Before the new academic year, with its exciting collective projects and less inspiring committee obligations, kicks into gear, this might be a good moment to look back on my experience teaching at 中国人民大学 Renmin (People's) University of China in July and early August.
This was, as you know, my first real chance to teach in China. I gave a few talks in classes during my sabbatical year in China in 2014-15 (including one at Renmin), but these were few and far between, and of course one-offs. Designing a course for a community of students, interacting with them, watching them engaging, accommodating their particular needs and interests... how I missed that! So how exciting to have a chance to participate in the International Summer School at Renmin (aka Renda), a place I'd found congenial before - and in Beijing, to boot! (The summer part, well ... the price of admission.)
Most of the classes at Renda's summer school are in English and half the instructors hail from abroad. Renmin's was one of the first such programs in China; it celebrated its first decade this year. I was given a standing invitation to teach there in 2015 but was too busy in 2016 and missed the deadline for 2017. As described to me by its founder, it sounded like a nerdy international summer camp, a joyous interdisciplinary celebration liberated from majors and devoted to the joy of discovery. In the end I got to know a few of the other international faculty a little - at breakfast at the hotel many stayed at, and at a welcome reception - but that part of it didn't pan out. Most of the faculty were there for a more concentrated course than my leisurely four weeks, and/or to pursue other research or collaborations in China. I can see it functioning that way for me in the future, too.
The student body hails from across China and beyond, graduate as well as undergraduate, often in the same classes. All Renmin students have to take one English language summer school class during their studies. My thirty-one students were almost all early undergraduates from Renmin. (Also present two students from a Paris-Suzhou program, and an auditor from a Canadian university.) All were Chinese. By and large they were in majors for which Renmin is well known - social science and policy - although there was one philosophy major and the Canadian auditor was an English literature major. For the most part these were students of business, law, human relations management, finance, demography and statistics, journalism. Their facility with English varied but was generally at a high level. I was the more impressed since English - and for that matter western culture - was not a focus of their studies.
Folks in Beijing, and also here in New York, have asked me how Chinese students compare to American ones. I usually plead ignorance - my samples are so unrepresentative! A competitive national university lecture course vs. seminars in a self-selecting liberal arts college. In another way, my samples might be similarly unrepresentative: a foreign languages instructor who attended my classes and has become a friend proudly told me that, unlike the careerists of Tsinghua and the bitter intellectuals of Beijing University - the capital's other top schools - Renda's students earnestly "want to make the world a better place"!
My best answer to the question - tested out in China as well as here - is that when I threw out a question, nobody at Renda would raise their hand. (The Canadian told me that in Confucian culture it was frowned on to draw attention to yourself.) But when I called on a particular student, she would have an answer ready. So would the next, and the next, even the shyest - and in their second language, too! In my classes here, some students (often the same) raise their hands, and usually have something interesting to say. But many of the others are just following the discussion, not working answers out for themselves. Or, at least, would say so if I turned to them. (As a student I was like the latter, too... thinking things through, rarely the first to ask a question.)
It took me a little while to figure out how to hear from the students. I included brief writing assignments in class, where students provided interesting responses - but I didn't know which response was whose. Happily I'd also built smaller group discussions into the course (in part to break up our 3.5 hour sessions). The last half hour of class a group of six students would stay, and we'd talk about whatever they wanted to ask about. Some of these questions were about the material we'd have just finished working on, but others were more general, or on different topics entirely. (Even in these small groups I had to call on people - and each student had a question of their own.) By the time the final papers came in, I could put a face to a written voice, at least in many cases.
I haven't mentioned the elephant in the room - that my class was essentially a religion class dressed up as something else. "Interpreting the Literature of Suffering" was a version of "The Book of Job and the Arts," the title garnished to fit the secular framing of liberal arts at Renmin. When I asked students to introduce themselves in the second session, some said they'd come because they liked literature, and two said they wanted to learn better how to respond to suffering. Most were more vague - "it sounded interesting" - but a significant number also said they'd been curious to take a course on religion, or on the Bible. Some might have known that the institute which had invited me, while ensconced in the Chinese Philology Department, engages in pretty theological studies of "contemporary Christianity."
For my part, I didn't think I was teaching a religious studies course - let alone a Bible course. My class was about western responses to the problem of suffering, which were shaped but not dependent on religious templates. The Book of Job was like a springboard, a suitable focus for a concentrated course, but the subject matter it led us to was broader. Job, I told them, is compelling because it's proved valuable to people with such different faiths - and with none. It speaks to the collapse of any set of received notions about justice in the world. This is how I peddle it in the New School course, most of whose students are somewhere in the vicinity of "none." Perhaps that's why I thought this would translate to Renda better than my other courses. Secularizable, the problem of Job is surely universally accessible, right?
I'll have to devote another blogpost to just how naïve I was in thinking this - that is, to how this experience showed me my own lingering naïveté. I'm supposed to have discovered that the "problem of evil" doesn't really translate across cultures way, way back in graduate school, when I spent a year in Tokyo on a quest to find the Japanese theodicy, only to learn that the question wasn't posed, not in the way I expected at least. That discovery is supposed to have changed the whole way I approach the topic. In fact I start the New School course with an ancient poem I found in Japan that year, convinced it was a theodicy in disguise, while it's something else entirely...
Another blogpost, yes. I need to articulate what the Renda experience has taught me about the cultural contingency of the "problem of Job" - perhaps I can even turn it into an essay - but another time. Soon!
This was, as you know, my first real chance to teach in China. I gave a few talks in classes during my sabbatical year in China in 2014-15 (including one at Renmin), but these were few and far between, and of course one-offs. Designing a course for a community of students, interacting with them, watching them engaging, accommodating their particular needs and interests... how I missed that! So how exciting to have a chance to participate in the International Summer School at Renmin (aka Renda), a place I'd found congenial before - and in Beijing, to boot! (The summer part, well ... the price of admission.)
Most of the classes at Renda's summer school are in English and half the instructors hail from abroad. Renmin's was one of the first such programs in China; it celebrated its first decade this year. I was given a standing invitation to teach there in 2015 but was too busy in 2016 and missed the deadline for 2017. As described to me by its founder, it sounded like a nerdy international summer camp, a joyous interdisciplinary celebration liberated from majors and devoted to the joy of discovery. In the end I got to know a few of the other international faculty a little - at breakfast at the hotel many stayed at, and at a welcome reception - but that part of it didn't pan out. Most of the faculty were there for a more concentrated course than my leisurely four weeks, and/or to pursue other research or collaborations in China. I can see it functioning that way for me in the future, too.
The student body hails from across China and beyond, graduate as well as undergraduate, often in the same classes. All Renmin students have to take one English language summer school class during their studies. My thirty-one students were almost all early undergraduates from Renmin. (Also present two students from a Paris-Suzhou program, and an auditor from a Canadian university.) All were Chinese. By and large they were in majors for which Renmin is well known - social science and policy - although there was one philosophy major and the Canadian auditor was an English literature major. For the most part these were students of business, law, human relations management, finance, demography and statistics, journalism. Their facility with English varied but was generally at a high level. I was the more impressed since English - and for that matter western culture - was not a focus of their studies.
Folks in Beijing, and also here in New York, have asked me how Chinese students compare to American ones. I usually plead ignorance - my samples are so unrepresentative! A competitive national university lecture course vs. seminars in a self-selecting liberal arts college. In another way, my samples might be similarly unrepresentative: a foreign languages instructor who attended my classes and has become a friend proudly told me that, unlike the careerists of Tsinghua and the bitter intellectuals of Beijing University - the capital's other top schools - Renda's students earnestly "want to make the world a better place"!
My best answer to the question - tested out in China as well as here - is that when I threw out a question, nobody at Renda would raise their hand. (The Canadian told me that in Confucian culture it was frowned on to draw attention to yourself.) But when I called on a particular student, she would have an answer ready. So would the next, and the next, even the shyest - and in their second language, too! In my classes here, some students (often the same) raise their hands, and usually have something interesting to say. But many of the others are just following the discussion, not working answers out for themselves. Or, at least, would say so if I turned to them. (As a student I was like the latter, too... thinking things through, rarely the first to ask a question.)
It took me a little while to figure out how to hear from the students. I included brief writing assignments in class, where students provided interesting responses - but I didn't know which response was whose. Happily I'd also built smaller group discussions into the course (in part to break up our 3.5 hour sessions). The last half hour of class a group of six students would stay, and we'd talk about whatever they wanted to ask about. Some of these questions were about the material we'd have just finished working on, but others were more general, or on different topics entirely. (Even in these small groups I had to call on people - and each student had a question of their own.) By the time the final papers came in, I could put a face to a written voice, at least in many cases.
I haven't mentioned the elephant in the room - that my class was essentially a religion class dressed up as something else. "Interpreting the Literature of Suffering" was a version of "The Book of Job and the Arts," the title garnished to fit the secular framing of liberal arts at Renmin. When I asked students to introduce themselves in the second session, some said they'd come because they liked literature, and two said they wanted to learn better how to respond to suffering. Most were more vague - "it sounded interesting" - but a significant number also said they'd been curious to take a course on religion, or on the Bible. Some might have known that the institute which had invited me, while ensconced in the Chinese Philology Department, engages in pretty theological studies of "contemporary Christianity."
For my part, I didn't think I was teaching a religious studies course - let alone a Bible course. My class was about western responses to the problem of suffering, which were shaped but not dependent on religious templates. The Book of Job was like a springboard, a suitable focus for a concentrated course, but the subject matter it led us to was broader. Job, I told them, is compelling because it's proved valuable to people with such different faiths - and with none. It speaks to the collapse of any set of received notions about justice in the world. This is how I peddle it in the New School course, most of whose students are somewhere in the vicinity of "none." Perhaps that's why I thought this would translate to Renda better than my other courses. Secularizable, the problem of Job is surely universally accessible, right?
I'll have to devote another blogpost to just how naïve I was in thinking this - that is, to how this experience showed me my own lingering naïveté. I'm supposed to have discovered that the "problem of evil" doesn't really translate across cultures way, way back in graduate school, when I spent a year in Tokyo on a quest to find the Japanese theodicy, only to learn that the question wasn't posed, not in the way I expected at least. That discovery is supposed to have changed the whole way I approach the topic. In fact I start the New School course with an ancient poem I found in Japan that year, convinced it was a theodicy in disguise, while it's something else entirely...
Another blogpost, yes. I need to articulate what the Renda experience has taught me about the cultural contingency of the "problem of Job" - perhaps I can even turn it into an essay - but another time. Soon!
