Introduction

China’s premier sociologist of all time, Fei Xiaotong, like most of his contemporaries in the early 1900s, was educated largely by renowned Western academicians such as Professor Robert Park of the University of Chicago. Reflecting later on his education, Fei (Fei & Zhang, 1945, p. viii) wrote, “We learned from books about Chicago gangs and Russian immigrants in America, but we knew very little or nothing about the Chinese gentry in the town and the peasants in the village, because these were not in the books.” Seventy plus years later, in 2017, I walked on to the Yunnan University campus, in the far southwest of China, to teach in the very place where Fei had chaired the Sociology department in the 1940s. Dr. Fei and his words have profoundly shaped my teaching—of Sociology, as a Fulbright U.S. Scholar to the People’s Republic of China (PRC)—and my scholarly work since then as well.

Objectives

In this chapter, I will outline how I structured the teaching of two classes, Qualitative Research Methods and Writing for the Social Sciences, to show respect for the collective history and cultures of my Chinese graduate students. I will illustrate how curriculum (what is taught) and instruction (how it is taught) can be rethought to avoid overreliance on Western examples to the neglect of local context.

Context

I came to China as a Fulbright scholar following 10 years of teaching and 12 years of working as a clinical sociologist at South Dakota State University (SDSU). I had co-founded, with two colleagues at the Flandreau Indian School, a college preparatory program for American Indian high school students. The FIS-SDSU Success Academy program that I directed increased by 100 fold the number of Indian School seniors going to college at SDSU (Lee, 2013, p. 154). A similar jump was seen in FIS seniors intending to pursue post-secondary education elsewhere. Fundamental to the success of the program was its foundational principle, that ethnicity matters in education (Lee, 2006). While the leap from working with American Indian high school students at South Dakota State University to teaching graduate scholars at Yunnan University’s Research Institute of Higher Education seems great, the transition actually occurred through a series of small steps that had begun 25 years earlier. Together with my husband, Journalism professor Richard W. Lee, I spent the spring semester of 1991 teaching at Yunnan Normal (Teachers) University, part of an SDSU-YNNU faculty exchange program. In 1997, after completing my course work in Sociology at SDSU, we returned to YNNU. Then I was a visiting scholar, collecting data for my doctoral dissertation on ethnic minority education (Lee, 2001). Yunnan is the country’s most ethnically diverse province, with one third of its population comprised of minorities. Twenty-five of China’s 55 officially recognized minority groups live within Yunnan’s borders.

My interests as a sociologist in education, race and ethnicity drew me back to Yunnan. I applied to the Fulbright Scholar Program, which sends about 500 U.S. academics to 125 countries around the world each year. Certain universities in each country are designated as eligible to accept Fulbright lecturers, and Yunnan University where I was placed is one of these. It is the next-door neighbor of Yunnan Normal University where Dick and I had been twice before. Both universities are located in Kunming, the provincial capital of Yunnan. (Fulbright provides a generous allowance that enables spouses to travel with grantees. Dick and I shared with each other all three of our teaching/research experiences in Kunming—in 1991, in 1997 and in 2017.)

Methodology

I will use a methodology called “autoethnography.” Qualitative researcher Carolyn Ellis defined “autoethnography” as “research, writing and method that connect the autobiographical and personal to the cultural and social” (Denizen, 2006, p. 419). In this chapter, the “autobiographical and personal” refer to my practice day-to-day as a Fulbright lecturer at Yunnan University. The “cultural and social” refer to my efforts to dismantle the hegemony of European values in the teaching of research methods and academic writing. To reflect on my experiences, I turned to the daily journal I kept while in Yunnan and to my teaching materials, such as class syllabi and student assignments.

Methodology cannot be discussed separate and apart from theorizing. I will refer to the work of Australian sociologist Raewyn Connell (2007) who has made a distinction between two types of theorizing. The first is “Northern theory,” which privileges the perspectives of metropolitan society (or the former imperial powers) while presenting itself as universal knowledge. The second is “Southern theory,” an alternative way of thinking about the world from the viewpoints of the global periphery (or the former colonized world). Throughout the chapter I will explain more explicitly how an understanding of Southern theory shaped my teaching in China. But first, to be clear, China was not colonized, except for a brief period between the first Opium War in 1842 and the Japanese occupation in 1937. “Decolonization,” as I will use it in this chapter, is “a movement to eliminate, or at least mitigate, the disproportionate legacy of white European thought and culture in education…It also means dismantling the hegemony of European values and making way for the local philosophy and traditions” (Nordling, 2018). “Social Science has been Eurocentric throughout its institutional history,” Immanuel Wallerstein (1997, p. 21) reminded us.

Findings and Discussion

Rethinking Curriculum: Qualitative Research Methods Class

This was a class, for master’s and doctoral students in Education. About 35 students were enrolled, approximately one-quarter male and three quarters female. Most had worked as school teachers or administrators for several years after receiving their undergraduate degrees. I have taught Qualitative Research Methods both at my home institution, South Dakota State University, and at my Fulbright host school, Yunnan University. The class, as described in the syllabus, “is designed to make students into confident qualitative researchers in Education by improving their observation, interviewing and data analysis skills.” In their book, Knowledge and Global Power: Making New Sciences in the South (Collyer et al., 2019, p. 10), the authors referred to the process of “extraversion” that they defined as the way “knowledge workers in the periphery are oriented to, and become dependent on, the institutions, concepts and techniques of the metropole.” When I have taught Qualitative Research Methods in the United States, the examples I have used have been largely drawn from the metropole. I have had students read such American classics as Street Corner Society by William Foote Whyte (1943) and Stranger and Friend by Hortense Powdermaker (1966). These texts and authors, however, seemed inappropriate for a class in China. Consequently I tried consciously to “co-construct a decolonial curriculum” (Watkins et al., 2018, p. 319). In the following sections I will illustrate what I mean.

Giving Priority to Locally Created Knowledge: The Yunnan Ethnographies

The texts I used for my Yunnan University class were four studies of Chinese communities, all done in the once remote and inaccessible Yunnan Province between 1936 and 1943. The four world-renowned anthropologists and sociologists who produced these community studies came to Yunnan from Northern China, England and the United States. For the most part they worked in isolation, each knowing little to nothing about the others’ endeavors. Laboring under the most challenging wartime conditions, they produced four community studies, all published as books in English and in Mandarin and all still in print today. Their writings significantly shaped worldviews of China as it existed before the Communist Revolution in 1949.

This was an incredibly rich archive of qualitative work, done by four recognized scholars—Fei Xiaotong and Zhang (1945), Xu Langguang (1948), C. P. FitzGerald (1941) and Cornelius Osgood (1963). Yet few of the excellent students in my class, enrolled in one of China’s top-ranked universities, were aware that these studies existed, much less that they had been conducted literally in the front yard of Yunnan University.

My students were astonished that I had read numerous texts by Fei long before I came to China—and they were surprised that I said “good morning” to Dr. Fei’s picture, which hung in the foyer of our teaching building, each day when I came to work. (A story about my semester at Yunnan University appeared on the front page of the campus newspaper and mentioned prominently my daily greeting to Dr. Fei!) I assigned each student to read one of the four community studies, either in Mandarin or in English. Then, working in groups, they discussed how the authors had used, in their work nearly 80 years earlier, the same qualitative techniques—observation, interviewing and data analysis—that the students themselves were currently learning in our class. The students reflected together on the challenges the scholars had faced while conducting research in wartime China and how they overcame these while doing fieldwork. Each group reported back to the class as a whole on its findings.

The students spent tens of hours dissecting the community studies, far more time than I required. Most students found the studies compelling to read and were moved by what they learned. Speaking for her group during its final oral report, one student said: “In the case of escaping Japanese bombers, Fei Xiaotong and Zhang Zhiyi (Fei’s co-researcher) were brave, hard-working, strong-willed and vigorous. They made great things. This is the spirit of knowledge and scholarly attitude. Because of this, this book reflects its eternal value, flashing its immortal light.” The students, through their scholarship, taught me much about fieldwork in wartime China that I had not known before. They did this both inside of and outside of the classroom, as I will discuss in the next section.

University Beyond the Walls: Field Trip to Kuige

“How do we enable our students to re-visit the past histories of their countries through a foreign eye,” Joyce C. H. Liu (2020, p. 1168) recently asked. Liu (2020, p. 1169) says that “curricular decolonization” often occurs beyond “pedagogical tasks in the classroom,” that is, beyond the university walls.

I later took another group of Qualitative Research Methods students to the Yunnan Station for Sociological Research in Chenggong (about an hour’s drive from Kunming). The research station was where Fei, Xu and their colleagues fled in 1940 when the Japanese air raids over Kunming had become too frequent. The scholars set up shop there in Kuige, a crumbling nineteenth century tower built to honor the God of Literature. (The research station subsequently was called “Kuige,” for the tower in which it was housed.). Some dozen manuscripts (including those by Fei and Xu that the students read for class) were produced at Kuige. Kuige became a refuge during the Anti-Japanese War (World War II) for some of China’s most distinguished anthropologists and sociologists. In 1938, they had been forced to leave the country’s top universities (Beida, Qinghua and Nankai), all in the North, which the Japanese first occupied and later destroyed.

After the war, Kuige was abandoned when the scholars returned home. All of the Kuige researchers, with the exception of Xu, remained in China after the Communist Revolution in 1949. Two years later Sociology was eliminated as a subject from China’s university curricula. All of the Kuige scholars dropped out of sight. From the late 1950s to the early 1970s, some were criticized and removed from their posts. Others were arrested and jailed. Inside of China, the Kuige scholars were disgraced. Outside of China, they were forgotten for more than a century. Today Kuige, which sat in disrepair for decades, has been restored. A monumental sculpture, of the eleven scholars who worked at Kuige during the war, has been erected in the courtyard. The figures are posed around a table, frozen in time, as if they are participating in one of Fei’s seminars.

In 2000, Fei and others gathered at Kuige for a triumphant reunion. As with the Yunnan ethnographies, my students and most others I met in Kunming had no idea what Kuige was, where Kuige was or why that mattered. That changed the day we went to Kuige. The students touched Dr. Fei’s desk. They posed next to his picture, in the same spot where he had stood 80 years before. They roamed the rooms where the researchers had lived in the most challenging conditions and had produced some of China’s finest social science between 1939 and 1946. Finally, the students climbed into the sculpture, gathered around the table, with Fei, Xu and the others, and took a photo—China’s scholarly past joined with China’s promising future.

Critical educator Paulo Freire (1970) coined the term “conscientization,” which means “developing a critical awareness of one’s social reality through reflection and action” (Freire Institute, 2020). “Conscientization” also has been explained as a process through which people realize that their own cultural values and histories are legitimate and worth maintaining. The students realized just that the day we went to Kuige. That day was my best ever in my life as a teacher.

Summing up the last two sections, I maintain that it is important for students to see cultures and histories from their own society reflected in the curriculum. It is also important for students to see strong positive role models of practitioners, with backgrounds like their own, doing qualitative research in settings outside the university. This I will illustrate in the next section.

Decolonizing the Mind: Teacher-Researchers at Daguan Kindergarten

Preschool in Three Cultures (PSin3C), published in 1989, was a landmark study of education, an exploration of the different ways that preschoolers are taught in China, Japan and the United States (Tobin et al., 1989). One of the three preschools studied was the Daguan Kindergarten in Kunming. A follow-up study of Daguan and the other two schools was conducted in 2002, and the results published in 2009 (Tobin et al., 2009). Luckily for me, my close friend and colleague, Professor Li Hong of Yunnan Normal University, was part of lead author Joseph Tobin’s team that conducted the follow-up study. Because of Li Hong’s connections, I have visited the Daguan Kindergarten several times. I have gotten to know the educators there who truly are teacher-researchers in the best sense of the word. They were co-researchers with the Tobin team for both PSin3C books, and they have participated in the ongoing studies at Daguan since then.

During my semester teaching Qualitative Research Methods at Yunnan University, I introduced students to the work of Tobin and his co-researchers. (They used a qualitative technique called “video-cued multivocal ethnography.”) The students and I then spent the better part of a day at the Daguan Kindergarten, located a short distance from the university.

My students, all majoring in Education, were captivated by seeing a day in the life of the famous preschool, considered by most to be one of Yunnan Province’s best. After our school tour, we viewed, with principals and teachers, a video on the research that resulted in the publication of PSin3C. Students learned, firsthand from practitioners, what “teacher research” is. It is “intentional, systematic inquiry by teachers with the goals of gaining insights into teaching and learning” (National Association for the Education of Young Children, 2020).

In an article on “decolonizing the mind,” researcher Wanga Zembe-Mkabile, has discussed the problem of “invisibility” for African women aspiring to become social scientists (Nordling, 2018). There are relatively few African women in social science disciplines with whom she and others can identify. By immersing my class in the ongoing research at the Daguan Kindergarten—and by introducing the class to those who are conducting this research—I hoped to break down some of the barriers that separate students from professionals. I also hoped that students would begin to envision their own possible futures as Chinese researchers engaged with public education.

Rethinking Instruction: Writing for the Social Sciences Class

Writing for the Social Sciences was a course I developed specifically for my Chinese students, unlike Qualitative Research Methods, which I had taught elsewhere. So I will begin this section by discussing my rationale for this class and the content of the course. In the remainder of this section I will focus on pedagogy. More specifically, I will discuss three instructional techniques that I found useful while teaching in China and that others may find useful as well. I will give examples of what each looks like in practice. Since I used all three techniques in both classes I taught, some of the examples will be from the Writing for the Social Sciences class and others will be from the Qualitative Research Methods class.

To this point I have been discussing the decolonization of the curriculum for the Qualitative Research Methods class. In other words, I have been focusing on what I taught. In this section I will switch to writing about the decolonization of instruction, that is, how I taught. Fulbright lecturers are chosen for their teaching excellence in American classrooms. Moving to classrooms in other countries challenges us to consider our audiences in different ways. It requires us to move away from Western-centric ways of seeing, knowing and communicating that may be inappropriate for students with vastly different backgrounds and cultures than our own. How this might be accomplished will be discussed below. But first, some background on the Writing for the Social Sciences class.

The Rationale: Knowledge Production and China

“Western research has achieved a monopoly through protectionism that inhibits global knowledge developments, especially in non-Western countries,” said Connell (2007, as cited in Tierney, 2018, p. 400). For example, while China has reached parity with the United States in terms of submissions to journals considered to be globally recognized, China’s rates of acceptance (and those of other non-Western countries) lag far behind (Tierney, 2018, p. 400).

Scholars in China and other Southern countries are working hard to gain power in knowledge production, that is, in research and publication. In 2017 the Chinese government announced a list of 42 institutions that were designated to become “Double First-Class Universities” by 2049, the PRC’s 100th anniversary. Yunnan University where I taught is one of the 42. Double First-Class Universities receive strong financial and policy support from both the central and local governments, support to help them achieve the ambitious “knowledge production” goals set for them. Here is an example of one of these goals: “Yunnan University will have at least five disciplines entering the top 1% in the Essential Science Indicators database.” (ESI surveys 11,000 journals worldwide in order to rank authors, institutions, countries and periodicals, based on publication and citation performance.)

Course Content: Decolonizing Knowledge Production

The title of my Fulbright project statement was “Training the Next Generation of China’s Educational Researchers.” I envisioned the class I proposed, Writing for the Social Sciences, as a small start at the decolonization of knowledge production at my host university. My goal was to teach students how to report on social science research, using a wide range of writing styles. I wanted my Chinese students to become comfortable writing and speaking before professional peers and international audiences. As I wrote in the syllabus, upon the completion of the course, I hoped students would:

  • Be able to write effective scholarly papers, theses/dissertations, journal articles and book chapters;

  • Master such practical skills as writing curricula vitae, developing grant proposals and delivering conference presentations; and

  • Become familiar with topics ranging from networking to mentoring that are seldom discussed in textbooks, but are essential for professional advancement in research and publishing.

Collyer et al. (2019, p. 11) acknowledged that an inequitable “international knowledge economy” currently exists that prioritizes English. It is important long-term to dismantle that system. But it is fundamental now for Chinese graduate students, preparing for life in academe, to be able to write and present effectively in English. All Chinese undergraduates are required to pass the national College English Test in order to receive their degrees. (For this reason, most Fulbright lecturers in China, like me, teach in English.) Students in my class were competent English writers and speakers, but they had little knowledge of how to write for academic audiences or how to get published in respected journals. That was the intent of the class. (I will add that, in my experience, many American graduate students are in dire need of such training as well.)

Pedagogy Tip #1: Experiential Education

A Eurocentric stereotype, which many Western teachers hold about Asian students, is that they are passive learners who sit quietly in huge lecture halls, recording verbatim their professors’ words. At Yunnan University, I found quite the opposite. My students were curious and engaged. They eagerly embraced the hands-on, learning-by-doing approach that I used in both the writing and the research class.

The American philosopher, John Dewey, is famous for his advocacy of hands-on learning or, as it is also called, experiential education. Dewey travelled through China in 1919, gaining “superstar” status, with people flocking to his lectures and reading translations of his talks (Braendel, 2019). His philosophies of education were widely applied throughout China then and still are today. The colleague who I mentioned earlier, Professor Li Hong of Yunnan Normal University, is currently engaged in a 5-year training program for 10,000 school principals. Their assigned reading? Six books by John Dewey.

In-class Social Sciences Conference

Students in the Writing for the Social Sciences course could choose to write either a 10-page scholarly paper or a 10-page thesis or dissertation proposal. With my help, students then planned a day-long social sciences conference, during which they presented their work. The audience included professors in our Research Institute and guests from other universities. They gave feedback to the students at the end of the day.

We tried to make our conference as “real” as possible. Participants registered when they arrived and received nametags and copies of the conference program. Students were coached beforehand on professional dress and came suitably attired.

Each conference session had three presenters, a chair and a discussant. Presenters were required to have PowerPoints, notecards and handouts. Presentations could be no more than 10 min long, and points were deducted for exceeding the time limit. After each presentation, time was allowed for reflections by the discussant and questions from the audience.

Because there were 30 students in the class, some sessions were concurrent. Attendees moved from room to room between sessions. A break, with tea and refreshments, midway through the conference, allowed attendees to mingle. Networking at professional meetings was a skill that had been covered in class earlier in the semester.

In evaluating the course, students declared the in-class social sciences conference a high point of the semester. Most had not attended an academic conference before. Our conference gave them the opportunity to try on the professional identity of “scholar,” in essence, to picture themselves in the role for which they were preparing. After class ended, a few of the students had the opportunity to present at an international conference, and they reported that their “dry run” in our writing course had built their confidence.

Pedagogy Tip #2: Cooperative Learning

Dewey believed that the best learning occurs through experience and involves hands-on activities directly related to students’ lives. In my research methods class, students learned how to do field observation, intensive interviewing and data analysis. I created three major assignments to be completed outside of class, experiences designed to encourage students to practice these skills.

Dewey maintained that experiences, in and of themselves, are not learning. Students also must have an opportunity to reflect meaningfully upon their experiences in order for true learning to occur. I needed to find the best ways for this kind of reflection to happen. Teaching in China, I soon came to realize that cooperative group activities are more in keeping with Chinese culture than individualized projects that emphasize competition. Chinese civilization is rooted in the philosophy of Confucius, the great educator-sage who lived about 500 BCE. Confucianism encourages collectivism over individualism. The rights of the individual are subordinated to those of the general good.

Early on in the semester, I was impressed with just how cohesive my two classes of students were. Though the students had known each other for only a few months, they were kind and caring to each other in ways that I had seldom seen before as a teacher.

Student-Led Seminars

In the Qualitative Research Methods class, after each assignment—observation, interviewing, data analysis—students prepared 10-page reports on that experience. During the next class, I divided them into work groups, of five students each, to discuss their research experiences. Because I wanted the groups to be composed of different class members for each of the three assignments, I divided the students randomly by having them choose colored M & M’s out of a hat (indicating membership in the green group, in the red group and so forth). The groups separated themselves, spreading out through our teaching building and its courtyards. (Yunnan has the best weather in all of China.) Each group chose a leader, a scribe and a presenter. I distributed some guide questions to assist the groups in organizing their discussions. The questions were designed to help the students focus on the challenges and the successes that they had experienced out “in the field.” The groups had about 90 min to work before reporting back to the class as a whole.

Our class’s “seminar sessions” were patterned deliberately after Fei’s work with his colleagues at Kuige. “Regular seminars were held at Kuige. Fresh ideas developed as new observations were brought back by field workers,” Fei (Fei & Zhang, 1945, p. xi) wrote. I had taught students in both of my classes the technique of “mind mapping” (Buzan & Buzan, 1996) early in the semester. (Mind maps are diagrams used to visually organize information.) On seminar days, I gave each group a large piece of poster paper and a set of colored markers. Students delighted in making mind maps to summarize their group discussions and to report back, with an audiovisual aid, to their classmates. The groups tried to outdo each other in the colorfulness and creativity of their mind maps.

Pedagogy Tip #3: Mutual Learning

Confucius’s educational thought has been compared to that of contemporary critical educators such as John Dewey and Paulo Frieire, and many common threads have been found (Zhao, 2013, p. 9). “Among any three people, there must be one who can be my teacher,” Confucius wrote in the Analects in the fifth century BCE. Similarly, Freire (1998), in his last book, Pedagogy of Freedom, wrote “Whoever teaches learns in the act of teaching; and whoever learns teaches in the act of learning.”

Colleagues as Co-teachers

Mutual learning occurred throughout my semester in China in many ways, and I benefitted greatly from it. Associate professor and dear friend, Dr. Wu Mei, of the Research Institute of Higher Education, agreed to be my co-teacher for both the writing and the research classes. Mei earned her doctorate in Education at the University of Idaho and shortly thereafter wrote a book using qualitative methods to study ethnic minority education in China (Wu, 2013). In our classroom, she translated into Chinese concepts that were hard for the students to grasp in English. Just as importantly, she supplied examples, from the Chinese context, that enriched both the students’ and my understanding of research work and scholarly writing.

Three junior scholars, all teaching in the Research Institute, regularly sat in on both of my classes. They were actually teachers of my students in classes other than mine. These colleagues provided valuable role models for the students. Through my friendship with these scholars, I gained a far better understanding of higher education in China, both its challenges and its rewards, than I had previously. One of these colleagues was Dr. Fan Hua, an assistant professor in the Research Institute. As with Mei, I got to know Fan well both inside of and outside of the classroom. (We had an interesting trip, with students, to the local Super Walmart, where we purchased a washing machine for my apartment and carried it back to campus in his small car.)

In 2018 and 2019, Mei organized two international research conferences, held at the Research Institute and funded by the Double-First Class University initiative. An outgrowth of those conferences has been a writing partnership between Mei and me that has thus far produced two papers. In addition, I am a core member of Fan’s research group, studying interdisciplinary education worldwide, under a grant from China’s National Science Foundation. Mei and Fan exemplify for me what Collyar et al. (2019, p. 173) have described as “busy, creative people, who have built institutions, careers and research agendas” in the Global South. Their work illustrates what Collyar et al. (2019, p. 173) called efforts to close a gap in the “global knowledge economy dominated by the most privileged countries, institutions, and social groups.” I feel honored to be a participant in Mei and Fan’s research, and I continue to learn much from them in the process.

Finally, Dean Dong Yunchuan of the Research Institute gave me two “gifts” when I began my teaching. First, he asked three of his doctoral students to enroll in both of my classes, despite the fact that they did not need these classes to complete their programs. The master’s students enrolled in my classes greatly respected these hard-working doctoral students and tried diligently to do work that was “up” to their standards. The doctoral students, for their part, had to perform as the “role models” that the younger students expected them to be. Both groups benefitted, another example of mutual learning.

Second, Dr. Dong assigned to me not one, but four, graduate assistants to help with my classes at the Institute and with my life outside of school. These four young women had all been trained as teachers and had worked for several years before returning to graduate school. They had a way of making all things possible, both inside of and outside of the classroom. They began as my helpful teaching assistants and became my cherished friends, particularly after my husband, Dick, returned home unexpectedly midway through the semester due to health concerns. As the days and weeks of the semester unfolded, my graduate assistants and I shared with each other countless details of our lives that transcended our student-teacher relationship. I came to see them as my teachers, and I still do, as we continue to communicate almost weekly via WeChat (a Chinese messaging app).

From knowing them and the others I have mentioned, I now realize that insight comes from contrast. By learning about others’ lives in China, I came to understand more about the United States; by learning about my life in the United States, they came to understand more about China. An American friend and professor, just returned from China, put it this way: “It is impossible to understand one culture. You must be familiar with at least two to understand one.”

Teaching and Learning Outside the Classroom

The next three subsections, while not specifically about the “decolonization of teaching,” do relate closely to the book’s overall focus “on being a minority teacher in a foreign culture.” Fulbright scholars are selected, in part, for their ability to be “cultural ambassadors” while serving abroad. Much of the teaching about one’s own culture and learning about others’ cultures happens outside of the classroom.

Home and Family

The family is at the foundation of Chinese civilization. Ancestor worship dates back 3500 years. A central tenet of Confucianism is “filial piety” or respect for one’s ancestors, parents and elders. Because Chinese family bonds are exceptionally strong, naturally my students wanted to learn about my family, as I wanted to learn about theirs. My husband, Dick, and I, lived in university-owned housing, across the street from the campus gate. Our sunny, airy apartment had a living room, kitchen, bathroom and bedroom. A wall of pictures—of our house, our university, our friends, our children and even our kitten—was a glimpse into our American life. We hosted several gatherings, like one for Easter, complete with egg dyeing, Easter baskets and an egg hunt. Students and faculty friends reciprocated, with a celebration of my birthday at a colleague’s apartment and with a farewell party at my dean’s home.

Food and Relationships

Food is an important part of daily life for the Chinese. They believe eating good food can bring harmony and closeness to the family in particular and to relationships more generally (EthnoMed, 2020). Dick and I ate lunch each weekday in the faculty dining room with professors and staff from my department and others. Food was served buffet style, with perhaps 20 or 25 different, truly delicious dishes each day. The cost for a meal, paid by the university, was seven yuan (about one dollar). People sat at round tables, making conversation easy. Faculty occasionally invited students to join them for lunch. In our apartment building’s courtyard there was a family-operated restaurant called the New Earth Café. It was a comfortable place to meet, eat and drink with students and colleagues.

Gift-Giving and Books

The Chinese idiom, li shang wang lai, taken from The Analects of Confucius, translates as “for the sake of propriety, people must engage in social intercourse” or “giving and repaying is the thing attended to” (Chang, 2016). The modern idiom that evolved from this means “a gift (or favor) given must be returned.” My Fulbright appointment was a life-changing gift. I reciprocated, in part, by giving about 200 books to the Research Institute of Higher Education where I taught. We shipped these books—on qualitative methods, on academic writing and on ethnic minority education—to China for my use in teaching. Some were purchased with Fulbright funds, others with my own. Many books came from my personal library. They were kept in my office, available for checkout. The collection is now called the Fulbright Scholar Library and is a source of information on topics not well covered in the university library’s general collection.

Conclusions and Implications

A “power differential between ‘core’ and ‘peripheral’ culture” (Xu, 1999, p. 231) was apparent from the very first teaching of Sociology in China. Fei Xiaotong and his classmates were required to learn about Chicago gangs to the neglect of the Chinese gentry. More recently, Yogesh Atal wrote that Sociology in Asia remains a relatively young discipline. “No doubt we quite often hear the call for indigenization, but we have not gone beyond articulating our reaction against the intellectual kit that we borrowed from the West,” Atal (1986, p. 304) said.

As a Fulbright lecturer at Yunnan University, I tried to take the “intellectual kit” I carried with me, trained as an American sociologist, and repack it with “academic tools” more appropriate for teaching in China. In redesigning curriculum and rethinking pedagogy, I attempted, in one small classroom in Yunnan Province, to “southernize” the teaching of Sociology, “to extend its gaze and horizons beyond the North Atlantic world” (Carrington et al., 2019, p. 163). Whether I was successful or not is for others to decide.

“Decolonization,” as I use this term in my chapter, describes “a movement to eliminate, or at least mitigate, the disproportionate legacy of white European thought and culture in education…It also means dismantling the hegemony of European values and making way for the local philosophy and traditions,” writes South African journalist Linda Nordling. Future research in the scholarship of teaching and learning could build on this idea, extending the scope of my work, done in China, to other national and international contexts.