Teaching Complex Societies - China in Transition

Abstract

China is a vast and complex country capturing world attention not only because of its impressing economic growth, but also because of its official corruption, bad human right records and growing rich-poor gap. This project aims at establishing a variety of teaching tools and learning activities to promote active teaching and learning about complex societies such as China. The overall objective of the project is to experiment with a variety ways of teaching and learning in order to create an interactive classroom and sustain out of classroom learning interest which deepens students’ understanding and widens students’ experience of China. A specific approach to this course is ‘problematic-solving’, which will identify social issues and problems and guide students to conceptualize such problems and solve them through discussion and debates. Teaching and learning results will be evaluated at the end of the course and a toolkit for teaching complex societies will be developed in the final evaluation report.