Concept of Teaching

Teaching includes teachers’ teaching and students’learning, both of which are not limited to the classroom. The high-quality “goldencourse” should not merely include off-line classroom teaching, but also on-linestudents’ independent learning. At present, the key of teaching reform is to adopt offline and online hybrid teaching and realize the reform of teachingmode. In the new teaching mode, teachers need to change from pure knowledgegivers to designers of students’ learning process. Through careful courseteaching design, the guidance of classroom teaching and independent learningare organically linked to give full play to the subjective initiative ofstudents’ learning and achieve better learning effect.

Teaching Methods

[1]    Courseorientation: a video is used to explain the basicinformation, contents, objectives, design and evaluation of the course;

[2]    Classroomlectures: courses team members prepare lectures todeliver in class to guide students to have a general picture of contents. For amode of offline and online hybrid teaching, teachers prepare videos forstudents to make preparations before coming to class, which is Flipped Class.Students will be guided to do discussion or group discussion in class.

[3]    Taskpresentation: students are required to finish somelearning tasks and present their learning in class with a PPT when listenersare expected to make comments.

[4]    Writingtasks: students of this course are required towrite with prepared topics, write report after reading books and learn to writeacademic paper on the basis of research on contemporary China.

[5]  Telling story: students are guided to choose a topic, search for literature, write a script,and then tell stories about today’s China.

Textbook Description

This course first used the self-made handout "An Introduction to China", which was compiled into a volume and printed in September 2008 according to the lecture notes. After being used by students in 2008, comprehensive revision was made in 2009. As the second edition, the book still had 10 units, but the topics and contents were changed greatly, adding practical articles and effective information, as well as a large number of pictures. It is mainly to meet the actual needs of students, and to distinguish it from the second semester course "Chinese Culture" and connect them organically. In 2010, the appendix and some contents were revised as the third edition.

In order to solve the problems such as the lack of officially published teaching materials for curriculum teaching and the content overlap between the two courses, the curriculum team made a plan to compile and publish new teaching materials in 2016, and formally started to investigate and research similar teaching materials in the second half of 2018, redesigning chapters based on the original teaching materials and highlighting contemporary China. The curriculum group has held many meetings to discuss the concept of textbook compilation, formulate the textbook compilation plan, clarify the sources of reference materials, determine the principles of textbook compilation and the division of tasks, and officially launched the textbook compilation at the beginning of 2019.

In order to realize the online and offline hybrid teaching mode, independent electronic exercises have been compiled for the textbook, and the writing style was developed before the compilation of the exercises. The types of exercises include: multiple choice, noun explanation, cloze test, supplementary reading, topic writing, video production, academic research and so on. Each chapter's exercises are closely related to the chapter's theme. The first two kinds of exercises are designed to strengthen knowledge learning, third and fourth are designed to supplement reading, and fifth to seventh kinds of exercises are designed to strengthen students' creative learning. In addition, in the course of teaching design, there are some five English versions of works for each chapter, as supplementary reading materials, and students are required to write reports after reading books.

Teaching Conditions

[1] Supporting materials: after more than one year's efforts, the newly compiled materials have been put into use. The book name is China Today, which is published by Jiangsu Phoenix Education Press at home and American Cengage Publishing Group abroad at the same time. Based on the future teaching practice, it is to be further revised and improved in the future.

[2] Practical teaching environment: in view of the characteristics of culture course teaching that is difficult to integrate into practical activities, the course teaching has designed a task of video making with various aspects of contemporary China as the theme, guiding foreign students to tell Chinese stories in English to practice the national strategy of "telling Chinese stories" and spread Chinese culture. In addition, the school organizes the cultural festivals for overseas students in China every year to provide a cultural practice platform for overseas students in addition to their course learning. In addition, our school organizes a large-scale "Model United Nations" activity every year to recruit members for overseas students. In recent years, a large number of overseas students have participated in the school activities every year, and some of them went to New York to participate in the competition with each other after selection, and have made outstanding achievements.

[3] Network teaching environment: before the completion of the course website, the course teaching is assisted by QQ group. At present, the course has an independent teaching website, and the course PPT, supplementary materials, videos, etc. are uploaded to the webpapge. In the future, online and offline teaching activities are planned to be carried out on the website.

Teaching quality

This course makes full use of modern teaching methods. In addition to the multimedia teaching in the classroom, it also makes full use of the convenience of modern communication technology to improve students' mastery of the classroom content and stimulate students' interest in learning. For example, through the way of wechat group building, it strengthens the communication between students, the sharing of teaching materials and classroom feelings, which is a good assistance for teaching.

In terms of educational concept, this course is not only a required course, but also a window to introduce contemporary China and Chinese culture in a diverse cultural context. Through years of teaching experience and good feedbacks from students, all the lecturers really realized the diversity of school culture, the exchange between international students and Chinese students, and the acceptance of Chinese culture by international students.

This course can achieve good teaching effect, benefit from flexible learning process management and good communication between teachers and students. In this course, many students regard the teacher as a good friend and ask questions. Although there are only 24 class hours in this course, many students regard this course as one of the most meaningful courses in four years. Every year, when the new students show off in class, there will be a lot of former students coming to watch so that the classroom atmosphere is warm and harmonious. Many foreign students feel the warmth of becoming a member of the new family at this time. This has gradually become a tradition of this course.

Teaching Effect

[1] Off campus evaluation

This course handout has been adopted by some other colleges. The course videos have been clicked more than 8500 times on the superstar website. One member of the course has been invited to lectures in colleges and universities for many times, which has been well received by the audience (see the search results of www.baidu.com for relevant contents).

[2] Evaluation of teaching supervision group in school

The course "An Introduction to China" is one of the important courses for overseas students. It aims to introduce the current situation of China and understand the surrounding environment. The teaching is highly praised by the school's teaching supervision group: The overall goal of the course teaching is clear; the teaching method is proper; the teaching procedures are set reasonably; the teaching style is elegant and generous; the classroom teaching atmosphere is active; the interaction between teachers and students is full; the participation of students is high; and the teaching effect is excellent. Most of the students show a strong interest in the course and have a good evaluation of the course. (school teaching supervision group of Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics)

[3] Evaluation of teaching by students in school

① Evaluation index

The university has formulated detailed evaluation indexes for undergraduate courses, including teaching contents, teaching methods, teaching methods, teaching effects, etc., and implemented the network evaluation method, that is, students evaluate teachers' teaching through the network.

② Teaching evaluation results

This course has been welcomed and praised by students over the years. For the teaching of this course, the school administration department has provided some evaluation results.

Textbook

Fan Xiangtao, et al (ed.). China Today.Nanjing: Phoenix Education Press.

References

（1）  Michael Dillon. 2008. Contemporary China: An Introduction. Routledge.

（2）  Tak-Wing Ngo. 2011. Contemporary China Studies. AGE Publications.

（3）  Ross Garnaut. 2018. Reform and Development in China: After 40 Years. Canberra: ANUPress.

（4）  Zhu Zhiqun. 2019. A Critical Decade: China's Foreign Policy (2008–2018). New Jersey: WorldScientific.

（5）Xueyi Lu. 2020. Social Construction inContemporary China. New York: Routledge.

    In addition, over five books are provided for suggested reading and students are required to write book report.