UCLA professors teach social sciences courses to Chinese high school students
Geography Professor Justin Zackey created a UCLA program that teaches social sciences courses to high school students in China.
Courtesy of JUSTIN ZACKEY
By Gordon Murray
Feb. 17, 2011 1:34 a.m.
Shortly after arriving in China earlier this month, history Professor Eric Altice found himself trying to get his cleaning lady to stop teaching him how to use an ironing board and instead tell him the Chinese word for it. He may be a teacher, but Altice discovered that cultural differences leave a lot for him to learn.
Altice is teaching a UCLA history class in China, which means standing before 49 students packed into a small classroom.
His students are not from UCLA. In fact, they’re not even college students, and none of them are American. They are from Nanjing’s elite Jinling High School, half a world away and host to the UCLA Social Science Education in Asia program.
Geography Professor Justin Zackey came up with the idea to teach social science courses to Chinese students while researching in the country. He first came to southwestern China in 1994 and began conducting geographical research while teaching English. He fell in love with the region and kept returning year after year.
Altogether, he estimates he has spent five and a half years in China.
In September, Zackey started the UCLA program together with Cindy Fan, the associate dean of social sciences. Before this, UCLA had other outreach programs targeted at China, such as the Joint Research Institute and the Cross-disciplinary Scholars in Science and Technology. But Zackey’s is the first program specifically for Chinese high school students.
Jinling High School was selected because it has a history of sending its best students to American universities, Fan said.
Students who are interested in taking UCLA courses can enroll and pay a tuition that covers teaching fees.
There is a growing trend of Chinese students applying to schools in the United States, and Zackey thought UCLA could meet that demand by helping students prepare while also promoting the prestige of UCLA abroad, he said.
Zackey”˜s students were primarily from wealthy families and had very strong study habits, but they were not used to the critical thinking exercises that are common in the Western educational model, he said.
“A cool thing about this program is introducing them to Western standards of education,” Zackey said.
Over the last quarter, professors taught five general education courses to the high school students. All courses were taught in English and had the same curriculum and teaching method that students would expect from UCLA, Fan said.
Zackey said he believes the rationale behind teaching Chinese students is simple. With one-fifth of the world’s population, he said, China is the ideal place for UCLA to establish a base to potentially tap into a huge talent pool, and international students pay higher tuition than in-state students do.
Zackey said the program will also provide networking opportunities for UCLA faculty and students going to China.
Fan agreed on the importance of embracing globalization.
“I am a believer of training our students for the workplace, and as you know, the workplace is increasingly globalized,” Fan said.
UCLA professors are planning additional programs to strengthen the university’s relationship with Chinese schools.
Public health Professor Stuart Schweitzer said he is setting up an exchange program with Shanghai’s Fudan University for graduate students. Although the contract between UCLA and Fudan is still being written, Schweitzer said he hopes UCLA and China can provide each other’s visiting students with public health internships.
Others recognize that there is much that China and the U.S. can learn from each other, and Chinese professors have visited to learn from the Western way of teaching.
Last year, for example, UCLA hosted officials from China’s prestigious Zhejiang University, located in the city of Hangzhou.
The officials were looking into how Western learning styles, which emphasize problem solving over knowledge memorization, could be applied to the Zhejiang University curriculum, said UCLA professor of molecular and medical pharmacology Ren Sun, who assisted in hosting the Chinese delegation.
Speaking over the phone from Nanjing, Altice said although he came to China to teach, not being able to communicate with the cleaning woman has given him more motivation to learn Chinese.
“It’s my responsibility to learn, so maybe I should hit the books and start studying,” he said.
