CYCU Developed the New Southbound Policy Successfully and Moved Forward

CYCU has achieved remarkable results in the promotion of the New Southbound Policy. It established the “New Southbound Office” officially in November this year and moved forward to the Chinese high school in Brunei, “Chung Hua Middle School Kuala Belait”, where the University students were assigned to lead the local junior high school and senior high school students to attend the cultural camp. This enabled the local teachers and students to experience the special way of giving a lesson adopted by the university from Taiwan. The participating CYCU students could also experience a different cultural atmosphere. CYCU’s New Southbound exchanging activity which included teaching, implementation and cultural experience not only bridged the friendship between both parties but also demonstrated CYCU’s educational characteristics full of creative ideas and services.

The “We Are Family – Chinese Culture Experience Workshop” teaching activity organized by CYCU in Chung Hua Middle School Kuala Belait provided the 3-day courses designed by 19 teachers and students from different departments of CYCU in the form of Service-Learning, including DIY, creation of picture books and singing & dancing, in order to enable the local students to learn about Taiwan through the active and creative learning activity.

The senior student of Department of Applied Linguistics and Language Studies participating in the activity, Hung Yi-Jou revealed that all of the courses were designed and planned by the student group, and all of them had to verify the local custom and tradition, and characteristics and formation of students of the Chinese school at first, and then discussed, modified and thought about how to design the courses integrating traditional Chinese culture for 2~3 weeks. “We discussed the teaching plan day and night and carried the heavy teaching tools held in our baggage when departing from Taiwan. However, we felt that all of our efforts were worth it when presenting our results and seeing the local students’ active participation and smiles.”, said Hung Yi-Jou.

The students participating in the Workshops were primarily the local junior high school students of 7th~10th grades in Brunei, who were very interested in experiencing the multi-cultural education, e.g. hand-made Chinese knots, production and creation of traditional folding fan, and art of paper cutting, and also impressed all the volunteers. In the courses for picture book creation, the junior high school student of 10th grade, Hsu Chia-Wen, indicated that “The big brothers and sisters taught us to complete a picture book with only one piece of paper, and at the very beginning, I didn’t believe that we could do it; however, we completed our own “story books” at last. Therefore, only if we are willing to try and spare no efforts to do it, we can do it successfully!” The 9th-grade student participating in making of facial masks and dough figurine, Danica, also said that “As a Filipino, I am so happy to participate in the interesting cultural activity and know more about the cultures of China and Taiwan.”

The CYCU students led the Chinese school students to complete the Service-Learning activities for various cultures. Meanwhile, Teacher Liao Yi-Yao and Teacher Yu Hao-Chang of Department of Teaching Chinese as a Second Language also arranged two sessions of the teacher training courses for teachers of Chung Hua Middle School Kuala Belait to give the teachers of the Chinese school in Brunei more inspirations in practices with the creative flip and IT teaching methods. A total of 70 persons have participated in the courses.

Director of CYCU New Southbound Policy Office, Huang Wen-Tsung, mentioned that in order to promote the New Southbound Policy, CYCU values the personnel training and international exchanges very much and also hopes to pass the spirit upheld by CYCU in promoting Service-Learning and CYCU’s creative teaching methods on to more overseas schools to enable the overseas Chinese schools to know more about the culture and environment of Taiwan and to promote the cultural and scholarly exchanges together. Meanwhile, in addition to the local scholarly exchange, many company visitation activities held locally also enabled the students from Taiwan to know the industrial structures of South East Asia countries and thereby developed the students’ vision and global view.

Source: https://m.ctee.com.tw/livenews/ch/20171128004499-260405