and a number of other people who were apparently education officials in in the district.
Poor Rachel–I don’t think either of us realized this was going to happen. Rachel’s English is good, but not as good as Kitty’s; there were a lot of dignified people, and as usual I was peppering Rachel with questions about language and culture. We sat at a big round table with an enormous Lazy Susan on a slow constantly-rotating speed. As usual there was amazing food and too much of it: pork, duck, vegetables, noodles, soup, shrimp…. We were served watermelon juice and there was a big toast where everyone stood up and clinked watermelon glasses. Thanks to Rachel, I was able to have an interesting conversation at that meal with the principal, who had studied in Singapore, and the vice principal, who had some training at Towson, where I got my teaching degree.
But the real excitement was the toasting! The way it seems to work is that throughout the lunch, each person stands up and goes around the table and toasts everyone else individually with watermelon juice. The first time someone came to me, I didn’t realize I should be standing; Rachel told me. The next time, I neglected to fully stand up; I was kind of in a half-stand-half-sit position, bent over like an old man. Soon I go the gist though. People seemed to really be having fun with it. One guy latched onto the Chinese name that Mike and Robin gave me and came over to toast “Wendao.” Eventually I made my own round, with a glass of watermelon juice and Rachel in tow to translate. I realized that if you like a particular dish, like the twice-cooked pork, for example, you can time your revolution of the table to match the rotation of the Lazy Susan and eat pork all the way around.
But I did promise that this post was about Science Teaching and Teacher Education in China. That afternoon, after lunch, we structured a workshop such that teachers could look at their own lessons through the lens of US science education reform–in the form of Next Generation Science Standards core ideas, cross-cutting concepts, and scientific practices. Chinese science educators are very interested in what goes on in U.S. science education; they took on this charge seriously, and I think they found it useful. Based on the evaluations and my sense during the workshop and other meetings, I think the most powerful thing for the elementary science teachers I worked with was the realization that they are already creating very productive science learning environments for their students, at least based on the recommendations of NGSS in the US (and on my interpretations of NGSS).
I realized that my expertise is primarily in secondary and middle school science teaching in the U.S., although I have done some work in primary, yet everyone I was talking to in China was in primary science education. In China, at least in urban schools, primary school science teachers are specialists, and most have a background in science. VIdeos and transcripts of classrooms that I saw generally showed the kinds of interactions that I would associate with the most dynamic middle and high school science classrooms that I have seen at home. (Although Kitty cautions me that I’ve mostly seen classrooms of the best teachers). Still, I was impressed at what I was seeing, and I told the teachers so.
It wasn’t until later in the week that I learned that science in high schools can take place in classes of up to 100 students and it is always lecture. One teacher told me that she did no laboratory activities of any kind in her high school science classes, and the kind of engagement in scientific practices that we envision in U.S. high schools would not overlap at all with high school Chinese science teaching.
It seems that high school is like a pre-college in China more than it is here. Public school is only compulsory in China through grade 9, and public high schools charge tuition (although it is apparently affordable for most people). These kinds of things really surprised me about China–in many ways it seems less socialist than the U.S.–people have to pay for health insurance–there is not universal health care. Apparently the Chinese government’s answer to things that don’t seem very socialist is (and has always been), that “We are in the early stages of socialism”. Or so I have heard.
To become a teacher, a person usually completes an undergraduate degree that gets them certified, but these programs can be very competitive. For example, one student I know really wanted to be an English teacher, but only people with the highest test scores get into those programs, so she settled on becoming a biology teacher. However, even with a degree, it’s not so easy to get a job, which is why many of the students I met were working on their masters degrees. Even though they were doing research-based masters degrees, it is expected that the masters degree will help them to get a teaching job.
The professional development is handled at the level of the district, as it is
with us, but the teacher leaders appear to have a lot more autonomy. These teacher leaders were the people who came to every talk, workshop, or class I did. They seem to be the people in China who are most like me; people trying to soak up every good thing they can about science teaching. These pictures are from the last day of my class later that week, but a bunch of the people in them are teacher leaders who had been at the Huaxin talk and workshop on Monday.
That day at Huaxin was really interesting and exciting, but it was the most stressful and exhausting day of my whole trip. I was talking or leading a workshop for six hours. I realized that my colleague DJK and I almost signed a contract to do that in Beijing for 10 days, and one day in Chongqing had just about killed me. So glad we didn’t do that DJK!
After the workshop, we got a nice surprise. The teacher leaders had gotten us a private car and we were whisked back to Beibei in style, just in time to plan for class the next day. I just realized….Che Tau did not cry the entire day!
Darwin's Apostle 