And so ends another of my courses for the International Summer School of Renmin University of China. I managed to teach there twice in person, and this makes a second time virtually. (The 2020 summer school was canceled because of Covid.) This year's topic, like last year's, was "Anthropocene Humanities," and, like last year, I divided the class into groups to get them thinking together - but also to break up our eight crushing 3.5 hour sessions. For four of the sessions I devoted 1.5 hours to meeting with the groups one by one, as other groups finished a project, which gave each student a chance to introduce themselves and ask me deep and broad questions.
Levels of English proficiency varied, in a good number of cases because the students were enrolled in what one student revealingly called the "Sino-Franch Institute" in Suzhou. After two years of intensive French, they told me sheepishly (and sometimes with adorable French accents), they'd forgotten much of the English they'd known in high school. Others were nearly fluent, but the most mellifluous pronunciation came from the one student from the school of arts performance, who owned that her English wasn't very good and that she had used translation software on the assigned readings, "and also for this self-introduction." I appreciated her candor!
These slides are taken from the second-to-last group assignment, in a session called "Chinese remedies for the Anthropocene." They had 45 minutes to produce a five-minute presentation suitable for American students who'd read all the same texts they had (perhaps without the benefit of translation software!), and I was pleased that only one (above) explicitly highlit the government's "ecological civilization" prerogative - though most jibed with its claim that there's a single coherent Chinese worldview from time immemorial which somehow incorporates Confucianism and Daoism and finds its consummation in New China. A welcome exception came from one group which offered this creative redefinition of the Anthropocene "from the view of Dao."
