 | An impromptu cake fight helped break the ice at a party early in the first semester of the PKU-Yale program in Beijing. Here (from left) PKU students Jiang Junle '09 and Wu Luchao '09, along with Yale student Alexa Verme '08, show off the messy results. |
Students building bonds, understanding
In a term this past fall in the Peking-Yale University Joint Undergraduate
Program, Chinese student Jiang Xiaowei learned something that, to her, felt
rather peculiar: that being “right” in the classroom is not necessarily
more important than being an original thinker. “As higher education institutions in China, and indeed worldwide,
explore educational experiences that emphasize the liberal arts, the PKU-Yale
Joint Program gives PKU’s faculty, administrators and students the opportunity
to observe — and participate in — a model of liberal arts curriculum
in action,” Weber says. — By Susan Gonzalez
T H I S
IN MEMORIAM
In Focus: Peking-Yale
Joint Undergraduate Program
as they live and learn together
Most Chinese instructors usually reward students only for presenting the correct
answer, so it took Jiang some time to get up the courage to express herself in
the program’s “Neurolinguistics” seminar taught by Yale Professor
Maria Piñango in Beijing, China. Communicating a personal opinion, she
notes, felt foreign to her.
“[Professor Piñango] wanted us to express ourselves, what we think
of the issue [we are discussing],” says Jiang. “Sometimes she would
support some view [just to encourage] us to argue with her. I gradually learned
in her course that in her eyes, the smartest students … are those who
speak the most often and make the most mistakes in class. Here arises the contradiction.
We Chinese students tend to think deeply before we say anything in class, but
if we do say anything, we have given it a thorough thinking, and we want it to
be perfectly right. Those students are considered to be the best students in
Chinese classes.”
Jiang is one of nearly 100 Peking University (PKU) and Yale students who have had the opportunity to experience new courses,
teaching styles, classmates and cultures in the PKU-Yale Joint Undergraduate
Program since it began in the fall semester of 2006. The program was conceived
by Yale President Richard C. Levin and PKU President Xu Zhihong as a natural
outgrowth of other collaborations between the two universities over the years,
which have included faculty research projects and graduate student exchanges.
As the two universities’ first joint undergraduate initiative, the program allows Yale students to become immersed in Chinese
language and culture during a semester at PKU, while giving their Chinese counterparts
the chance to study with American professors and peers. (See related story.)
For many of the Chinese participants, it is their first experience of a liberal
arts curriculum, according to Amy Weber, who coordinates the Yale end of the
program under the auspices of the Office of International Education and Fellowships
Programs.
While at PKU — which is considered China’s flagship university — Yale
students have the unique opportunity to live and take classes with their Chinese
counterparts in the program, all of whom are members of the highly selective
Yuanpei Honors College. Considered to be PKU’s first step in instituting
a liberal arts education, Yuanpei Honors College each year admits a select group
of 160 highly accomplished students who are able to spend their first two years
in a liberal arts curriculum at PKU before declaring their majors. Most Chinese
students, by contrast, attend college classes based on concentrations determined
during secondary school.
The joint program brings to the Beijing campus (called “Beida” in
Chinese) an equal number of Yuanpei and Yale students — no more than 24
from each school in any given term, so that classes remain small and so students
from each school can be matched one-to-one as roommates. In seminars taught in
English by Yale and PKU professors and featuring numerous guest lecturers, cross-cultural
dialogue is encouraged. The Chinese students are all proficient in English, while
the Yale students are not required to have any previous knowledge of Chinese
in order to take part in the program.
Gary DeTurck '08 of Silliman College and Huang Huatai '09 of PKU greet each other at the start of the Yale-PKU program.
Yale senior Michael Schmale, an East Asian studies major who did not speak Chinese
before taking part in the program in his sophomore year, admits that it was “daunting” at
first to “go about daily life armed with little more than pantomime,” but
says it didn’t take him very long to learn some Chinese and adjust to life
in Beijing. He used his time at PKU to focus entirely on learning about his host
country, taking courses on Chinese language, the Chinese economy, historical
Chinese culture and on contemporary culture in Beijing.
Like Jiang, Schmale found distinct differences between the university experiences
in China and in America.
“The Chinese educational system relies on rote learning and standardized
assessments,” he says. “In this regard, it is considerably different
from U.S. higher education, which is geared more toward self-expression and takes
a more holistic approach to its students. Of course, these are generalizations,
and in many ways China’s system is simply a reflection of both its enormous
population and its enormous economic growth, which is giving more and more students
the means to pursue higher education.”
Steven Stearns, the Edward P. Bass Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology,
taught two courses in the PKU-Yale program this past fall: “Key Issues
in Evolution” and “Principles of Evolution, Ecology and Behavior.” He
notes that, for many of his Chinese students, a seminar-styled classroom was
a new experience.
“The Chinese students who selected my courses were very hungry for information
about evolution, which is not a field well represented in the Beida faculty — or
anywhere in China,” Stearns says. “In my seminar course, conversation
was lively, but I had to train the Chinese students whom I asked to lead the
discussion to develop shared information by eliciting questions and synthesizing
the answers, rather than by giving short lectures from prepared notes. They are
starting to learn what a seminar is all about.”
Similarly, for his “Introduction to the Chinese Economy” class this
fall, PKU Professor Dong Chen says he devoted nearly 40% of his class time to
student discussion, even though his class is more typically a lecture-style course.
“Teaching in this program requires a PKU professor to exert more effort
than he or she would have done in a regular PKU class to get the students involved,
to initiate and coordinate class discussions and to accommodate the fact that
the student body consists of individuals with very different cultural background
and language skills,” he says. Outside of the PKU-Yale program, he notes, “Chinese
students are not encouraged to speak in class,” but once in the program, “they
learn very fast. So in the second half of the semester, they become much more
active.”
Chen says he is similarly impressed with his Yale students’ interest in
learning about the Chinese economy, the fastest-growing one in the world, and
notes that “being in this environment” enhances their ability to
understand the many complex factors that have led to that growth.
Yale participants in the program report that they formed close bonds with their
roommates and with their classmates from China.
“The decision to pair up Yale students and Chinese students as roommates
was a stroke of genius because it gently, but persistently, fostered a deeper
bond and deeper understanding between us and our roommates that would have been
unlikely otherwise,” says Schmale. “I’m still in regular contact
with my roommate and another of the Chinese students.”
He adds that as the Yale and PKU students began forming friendships, the “superficiality” of
their differences as people became more apparent.
Another highlight of the program is the multitude of opportunities it provides
for exploring different parts of China and beyond its borders, often with their
teachers and Chinese classmates, according to Kate Aitken, a Yale junior majoring
in political science who participated in the PKU-Yale Joint Undergraduate Program
last spring.
In addition to seeing the famous sites in Beijing, both she and Schmale say they
particularly enjoyed traveling to rural Chinese schools to donate English-language
books — trips organized by the Yale Club of Beijing — as well as
the excursions further afield, including a trek through the Inner Mongolian desert.
On these trips and in other settings, the Yale students and teachers were able
to discuss history, politics, economics, education, environmental issues and
other subjects with their PKU peers.
Speaking to the “Yale 100” delegation during the group’s visit
to China with Levin in May 2007, Aitken described her trip to the hometown of
her PKU classmate Xie Yu Hong, located outside of the port city of Xiamen.
“We met his incredibly gracious and hospitable family, visited old teachers
and classmates at his high school, and toured the sites of Xiamen, arguably the
most beautiful city I’ve visited in China,” Aitken told the delegation. “Yu
Hong’s desire to share with us not only his academic life but his broader
life outside of Beida impressed me deeply. And he is not alone — all of
our Beida roommates have journeyed with us outside of Beijing, taking time out
of their busy academic lives to explore the beauty and historical richness of
their country with us.”
The participants in the Yale-PKU program say they were also impressed with faculty-led
trips to sites that helped inform some of their classroom study. In the 2007
spring term, for example, Yale political science professor Pierre Landry traveled
with students to Yenan, the original home of the Communist Party, while Yale
art historian Anne Dunlop took students to visit caves along the Silk Road featuring
centuries of images carved on the walls by Buddhist monks.
The Yale and PKU students say the program represents the best of what a liberal
arts education is about.
“One of the reasons I came to Yale was to get a complete liberal arts education,” says
Aitken. “My semester in China just added to that experience, and was one
of the most enriching of my college years. I came away with an intimate experience
of the country, learning so much more than I possibly could have from any reading
I could have done. My semester in the program rounded out my liberal arts education.”
Jiang notes that the PKU-Yale program gave her an opportunity few of her Chinese
classmates have had the chance to experience.
“A student of the 21st century should have a global perspective,” says
Jiang. “That’s part of the reason why some Yale students choose to
come to China. But for a Chinese student, such opportunities are very rare. In
most cases, we cannot go to America to take part in an exchange program, even
in some less-famous universities, let alone a prestigious one such as Yale. And
exchange programs within China are no better. Every semester, there are no more
than 10 people lucky enough to win the chance to go to Hong Kong University for
a semester.
“Given the situation, we have to find other ways to develop our global
perspective even if we cannot go abroad,” she adds. “So this program
is a good choice, for the students [in the program] are all ‘elites’ in
the United States, and some of them are going to be world leaders in a few decades.”
Aitken was so enthralled with her time in China that she stayed on over the summer
to work through the Yale Bulldogs Program, which gives undergraduates work experiences
abroad. By then comfortable enough with her Chinese to do some independent traveling,
Aitken ventured to Tibet and to a Mt. Everest base camp, among other places.
“I visited some monasteries in out-of-the-way towns where the people never
saw Westerners before,” says Aitken. “I never would have done that
without my semester at PKU. There is a reason why Yale encourages its undergraduates
to spend time during their undergraduate years abroad. It’s about having
broad exposure to different people and gaining different perspectives on the
world. The PKU-Yale program was a really exciting way to understand the world
and the people in it a little better. China is a country we will all have to
learn about, especially our generation, and there couldn’t have been a
better way for me to do that.”
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