Preparations Before Departure

Vital Information:

Essential elements in prepping for our first-ever teaching sojourn at  Hwa Nan Women’s College in Fuzhou, China included:

1.  Issuing a call for student applicants around early January, and interviewing likely candidates in mid-February.  A special application form adapted by the instructor from the one used during the study abroad process at Morningside was used to help select candidates to be interviewed.  Even more than having a background in education, each candidate’s personality and dispositionwas carefully assessed.  Possessing a sort of Daoist “go with the flow” character should prove most important in coping not only with a new & unfamiliar culture, but also in dealing with the somewhat amorphous nature of our teaching assignments at Hwa Nan (more on this topic to appear below).

2.  Using Airteks in San Francisco, CA for plane reservations.

3.  Using International Currency Express, Inc. in Beverly Hills, CA (www.foreignmoney.com) to secure an emergency supply of Hong Kong and Chinese currency for our trip over.

4.  Using China Visa Service Center (www.mychinavisa.com) to procure the necessary tourist visas.  To obtain a visa to China, one must either show up in person at the consulate (our closest one is in Chicago), or use a licensed visa procurement service.  It takes six working days for the consulate to process a visa, normally, and costs around $175 a person.  China Visa Service Center was very professional and efficient!  They email you when the application is received, and when it been shipped back.  By shipping the passports and applications together, we paid a single shipping fee.  We also used the instructor’s name and Morningside shipping address, as the Printshop can receive and sign for FedEx packages anytime it’s open.  By the way, we first tried Interculture Tours in Chicago, which the college had used previously for the May Term trip in 2008, but after first expressing interest in helping us, they stopped replying to emails.

5.  Students participants are allowed to choose the four hours of credit they are to receive from among relevant courses offered at Morningside College.  This year’s participants (including the instructor’s daughter) selected the following:  Internships in MORN or HIST, Preceptorship in History, Senior Thesis in History, Topics in Global History: Contemporary China, and May Term.  With but one exception (the May Term course), the students chose to divide their credit between two different two-hour courses.  As such, the instructor needed to prepare syllabi and assignments for SEVEN different (and unrecompensed) summer courses.  Keep in mind that the majority of such courses also require special registration forms and signatures.  All in all, this aspect of the program takes up unexpected extra time!

6.  Students should consult with Karen Gagnon about the possible financial aid implications of their participation in the Hwa Nan program.

7.  Students and instructor also need to devote time to conceiving and prepping the courses to be taught at Hwa Nan.  At present, we’ve been asked to teach some combination of the following courses (capped at 30 students each) during two-week long, back-to-back sessions (M-F mornings from 8:30-11:30):  Public Speaking Skills, American Culture, Spoken English (Beginning and Intermediate), and Spoken Japanese.  That breaks down to two courses per participant.  All but the English Conversation classes are credit-bearing for Hwa Nan students.  Unfortunately, Hwa Nan informed us that it was up to us to decide how and what to teach in the courses (which has lent an element of real uncertainty to our preparations).  Moreover, we received several different iterations of our teaching schedule over time.  Much time has been spent researching books to use in our courses, especially books on American life and culture (we ordered eight or nine used books on Amazon.com), as well as drawing up draft syllabi .  Instructor assigned the participants without some previous education coursework/teaching experience to the more informal conversation classes (of the students two have such experience, and two do not).

8.  Students will have met twice a week (TTH 10-12) since classes ended in May to work with the instructor on prepping the Hwa Nan courses and taking care of other details associated with the trip.  The students have also been dividing their time with research for the proposed documentary film (see #10 below).

9.  Each student has also been encouraged to purchase a pocket-sized Chinese-English/English-Chinese dictionary.  Two of the better ones seem to be by Langenscheidt and Oxford University Press.

10.  Fundraising also proved to be a vital part of the process, as the students (thus far) need to pay their own way overseas, and total costs this year should be around $3000.  Monies from an anonymous donor, a Ver Steeg Research Grant (to hire the students to do research for a proposed documentary on Hwa Nan Women’s College), and a promised teaching stipend from Hwa Nan should cover just over half that amount.

11.  As much as possible, we’ve tried to coordinate our travel plans.  Itineraries and copies of the passport photo pages have been provided to the Dean of Students office.  The same holds true for health information, where relevant.  Itineraries were also emailed to Nell, our contact at Hwa Nan.

12.  For the participants without any prior knowledge of or experience with China, the book “China A to Z” was assigned. [Two students travelled to China in May 2008 on the Morningside College Choir Performance Tour trip, and completed HIST 222: Introduction to Asian Civilizations].

13.  China, one must remember, is a bureaucratic culture of long standing.  As a result, decisions, especially where precedent is lacking, tend to take longer to be made there (and often involve the gathering of input from all affected parties first before a consensus is reached).  As we’ve learned in setting up this initial exchange, sometimes time must be allowed for answers to even the simplest-seeming questions.  Patience is a virtue!

14.  Due to a one-night stopover in Hong Kong before the flight to Fuzhou, we made reservations for three rooms at the Novotel Hong Kong Citygate hotel near the airport (with free shuttle service).  Cost should be just over $400.

15.  We were advised to wear long pants and collared shirts when teaching.  Goodwill is a good source for cheap (and expendable) polo and short-sleeve shirts.  Cargo pants with their extra pockets are well-suited to traveling.   Linen pants should breathe well in the heat.

16.  One must stock up on enough personal toiletries and medicines to last the month.  Anti-perspirant/deodorant was particularly hard to find in China during our last visit.

17.  We purchased a good supply of small gifts (Asian cultures are gift-giving cultures) at the Morningside College bookstore:  pens with the Morningside College logo, keychain/coin purses with the logo, and a couple of stuffed animal Morningside Mustangs.

18.  We seem to have settled on the following films to take with us to Hwa Nan (as possible teaching material):  “Forrest Gump,” “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “American Graffiti,” and “Field of Dreams.”

19.  Greg A. will put together a collection of poetry for use in class.

20.  we’ve been asked to purchase and wear masks on the plane due to the current worries over swine flu.  It’s also been suggested that we should quarantine ourselves on campus the first few days after our arrival in Fuzhou.