Meeting the people

A key part of the special mission of my current school - a year-abroad residential programme in the Chinese mainland for one of Hong Kong's leading private schools - is to try to get out and about as much as possible to engage with local Chinese culture and give our students maximum opportunity to develop their abilities in Mandarin Chinese.

Although my own Mandarin has never progressed much beyond restaurant-and-taxi competence (and I am, privately, something of a curmudgeon about the value of learning the language anyway), I have done my best to support these initiatives in every way possible. I've had my Film students shooting short documentaries entirely in Mandarin (and sub-titling them into English, to help me out in following them!) and visiting an old people's home to record the reminiscences of some of the city's senior citizens. And I've sent my English students out to shopping malls and such to try to conduct vox pop interviews with local people about what the 'Chinese Dream' means for them.

So, I like to take some of the credit for our most recent 'Inter-Disciplinary Experience' event we conducted at the end of last week, in which we sent our whole school out to various locations around the city to try to talk to and photograph passersby, and then asked them to use this material to create an art display in our theatre capturing the diversity of the society we are living in the midst of. However, I must acknowledge that this project is much grander in scope and ambition than anything we have attempted before, and has been largely developed by our energetic team of 'Coach Mentors' - recent university graduates who join us for a year to live alongside the student dormitories and act as 'big brother/big sister' figures to our boisterous 14-15-year-old charges. The main point of inspiration for this project was the cult photo blog, Humans of New York, created by Brandon Stanton. (I am hopeful we might be able to get Brandon to come and visit our school one day - or at least take a look online at some of the work our students have created in emulation of his site. [We hope to get all of this up on our own 'Humans of Hangzhou' site at some point, but it may take a while.])

Here's a short film I made of the activity (this can also be viewed over on the official school 'TV Channel', which I curate).