east vs west..(warning long message)
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ivy
Nov 23, 2009, 9:30:41 AM11/23/09
to HCCS_SE_Writing_Center
East vs. West
For those of you who didn’t read the article by Fan Shen, “The
Classroom and the Wider Culture”, recommended by Ms. Analicia, it is
an excellent essay and could prove useful when developing strategies
for teaching our students. The interesting part about Mr. Shen’s
article is it gives us all a glimpse into the Chinese psyche. We are
so ethnocentric here in America, we often don’t acknowledge the
existence of other world views (aka, Weltanschauug) out there in the
universe.
The point of this article, in my reading, is that all of us, in
America and in China, have been taught a way in which to view the
world. We then have choices, we can stick with what we have always
known, or we can open ourselves to other viewpoints. Mr. Shen has
come more than half-way to meet us. He has chosen to embrace our way
of thinking, at least when it comes to writing for an American
audience.
More to the point, however, this article can teach us several
important things when we are dealing with, i.e., tutoring, people of
different cultural backgrounds, especially, for those students who are
Chinese (or perhaps Taiwanese, Korean, Vietnamese).
First, and foremost, there were historical periods in China when the
“I” was not as important as the “we” – in these times an individual’s
opinion was considered inferior to the opinion of intellectual role
models such as Mao, Marx, Confucius, Lao-tse (Taoism), and Buddha. In
America, we have traditionally prized the ideas of “autonomy and
individualism” over the idea of team effort (although this is changing
all the time). Perhaps this is due to the fact that America was
founded by individuals who didn’t know how to play nicely with
others. lol
In China, the group has always taken precedence over the individual.
Historically the individual was taught to conform. Rebellion,
individual thinking and doing one’s own thing was not rewarded, or
even understood, for that matter. Learning by rote, and memorization
is traditional. In America, we also learn many things by rote, but we
also try to impart to students the idea that being creative and
original is a good thing. In China, being creative and original has
not really been emphasized (until recently?). Chinese students are
used to copying from credible, higher sources (therefore, the problem
with the understanding of the concept of Plagiarism in our society).
Secondly, Chinese students are used to writing essays in a much
different way than we write. In America we are taught to put the most
important things up front, such as the thesis statement, so the
audience knows what is coming. Each paragraph then follows in order
of importance, and ends with a recap of the introductory paragraph
(conclusion). Shen compares this process to eating an apple, where
the outside of the apple is the “surface”, and the inside of the apple
is the “core”. So, in Chinese thinking, we eat the apple from the
inside out. If you really want to talk about logic, our process of
writing is the backwards one. It (obviously) makes more sense to eat
the apple from the outside (surface) to the inside (core).
In essay writing, a Chinese student is taught to answer specific
questions in a specific order, beginning with time, place, characters,
events, cause, and ending with consequence (corresponding to our
“when, where, who, what, why, and therefore”). A Chinese writer is
asked to insert himself into an essay in the primary paragraph, to
explain why he has chosen the topic he has chosen. (as tutors, we
often encounter this first seemingly random paragraph and have to tell
the student to get rid of it altogether). He goes on to introduce a
bunch of ideas, which are intended to examine and explore the many
facets of the problem, building slowly until he reaches a conclusion.
This formulaic approach to essay writing can be used to explain
organization to your Chinese students. For example, ask the student
to think of writing an essay as printing out a set of Directions on
Mapquest. Instead of printing out the directions from your house to
your destination, ask him/her to imagine printing out the reverse
directions. We also might suggest that the “outside of the apple” in
Western essay writing, goes on the inside (or the core). (Not
logical, but what the instructor wants). From my experience, Chinese
students do not have a problem coming up with ideas; they have a
problem getting their ideas in the desired order.
If an essay does not make sense to our Western brains, it may be
because we aren’t looking in the right place. May I suggest searching
the end of the paper for the beginning (i.e., intro and thesis
statement) – it is probably there somewhere; we just have to find it.
Think of deciphering essays as a puzzle, and the Chinese writer as the
puzzle’s composer. We can solve the puzzle with a playful attitude or
we can befuddle ourselves.
Finally, when working with Chinese writers, we have to consider
intent. According to Shen, our Western idea of a critical analysis is
markedly different than the Chinese ideal. To us, a critical analysis
is an exercise in picking apart another person’s thought process. To
Chen, a critical analysis is more of a personal recollection, a record
of a journey through another person’s ideas, realized in words and
images. Writing is to be celebrated, not dissected.
In Western writing, our intent is often to persuade the audience, and
make our readers come to the same conclusion, or opinion, that we
have. In Chinese writing, the intent is to bring enjoyment. Creating
the essay is the purpose. The path taken is one which is ultimately
intended to lead to pleasure for the reader.
Shen speaks of an idea used by Chinese writers, a concept called
“Yijing”, which is an attempt to communicate in words a picture the
author “sees” in his mind. He explains, “Yijing” is “not a process of
logical thinking…thinking is conducted largely in pictures, and then
‘transcribed into words.” [1] In other words, writing is poetry, an
exercise in metaphor, and all writing is poetry. In the essay, “A
Defense of Poetry,” the well-known English poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley,
takes a purely Chinese dip into a different mindset. Shelley’s main
contention is that poetry is the seed of all imagination and all
creative thinking. [Poetry] “…awakens and enlarges the mind itself by
rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations
of thought”.[2]
The Chinese writer wants the reader to explore a path, one he stakes
out in words, like verbal breadcrumbs, on a piece of a paper. The
journey is not about reaching the goal; the journey is about the
trip. Unlike Western essays, the purpose of a Chinese essay is to
entertain, usher, and finally, bring the reader to a place of personal
enjoyment. The ultimate goal becomes the one alluded to in a Rhetoric
of Pleasure, by T.R. Johnson, that is, for the writer and reader to
occupy the same space in some unseen dimension where both share one
mind. Johnson refers to this merging of minds and experiences, as the
“infinite”. He goes on to say, “as my students develop an
increasingly ‘objective’ relation to language, perhaps they will
eventually learn to make words dance and dance well enough ultimately
to approach that circle of belief in which reader and writer, self and
other, are drawn so tightly together that it feels as if the thoughts
of one person are becoming the thoughts of the other, an experience in
which any delimiting boundary between reader and writer seems, at
least for a fleeting instant, altogether impossible…This, I think, is
what bell hooks[3] calls an experience of the ‘infinite’.[4]
Maybe then, the way to reach our own “infinite” state of bliss: when
tutoring, when writing, when reading, or whenever, is to investigate a
more Chinese way of thinking.
We tutors are in a unique position to investigate, explore, and share
journeys with our students from other cultures. Let us celebrate this
opportunity and embrace, rather than condemn a different thought
process and writing style.
________________________________________
[1] Shen, Fan, “The Classroom and the Wider Culture: Identity as a
Key to Learning English Composition,” College Composition and
Communication, Vol. 40, No. 4, December 1989, p. 464.
[2] Shelley, Percy Bysshe, “A Defence of Poetry”, Modern History
Sourcebook (1792-1822), 1819.
[3] Gloria Jean Watkins (born September 25, 1952), better known by the
pen-name “bell hooks”, is an American author, feminist, and social
activist. (wikipedia)
[4] Johnson, T. R., A Rhetoric of Pleasure, Boynton Cook Publishers:
Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 2003, p. 24.
For those of you who didn’t read the article by Fan Shen, “The
Classroom and the Wider Culture”, recommended by Ms. Analicia, it is
an excellent essay and could prove useful when developing strategies
for teaching our students. The interesting part about Mr. Shen’s
article is it gives us all a glimpse into the Chinese psyche. We are
so ethnocentric here in America, we often don’t acknowledge the
existence of other world views (aka, Weltanschauug) out there in the
universe.
The point of this article, in my reading, is that all of us, in
America and in China, have been taught a way in which to view the
world. We then have choices, we can stick with what we have always
known, or we can open ourselves to other viewpoints. Mr. Shen has
come more than half-way to meet us. He has chosen to embrace our way
of thinking, at least when it comes to writing for an American
audience.
More to the point, however, this article can teach us several
important things when we are dealing with, i.e., tutoring, people of
different cultural backgrounds, especially, for those students who are
Chinese (or perhaps Taiwanese, Korean, Vietnamese).
First, and foremost, there were historical periods in China when the
“I” was not as important as the “we” – in these times an individual’s
opinion was considered inferior to the opinion of intellectual role
models such as Mao, Marx, Confucius, Lao-tse (Taoism), and Buddha. In
America, we have traditionally prized the ideas of “autonomy and
individualism” over the idea of team effort (although this is changing
all the time). Perhaps this is due to the fact that America was
founded by individuals who didn’t know how to play nicely with
others. lol
In China, the group has always taken precedence over the individual.
Historically the individual was taught to conform. Rebellion,
individual thinking and doing one’s own thing was not rewarded, or
even understood, for that matter. Learning by rote, and memorization
is traditional. In America, we also learn many things by rote, but we
also try to impart to students the idea that being creative and
original is a good thing. In China, being creative and original has
not really been emphasized (until recently?). Chinese students are
used to copying from credible, higher sources (therefore, the problem
with the understanding of the concept of Plagiarism in our society).
Secondly, Chinese students are used to writing essays in a much
different way than we write. In America we are taught to put the most
important things up front, such as the thesis statement, so the
audience knows what is coming. Each paragraph then follows in order
of importance, and ends with a recap of the introductory paragraph
(conclusion). Shen compares this process to eating an apple, where
the outside of the apple is the “surface”, and the inside of the apple
is the “core”. So, in Chinese thinking, we eat the apple from the
inside out. If you really want to talk about logic, our process of
writing is the backwards one. It (obviously) makes more sense to eat
the apple from the outside (surface) to the inside (core).
In essay writing, a Chinese student is taught to answer specific
questions in a specific order, beginning with time, place, characters,
events, cause, and ending with consequence (corresponding to our
“when, where, who, what, why, and therefore”). A Chinese writer is
asked to insert himself into an essay in the primary paragraph, to
explain why he has chosen the topic he has chosen. (as tutors, we
often encounter this first seemingly random paragraph and have to tell
the student to get rid of it altogether). He goes on to introduce a
bunch of ideas, which are intended to examine and explore the many
facets of the problem, building slowly until he reaches a conclusion.
This formulaic approach to essay writing can be used to explain
organization to your Chinese students. For example, ask the student
to think of writing an essay as printing out a set of Directions on
Mapquest. Instead of printing out the directions from your house to
your destination, ask him/her to imagine printing out the reverse
directions. We also might suggest that the “outside of the apple” in
Western essay writing, goes on the inside (or the core). (Not
logical, but what the instructor wants). From my experience, Chinese
students do not have a problem coming up with ideas; they have a
problem getting their ideas in the desired order.
If an essay does not make sense to our Western brains, it may be
because we aren’t looking in the right place. May I suggest searching
the end of the paper for the beginning (i.e., intro and thesis
statement) – it is probably there somewhere; we just have to find it.
Think of deciphering essays as a puzzle, and the Chinese writer as the
puzzle’s composer. We can solve the puzzle with a playful attitude or
we can befuddle ourselves.
Finally, when working with Chinese writers, we have to consider
intent. According to Shen, our Western idea of a critical analysis is
markedly different than the Chinese ideal. To us, a critical analysis
is an exercise in picking apart another person’s thought process. To
Chen, a critical analysis is more of a personal recollection, a record
of a journey through another person’s ideas, realized in words and
images. Writing is to be celebrated, not dissected.
In Western writing, our intent is often to persuade the audience, and
make our readers come to the same conclusion, or opinion, that we
have. In Chinese writing, the intent is to bring enjoyment. Creating
the essay is the purpose. The path taken is one which is ultimately
intended to lead to pleasure for the reader.
Shen speaks of an idea used by Chinese writers, a concept called
“Yijing”, which is an attempt to communicate in words a picture the
author “sees” in his mind. He explains, “Yijing” is “not a process of
logical thinking…thinking is conducted largely in pictures, and then
‘transcribed into words.” [1] In other words, writing is poetry, an
exercise in metaphor, and all writing is poetry. In the essay, “A
Defense of Poetry,” the well-known English poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley,
takes a purely Chinese dip into a different mindset. Shelley’s main
contention is that poetry is the seed of all imagination and all
creative thinking. [Poetry] “…awakens and enlarges the mind itself by
rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations
of thought”.[2]
The Chinese writer wants the reader to explore a path, one he stakes
out in words, like verbal breadcrumbs, on a piece of a paper. The
journey is not about reaching the goal; the journey is about the
trip. Unlike Western essays, the purpose of a Chinese essay is to
entertain, usher, and finally, bring the reader to a place of personal
enjoyment. The ultimate goal becomes the one alluded to in a Rhetoric
of Pleasure, by T.R. Johnson, that is, for the writer and reader to
occupy the same space in some unseen dimension where both share one
mind. Johnson refers to this merging of minds and experiences, as the
“infinite”. He goes on to say, “as my students develop an
increasingly ‘objective’ relation to language, perhaps they will
eventually learn to make words dance and dance well enough ultimately
to approach that circle of belief in which reader and writer, self and
other, are drawn so tightly together that it feels as if the thoughts
of one person are becoming the thoughts of the other, an experience in
which any delimiting boundary between reader and writer seems, at
least for a fleeting instant, altogether impossible…This, I think, is
what bell hooks[3] calls an experience of the ‘infinite’.[4]
Maybe then, the way to reach our own “infinite” state of bliss: when
tutoring, when writing, when reading, or whenever, is to investigate a
more Chinese way of thinking.
We tutors are in a unique position to investigate, explore, and share
journeys with our students from other cultures. Let us celebrate this
opportunity and embrace, rather than condemn a different thought
process and writing style.
________________________________________
[1] Shen, Fan, “The Classroom and the Wider Culture: Identity as a
Key to Learning English Composition,” College Composition and
Communication, Vol. 40, No. 4, December 1989, p. 464.
[2] Shelley, Percy Bysshe, “A Defence of Poetry”, Modern History
Sourcebook (1792-1822), 1819.
[3] Gloria Jean Watkins (born September 25, 1952), better known by the
pen-name “bell hooks”, is an American author, feminist, and social
activist. (wikipedia)
[4] Johnson, T. R., A Rhetoric of Pleasure, Boynton Cook Publishers:
Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 2003, p. 24.
Shannon Stoney
Nov 23, 2009, 10:22:33 AM11/23/09
to hccs_se_wri...@googlegroups.com
Hi, Thanks for your careful reading of the Fan Shen article.
The whole time I was reading the article, I thought it was a woman
speaking! I guess that makes me gynocentric. Or something. Whatever
the opposite of phallocentric is. Uterocentric?
I've been thinking about these cultural differences all weekend, and I
talked to my partner about the issue, because he has been teaching
Chinese graduate students for years. I've met some of them and I got
to know two of the women students pretty well. Both were very
career-oriented and NOT into being just mothers, nor were their own
mothers. I met one student's mother, and she had been a high-powered
professional her whole life. She spoke Russian as well as Chinese.
Both of Tom's Chinese women students had had serious conflicts with
their husbands over the issue of having babies and staying home with
babies. Both of the husbands wanted the wives to have babies and be
homemakers first and foremost, but both women resisted. In one case
the relationship ended over this issue. So my experience with Chinese
women was that they were pretty strong feminists, willing to end a
relationship rather than be relegated to homemaking and baby-making.
One did get pregnant and have a baby, but that didn't even slow her
down much: she is practicing architecture in LA now I think.
Anyway, I talked to Tom about the individualism issue. Clearly his
students were individualists in the sense that they wanted their own
careers; they had worked hard to get to come to the US for schooling;
and they weren't about to give that up because of what their husbands
wanted. BUT. He said that when he was teaching them design, they had
a very hard time with the question, "What do YOU want to do with this?
What are YOUR ideas?" They would just draw a blank and look at him as
if to say, "What?!? Why are you asking me that?"
He said that he got the feeling that in China, education is focused on
following directions, rather than being creative, which is what Ivy
says below. Chinese students are often very good at following
directions. But in the architecture program at UH, they want students
to learn to think creatively. This is hard for Chinese students at
first, but once they get the idea, they can do this also, very well.
Their work ethic is such that once they get something, they can run
with it.
When I was tutoring the Chinese student I mentioned last week, it was
as if she was writing what she thought the teachers in the US wanted to
hear. It wasn't that she was so committed herself to the idea that
reproduction is compulsory. She just thought that that was the
"correct" thing to say here. I thought it was my "bounden duty" to tell
her that she is under no obligation to say this, and that in fact, if
she does say it, she needs to defend it at least a little because it's
not universally thought to be true here.
I wondered later why her stated beliefs seemed so different from those
of the other Chinese students that I had come to know at UH. Well,
China is a big country: a billion people. That's about 500 million
women (or a little less, since there's a mysterious shortage of girl
children). So evidently some of those women are feminist, in their
way, and career oriented, and some apparently come from backgrounds
where it's normal to talk about the duty to bear children. Maybe my
student came from a more rural or more working class or just more
traditional background.
But as for the larger issue lurking behind these questions: does
individualism really conflict with community well-being? This is an
important question since most of us would say we value both individual
freedom and opportunity, and community well-being. (Well, maybe not in
Houston, where the idea of community is sort of a foreign concept.) A
new book shows how, when it comes to women, these two values are not in
conflict. The book is called Half the Sky, and it talks about the
importance of educating and empowering women, in order to benefit whole
communities. The authors studied women all over the developing world,
and they came to the conclusion that there is nothing more beneficial
to the health and economic prosperity of communities as a whole than
educating and empowering women. Women who are educated plan their
families and their reproduction; they have control over how many
children they have; and they spend the money that they earn on
education and healthy food for their families.
Probably the majority of our students in the writing center are women,
so even though we are not development workers in china or africa, we
have a similar calling: to educate and empower individual women in
order to benefit the entire community. Viva individualism!
--shannon
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http://shannonstoney-twors.blogspot.com/
http://branguslane.blogspot.com/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/shannonstoney/
http://www.eyeballkicks.blogspot.com
http://allfiber.blogspot.com
The whole time I was reading the article, I thought it was a woman
speaking! I guess that makes me gynocentric. Or something. Whatever
the opposite of phallocentric is. Uterocentric?
I've been thinking about these cultural differences all weekend, and I
talked to my partner about the issue, because he has been teaching
Chinese graduate students for years. I've met some of them and I got
to know two of the women students pretty well. Both were very
career-oriented and NOT into being just mothers, nor were their own
mothers. I met one student's mother, and she had been a high-powered
professional her whole life. She spoke Russian as well as Chinese.
Both of Tom's Chinese women students had had serious conflicts with
their husbands over the issue of having babies and staying home with
babies. Both of the husbands wanted the wives to have babies and be
homemakers first and foremost, but both women resisted. In one case
the relationship ended over this issue. So my experience with Chinese
women was that they were pretty strong feminists, willing to end a
relationship rather than be relegated to homemaking and baby-making.
One did get pregnant and have a baby, but that didn't even slow her
down much: she is practicing architecture in LA now I think.
Anyway, I talked to Tom about the individualism issue. Clearly his
students were individualists in the sense that they wanted their own
careers; they had worked hard to get to come to the US for schooling;
and they weren't about to give that up because of what their husbands
wanted. BUT. He said that when he was teaching them design, they had
a very hard time with the question, "What do YOU want to do with this?
What are YOUR ideas?" They would just draw a blank and look at him as
if to say, "What?!? Why are you asking me that?"
He said that he got the feeling that in China, education is focused on
following directions, rather than being creative, which is what Ivy
says below. Chinese students are often very good at following
directions. But in the architecture program at UH, they want students
to learn to think creatively. This is hard for Chinese students at
first, but once they get the idea, they can do this also, very well.
Their work ethic is such that once they get something, they can run
with it.
When I was tutoring the Chinese student I mentioned last week, it was
as if she was writing what she thought the teachers in the US wanted to
hear. It wasn't that she was so committed herself to the idea that
reproduction is compulsory. She just thought that that was the
"correct" thing to say here. I thought it was my "bounden duty" to tell
her that she is under no obligation to say this, and that in fact, if
she does say it, she needs to defend it at least a little because it's
not universally thought to be true here.
I wondered later why her stated beliefs seemed so different from those
of the other Chinese students that I had come to know at UH. Well,
China is a big country: a billion people. That's about 500 million
women (or a little less, since there's a mysterious shortage of girl
children). So evidently some of those women are feminist, in their
way, and career oriented, and some apparently come from backgrounds
where it's normal to talk about the duty to bear children. Maybe my
student came from a more rural or more working class or just more
traditional background.
But as for the larger issue lurking behind these questions: does
individualism really conflict with community well-being? This is an
important question since most of us would say we value both individual
freedom and opportunity, and community well-being. (Well, maybe not in
Houston, where the idea of community is sort of a foreign concept.) A
new book shows how, when it comes to women, these two values are not in
conflict. The book is called Half the Sky, and it talks about the
importance of educating and empowering women, in order to benefit whole
communities. The authors studied women all over the developing world,
and they came to the conclusion that there is nothing more beneficial
to the health and economic prosperity of communities as a whole than
educating and empowering women. Women who are educated plan their
families and their reproduction; they have control over how many
children they have; and they spend the money that they earn on
education and healthy food for their families.
Probably the majority of our students in the writing center are women,
so even though we are not development workers in china or africa, we
have a similar calling: to educate and empower individual women in
order to benefit the entire community. Viva individualism!
--shannon
>
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
> Groups "HCCS_SE_Writing_Center" group.
> To post to this group, send email to
> hccs_se_wri...@googlegroups.com.
> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
> hccs_se_writing_c...@googlegroups.com.
> For more options, visit this group at
> http://groups.google.com/group/hccs_se_writing_center?hl=.
>
>
>
http://shannonstoney-twors.blogspot.com/
http://branguslane.blogspot.com/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/shannonstoney/
http://www.eyeballkicks.blogspot.com
http://allfiber.blogspot.com
ivy
Nov 23, 2009, 4:24:49 PM11/23/09
to HCCS_SE_Writing_Center
i'm not defending Shen's viewpoint -- i was trying to paraphrase the
highlights for those who did not read the article and perhaps spark
more intellectual debate. also i was trying to glean from it what i
could as far as techniques we could apply in the Writing Center.
as an aside, i have been working with several Taiwanese professionals
as editors on their books for the last 3 or 4 years. one woman wrote
a couple of photo books and wanted to include a biographical section
about the photographer/author in her book. her biographical section
talked quite a bit about her husband and his job. in contrast, when
the husband decided to write his memoir -- conspicuously absent was a
chapter about his wife. conspicuous, because there were chapters
about his friends, and his children...conclusion...a women in China is
an extension of the husband. how triste.
but of course i neglected to mention their ages -- he is 75 and she is
67...so hopefully, this mindset is a thing of the past.
On Nov 23, 9:22 am, Shannon Stoney <shannonsto...@frontiernet.net>
wrote:
highlights for those who did not read the article and perhaps spark
more intellectual debate. also i was trying to glean from it what i
could as far as techniques we could apply in the Writing Center.
as an aside, i have been working with several Taiwanese professionals
as editors on their books for the last 3 or 4 years. one woman wrote
a couple of photo books and wanted to include a biographical section
about the photographer/author in her book. her biographical section
talked quite a bit about her husband and his job. in contrast, when
the husband decided to write his memoir -- conspicuously absent was a
chapter about his wife. conspicuous, because there were chapters
about his friends, and his children...conclusion...a women in China is
an extension of the husband. how triste.
but of course i neglected to mention their ages -- he is 75 and she is
67...so hopefully, this mindset is a thing of the past.
On Nov 23, 9:22 am, Shannon Stoney <shannonsto...@frontiernet.net>
wrote:
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