Teachers in American study-abroad programs usually receive little, if any, training before the trip, since “teaching is teaching.” The cultural differences between Chinese and American university classrooms, however, affect the students’ ability to learn and the teacher’s ability to teach in profound ways. Foreign teachers in China require at least a basic understanding of the educational, moral, and political dimensions of their classrooms if they wish to maximize the learning potential of their Chinese students. During the nineteen weeks that I taught at Tsinghua University in Beijing, I encountered students who were unfamiliar with studying literature, class monitors who reported what I was teaching, and students who truly did not understand why plagiarism was a problem. At the same time, the best teaching experiences were when my students caught me off guard with their cultural perspectives on works such as Hamlet, Oedipus, and The Outcasts of Poker Flats. I had another kind of eye-opening experience—this time political—when I taught An Enemy of the People on the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown. In addition to the classroom situation, faculty teaching abroad should be prepared for the politics of their university department, including management styles that can hamper efforts to acclimatize to the new setting. The Chinese concept of saving face controlled most situations, leading to misunderstandings about schedules, book orders, copyright issues, and accommodations. Even email messages followed a set of rules that no one had taught me. Teaching in China was an amazing and worthwhile experience, but I would have had an easier time of it if I had known at least part of what to expect. While flexibility helps with most study abroad scenarios (and did in my case), faculty should be better prepared for the challenges that they will face.
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