10/18/04 Contact: Roy Summerford, 334/844-9999 (summero@auburn.edu)
David Granger, 334/844-9999 (grangdm@auburn.edu)

AU COLLEGE OF EDUCATION DEVELOPING BILINGUAL PRESCHOOL IN CHINA

AUBURN -- Faculty from Auburn University’s College of Education are developing and introducing an international style of preschool education to a new generation of children in China.

Two teams of AU faculty and other experts are establishing model preschools in China in partnership with Simplex, one of several private corporations sanctioned by the Chinese government to revamp the communist country’s education sector in its move toward capitalism.

One team of education experts from Auburn has developed a curriculum for Chinese children at the first stage of their education, and another team will train teachers in China and help them implement the curriculum.

AU faculty and Simplex executives involved in the “Global Bridges” program say they expect the program to expand rapidly from initial use in 2005 in a model preschool serving “First City,” an upper-income residential and business section of Beijing, to Simplex-run schools throughout China.

The AU teams are unique both in the challenge they face and their approach to that challenge, said Renee Middleton, coordinator of the program for the College of Education, where she is director of research, human resources and outreach.

“The Chinese are opening their education system to Western culture as part of the globalization movement, but they don’t want to abandon their own culture, and we did not ask them to do so,” said Middleton. “Instead of simply trying to transplant American teaching philosophy and methods to the Chinese classroom, our faculty knew they would need to take a different approach.

“We wanted to develop a framework that could be adapted to other countries, including our own.”

Middleton, an associate professor, said the AU teams developed an international style that draws on strengths of American early childhood education, can be readily adapted to various national and regional cultures and starts preparing children at an early age for life in a global community.

“The teams have developed some things for the curriculum in China that are better than what we are doing in model schools in our own country,” Middleton said, citing the use of cross-cultural and bilingual instruction for children as young as age 3.

Janet Taylor, a professor emerita and leader of the curriculum-development team, said the program’s emphasis on three- to five-year-olds was no accident. “Our Chinese colleagues recognized that they needed to start at the beginning of the education cycle if they were going to truly reshape their education system,” she said.

Taylor, a widely published author on the ways preschool children learn, said the Auburn team members and their Chinese colleagues recognized that young children could master a second language by learning it along with their native tongue.

“This is the next best thing to being born into a bilingual household,” Taylor said. “Children who start learning another language in preschool will be far ahead of those who have to wait until much later to start, if at all.”

The new curriculum integrates English words into lessons in Chinese that draw from local customs and household scenes familiar to even the youngest children. Over the next two to three years, the interplay of the languages increases and the lessons expand beyond the household to familiar concepts in the community and beyond.

“We are fostering development of the Chinese language along with English,” Taylor said. “The curriculum develops points of connection between Western and Eastern cultures and between both languages, but the point is to do this as a natural part of learning.”

For example, she said, a teacher speaking in Chinese and using the new preschool curriculum could use a children’s book with pictures of local animals in a class, dropping an occasional English word into the lesson. A later lesson could expand the discussion to consider animals in parts of the country outside the local area, adding more English words in the process. Still later, the lesson could extend to animals in other parts of the world, and still more words could be in English.

Taylor said U.S. schools could benefit from some of the approaches for preschools in China. “We are very excited about designing a curriculum that provides children with better ways to understand about their place in their community, their country and the world,” she said.

A second team from Auburn is working with Chinese colleagues to introduce the curriculum to preschools in China. In addition to their own work with Chinese educators, the AU team members will send instructors to China as preschool teachers and mentors to native Chinese teachers, who later will become mentors to new teachers.

The American and Chinese teachers will work together, introducing Western teaching methods to Chinese classrooms and adopting Chinese methods that could work well in the new, international framework.

Team leader Maria Witte, an assistant professor in the AU College of Education, said the participating faculty is developing the international framework from education practices and philosophies that have a solid foundation in the U. S. “We know that the education component is sound, and our members have a lot of experience with it. And we are working with very accomplished teachers in China,” she added.

The AU teams are developing manuals and supporting materials to help teachers learn and implement the curriculum, learning themes and teaching practices. Those materials can be readily adapted for different cultures, including the U. S., team leaders say.

“The exciting part for us is to take the best of our American education system and work with our colleagues in China, who are bringing in some of the best aspects of their own culture, to create this international framework,” said Witte. “We expect to have a framework that can also be used in this country or anywhere in the world.”

Auburn University is a comprehensive research institution with nearly 23,000 students and 6,500 faculty and staff. Ranked among the top 50 public universities nationally, Auburn is Alabama's largest educational institution, offering more than 230 undergraduate, graduate and doctoral degree programs.

(Contributed by Roy Summerford.)

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oct04:AU-chinapreschools