journal of public affairs education - NASPAA *The Global Standard ...

Teaching Public Administration As a Fulbright Scholar In China:Analysis and Reflectionsassignments posed significant challenges to these first-year MPA students, duemostly to their general discomfort with working in the English language. Inaddition, the notion that in their future careers they might be either conductinga program evaluation or making decisions based on evaluation findings seemedto make them uncomfortable. Since most of the students had come directlyfrom undergraduate school, it was difficult for them to relate the tools of publicadministration to the activities and responsibilities of the professional world.Other Fulbright lecturers also noticed that Chinese education is very theoretical,and that students generally do not know how to address real problems in the“real world.”After my semester of teaching in China, I thought it would help me gaininsight into my experience to review the literature on cross-cultural teaching.The following section uses the academic literature as a framework to examinethe process of teaching public administration in contemporary China.CROSS-CULTURAL TEACHING LITERATUREResearchers in education and educational psychology have exploreddifferences in teaching Western and Chinese students. Studying in English is asignificant challenge for all non-English-speaking students. Huang (2004)identified specific problem areas with professors’ use of English for Chinesestudents. Another important aspect of Western-style teaching is the use of casestudies. Thompson (2000) examined the use of cases in teaching Chinese MBAstudents. Finally, Watkins and Biggs (1996) conducted a meta-analysis toexamine American and Chinese views of what makes a good teacher or a goodstudent, conceptions of teaching, use of group work, and styles of questioning.Following a brief summary of each of these aspects of teaching, descriptiveexamples from my experience are used to examine the differences betweenteaching public administration to first-semester graduate students in China andthose in the U.S. In addition, for each area I summarize lessons on Americanteaching, as developed by my Chinese teaching assistant, Dr. Li. The dean ofthe School of Public Administration, Dr. DONG Keyong, asked Dr. Li to sharehis thoughts about my teaching methods and style with the faculty of theschool. His “Eight Lessons on American Teaching Style” are listed in Table 1and referred to in the analysis below. (See Table 1.)MY TEACHING EXPERIENCE VIS-À-VIS RESEARCH ON TEACHING IN CHINA1. Chinese Students’ English and Academic ListeningAccording to Huang (2004), there are six areas of English speech that make itdifficult for Chinese students to understand professors. They include rapidspeech, a lack of clear pronunciation, long and complex sentences, colloquialand slang expressions, a lack of clear definitions, and the use of discourse338 Journal of Public Affairs Education