The first lesson in this semester was unforgettable.
I am a student again. With all the excitement and expectation on the first day of school, I waited patiently in the classroom, hoping to make some new friends and learn something interesting. My classmates got into the classroom one by one and we started chatting and asking for each other’s names. Two-thirds of my classmates are from the Mainland and the rest are from Hong Kong. But the real surprise came when the teacher entered the classroom. No doubt the teacher was kind. He told each one of us to introduce ourselves so that he could have a better understanding of his students. He read the attendance list and then called out the name of the first person on the list. The student happened to be from Hong Kong. “Hi, I am from Hong Kong,” said the student. “Why don’t we let students from the Mainland introduce themselves first?” the teacher replied. Still wearing a big, warm grin, the teacher called out the names of students from the Mainland and asked which provinces of China the students were from, what jobs they had on the Mainland, how long they planned to stay in Hong Kong, etc. After all students from the Mainland talked to the teacher, the teacher simply read out the names of Hong Kong students to check if they were present and said nothing.
I think perhaps this little episode teaches me more than the lesson itself. After the class my Hong Kong classmates said they all felt bad and felt left out; literally they had become “the minority” in the Hong Kong context. That really makes me reflect on my own teaching. It is good to be caring and be aware of the cultural diversity of a class, but assuming that a certain group of students need more attention than the others may not always be constructive to learning. As facilitators, we should instead focus on ways to encourage students to communicate their cultures to others so that students would benefit in cross-cultural communication. Take my first lesson again. That particular circumstance would be a good opportunity for students from Hong Kong and the Mainland to know each other better in the face of conflicts and distrust between Hong Kong and the Mainland. Cultural diversity would then become an advantage instead of an impediment to learning.