HANSARD
SITTING CALENDAR
SEARCH
LIVE BROADCAST
Hansard Dynamic Member Index
House of Assembly - Fifty-First Parliament, Third Session (51-3)
2008-10-16 Daily Xml
Contents
Pdf Xml

CONFUCIUS INSTITUTE, ADELAIDE UNIVERSITY

The Hon. L. STEVENS (Little Para) (15:49): I would like to add to the remarks I made yesterday about the delegation of South Australian school principals through the Confucius Institute of the University of Adelaide, which I led last week to Shandong province in China. As I said yesterday, the visit had three main purposes: first, its overarching purpose of providing a cultural and economic brief to school leaders; and, secondly, to enable them to visit, in an extended way, local schools in Jinan (which is the capital of Shandong province) in order for them to establish contacts that could be of benefit to them in the future in relation to education programs and cross-cultural communication.

I mentioned yesterday the work done with Shandong University as part of the visit—Shandong University being a partner university with Adelaide University. I want to talk in more detail about the visits to the primary school and middle school in Jinan. The primary school was the Hongjialou No. 2 Primary School. It had about 1,300 students and the delegation visited that school for about four to five hours one day. The visit took up time in an English language class. English language is a compulsory subject in all Chinese schools and the delegation was able to sit in on the class. It was a very interesting experience in a classroom with about 36 or 37 students at very rudimentary desks and stools—quite a different situation from most of the carpeted classrooms we have here in Australia.

As I mentioned yesterday, because of the large number of students in the class, the methodology was quite constrained to a very rote teaching method. We found this the next day, also, when we visited the middle school, Licheng No. 5 Middle School, which had 3,000 students. The classroom we visited had 64 students seated on little stools at rows of desks. It was an interesting and different experience from what we would see in our classrooms.

We saw other classes as well, and the most important outcome was that following these observations there was a general discussion between our teachers and principals and the principals and language teachers of the schools. It was a great pleasure to see how enthusiastic the Chinese school administration, the district administration in education and the teachers were about setting up ongoing relationships between the schools and other schools in South Australia. The teachers broke into small groups with our principals and engaged in in-depth conversations about methodology and the way in which they do things.

As I said yesterday, I think this augurs well for a good future, not only for these schools—because they will start with developing relationships over the next year—but also other schools that tour China. I look forward to being involved and encouraging more schools in relation to the uptake of Chinese language and the understanding of Chinese culture through these sorts of ongoing exchanges between principals and, hopefully in the future, teachers and students.

PARLIAMENTARY BUSINESS
MEMBERS
GET INVOLVED
ABOUT PARLIAMENT
VISIT
LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL
HOUSE OF ASSEMBLY
CONTACT