Our school is a keen participant in international programmes, such as Erasmus and, for a small city like Bath, our student population is comparatively diverse, with many students having roots in different parts of the world. St Gregory’s is a mixed comprehensive school of about 1,000 students (aged 11-18) in the West of England. Bronze and Sunflower, by Cao Wenxuan, tr. It struck me that a book club that focused on Chinese literature in translation could bring a new dimension to our students’ reading and open up new worlds and ideas to them. Helen Wang and Frances Weightman talked about the wealth of literature being written for young people in China and how little of this writing is known in the West. The inspiration for our book group came from a talk I attended a few years ago at the UK’s Annual Chinese Teaching Conference (aka the IOE Confucius Institute Annual Chinese Conference in London). We invited Theresa to tell us more about the bookclub… They spoke frankly and eloquently about the books they had read. At a symposium on Chinese children’s literature in 2016 she played a video in which she interviewed two of her teenage students about the Chinese books they had read. She took the initiative a few years ago to set up a Chinese book group. Theresa Munford teaches Chinese at a secondary school in the UK.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |