A fast course in American teaching methods and Southern California culture will greet 140 guest teachers arriving from China in less than two weeks.
Through the College Board Chinese Guest Teacher Summer Institute, hosted by the UCLA Confucius Institute, instructors will learn to teach Mandarin in K-12 schools across the country, according to the Confucius Institute’s website. The conference will be held July 19-27.
Since the Confucius Institute promotes Chinese language learning and teaching throughout Southern California, it was natural that the center would want to host the event to showcase its resources and teaching methods, said Susan Jain, executive director of the UCLA Confucius Institute.
This is the second year the institute has hosted the 10-day program.
“We’re retraining and rethinking the approach with language education,” Jain said.
After Sept. 11, the Bush administration identified several critical languages necessary for U.S. security, including Arabic, Portuguese, Hindi and Chinese, Jain said.
This initiative eventually created STARTALK and funded programs like the Guest Teacher Summer Institute through the Department of Defense, she said.
Once the guest teachers are placed in the United States, the positions can last anywhere from one to three years.
To help the guest teachers adjust to their American classrooms, the summer institute provides workshops that focus on the integration of language, culture and content, said Brandon Zaslow, director of the Occidental College Foreign Language Project and a returning lecturer at the summer institute.
In his seminars, Zaslow shows teachers how to adhere to standards-based teaching, which compares students against a set measure instead of against peers.
One example of this teaching method is a lesson on making a traditional Chinese recipe. By having students watch the cooking process, they learn the names of ingredients and the healthy content of the food.
From there, students could research similar dishes as homework and share their results with each other. To complete this cycle, the class could make the dish and present it.
Other workshop topics include classroom management and technology integration. Guest teachers will also tour Los Angeles-area schools and meet local students to get a sense of a typical American city and its diversity.
But the summer institute is not just about classroom training. Many of the guest teachers have an English teaching background in China and hope to experience the American culture while sharing their own, Jain said.
As a result, the guest teachers visit various places around Southern California to get a sense of the weather, diversity and typical American lifestyle.
Last year, the teachers spent a day at Santa Monica beach, where they had dinner and watched the sun set over the ocean, which many of the instructors had never seen before.
But along with these new experiences, the program will strive to keep some things familiar. While living in Sproul Hall, the teachers will eat in the dining halls, which will have familiar Chinese items on the menu, Jain said.
The dormitory also has Wi-Fi, which allows the young teachers, many of whom are in their late 20s to early 30s, to Skype with their families and children back home in China.
In spite of the distance, Jain said many of these teachers accept these teaching commitments with their long-term careers in mind.
“It’s an honor to be chosen to go abroad,” she said. “China puts a lot of value on the teaching profession.”