Research & Reflections

fulbright Taiwan online journal

Research & Reflections

fulbright Taiwan online journal

Tag: English

The Meaning of John Dewey’s Trip to China, 1919-1921

James Behuniak 江文思 September 11, 2015

     This year, in addition to teaching American philosophy in Taiwan, I have been researching John Dewey’s visit to China from 1919-1921.  The facts surrounding Dewey’s visit are fairly well known.  Dewey arrived in China at the height of the May Fourth Movement.  His former students invited him to tour and to give lectures throughout the country, and there are detailed records of his itinerary and the content of his talks.  I have focused primarily on how this experience influenced Dewey himself, and I have been reading his papers and personal letters in order to gain some insight.      The real meaning of Dewey’s visit remains a question that neither history nor philosophy has conclusively settled.  According to historian Benjamin Schwartz, “the encounter between John Dewey and modern China is one of the most fascinating episodes in the intellectual history of twentieth-century China.”  After reviewing Dewey’s own experiences, I think it is fair to say that it was one of the most fascinating episodes in Dewey’s own intellectual development as well.  Of particular interest in this regard is the manner in which the relationship between Confucian institutions and democratic reform was debated in Dewey’s presence, and the way

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Teaching Dewey in Taiwan

James Behuniak 江文思 September 11, 2015

In the fall semester of 2014, I taught a seminar on American philosophy to graduate students in the Philosophy department at National Taiwan University.  The main focus of the course was on the work of John Dewey, an American philosopher who, along with his wife Alice, spent over two years in China (1919-1921).  The timing of their stay could not have been more momentous.  They arrived in China on May 1, 1919, three days before the student uprisings of May 4, 1919.  This episode is part of a period now known as the May Fourth movement, during which Chinese thinkers engaged in vigorous debates over traditional customs and values.  During his visit, Dewey travelled, lectured, and wrote extensively about his experiences in China.  As my students and I read his philosophical works, I am working through Dewey’s own writings from this period: his personal letters, essays, and lectures.  What I’ve discovered has enriched my Taiwan experience very much. Obviously, much has changed since John Dewey visited the Republic of China in 1919.  Among the most important changes is that the Republic of China is now located on Taiwan.  Despite this geopolitical change, what is most striking is how many of

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Feeble Men and Double Bodies: Du Shiniang at the Metropolitan Hall Theater

Joshua Stenberg 石峻山 August 26, 2015

What is it about the feebleness of men in traditional Chinese theater? The emperor stands by, saying nothing and looking apologetic, while his councilors suggest that it would probably be for the best if his beloved concubine were to kill herself. The scholar Xu Xian stumbles over himself, trying to escape from his loving wife, White Snake, whom he has betrayed to a monk. Once she arrives, mournful and angry, he bad-mouths the monk and re-pledges his love. Not to mention all the scholars who run off to attend the imperial exams and forget about their wives, or the long-suffering courtesans who supported them. The women are left sitting at home taking care of the scholar’s parents, starving, choking on rice husks. And after his parents have died, they beg their way to the capital to find him, at which point they are imprisoned in mills or banished into remote servitude by the relatives of the scholar’s new wife. Or maybe a letter is forged, telling them they are abandoned, and they throw themselves in the river. Thank God for a woman with a backbone: in Du Shiniang at Taipei’s Metropolitan Hall theater, we had in a single forty-minute scene

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Top Five Highlights of a Year in Taiwan

Kirsten Asdal 艾永勤 August 26, 2015

Top ten lists are everywhere these days. As readership moves online, and as viewership becomes more dependent on a catchy title to encourage a curious click, writers have become adept at condensing regular material into this appealing format. One of my favorites this year was a Foreign Policy piece by Stephen Walt entitled “How to Get a B.A. in International Relations in 5 minutes.” In a few paragraphs that take no more than five minutes to read, Walt lays out key concepts that a student of IR would actually remember five years after graduation, like anarchy, balance of power, and comparative advantage. As I took the bait and opened the article, I thought to myself, “Ah, here we go…good thing I decided not to do that double major after all, because this is everything I need right here.” While not quite suitable for an academic paper, this uber-condensed format is just fine for the casual reader. So in an effort to make this article more appealing to whomever is browsing through the Fulbright website, I’ve decided to jump on the bandwagon and turn my jumble of thoughts into a consolidated list. Here you go, the top five things Kirsten will

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Contemporary Aboriginal. The Mixing.

Terry O'Reilly 易光海 August 26, 2015

For my Fulbright grant I chose a topic of immense richness: the aboriginal peoples of Taiwan. What I found exceeded my every expectation.  I have experienced countless encounters and exchanges, celebrated the sacred rites and important dates of the harvest and hunting calendars of the Pangcah (also known as Amis), the Paiwan, the Atayal and Saisiyat peoples.  My Fulbright grant became a mixture of scholarship and art. To begin at the beginning: I became aware of the cultural and artistic vitality of Taiwan during a short visit in 2005; and at that time I also began to learn about the Taiwanese aboriginals. I started to look into their origins. The scholarship is extensive and the science is far from settled, but everyone agrees that 9 out of the 10 branches of the Austronesian languages are spoken on Taiwan, and that the ‘Yuánzhùmín’, 原住民, the original people, have been living on Taiwan for at least 8 thousand years. Genetic and linguistic linkages establish a connection between the ‘Yuánzhùmín’ of Taiwan to other groups from Madagascar to New Zealand, Easter Island, the Philippines and greater Polynesia.  Competing models of a “Slow boat” or an “express train” to Polynesia are used by anthropologists

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Reflections on Research and Teaching English at National Taiwan Normal University

Marilyn Rahilly 雷瑪麗 August 26, 2015

It has been nearly 11 months since I started teaching an advanced English writing course at National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) in Taipei as a part of my duties as a  Fulbright senior scholar in Taiwan.  After a brief introduction to some of my NTNU English department colleagues at a lovely luncheon shortly after my arrival in August 2014, I began preparing for the advanced writing class that I had been assigned.  I ordered textbooks, developed a syllabus, and wrote a lesson plan for my first class. I was really excited about meeting my Taiwanese students for the first time. My first advanced writing class was quite the opposite of what I had expected. Having taught ESL and English composition for many years in the United States and other countries, I anticipated that my students would be adequately prepared to write academic English and quite motivated to learn.  When I stood before my Taiwanese students in that first class, I encountered eighteen tense, anxious faces and dead silence. After I passed out my syllabus and talked to them about the class, the expectations, and the assignments, I asked the students how they felt about having an American professor. I was

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Last Fragment from a Taiwan Notebook: Traffic, Turn Signals, Fate

Robert Siegel 席博安 August 26, 2015

A day or two after our arrival in Taiwan, my family and I stood at the edge of the narrow road just outside the college campus where we now lived, wondering how to cross the street. There was no traffic light, no crosswalk, no sidewalk, and no break in the traffic, which was made up almost entirely of motor scooters. Coming from America, land of the Humvee and the monster truck, a motor scooter sounds like a child’s toy, but a torrent of them is actually pretty scary. We watched for a while, looking for a gap in the flow, lurching forward and then retreating. Finally, we lost heart and went home. In the weeks that followed, we learned how to cross that street, zigging and zagging between scooters with the casual air of a Taiwanese college student out for bubble tea. We never really stopped to consider how out of character that was for us, anxious American suburbanites normally obsessed with rules and safety—tending to equate the two, really. It was like we’d left our order-loving, non-jaywalking selves behind in America, along with our two overweight cats and Big Gulp cups. Meanwhile in our travels through the city we

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Reflection on Teaching Advanced English Writing at a Taiwanese University

Marilyn Rahilly 雷瑪麗 August 26, 2015

I have been teaching ESL for many years, both in the United States and in several foreign countries. My students hail from a variety of ethnic, linguistic, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Over the years, I have taught a wide spectrum of English classes, including speaking, listening, study skills, reading, literature, and composition. When I was informed that I would be teaching an advanced English writing class at National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) in Taipei as part of my Fulbright award, I was very excited. I looked forward to meeting my Taiwanese students and helping them develop their English writing skills. I had been informed that my class would consist of English majors, so I was even more interested in teaching the class. However, as I have taught many Asian students over the years, I expected that the students in my class would be a bit shy and reluctant to participate actively in class. Because I have had a great deal of experience teaching many Chinese, Japanese, and Korean students, I naively believed that I understood East Asian culture. My first class at NTNU, however, did not go as I had anticipated. I walked into a classroom filled with nineteen Taiwanese college

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A Preliminary Research Note on International Teaching Partnerships

Chiung-Yao "Carolyn" Ho 何瓊瑤 June 30, 2015

Introduction The Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship (ETA) Program is a collaborative effort between the United States and host countries around the world.  Bringing together young U.S. citizens with experienced English teachers in the host country, it provides enriched English language instruction to students in elementary, junior high, and senior high schools.  In Taiwan, the ETA program was introduced in 2004 when a group of ETAs were sent to Yilan County to participate in a co-teaching program with local elementary school teachers.  Since then, several counties have begun to participate in the ETA program, including Kaohsiung, Kinmen, Taichung, and Taitung, adopting the co-teaching model in selected schools. As the mission of Fulbright is to promote international understanding, cross-cultural and binational partnerships such as the Fulbright ETA program give participants and stakeholders a unique perspective on intercultural understanding on a deeper level and enhance the richness and variety of language instruction.  During the 2012–2013 academic year, 33 English Teaching Assistants (ETAs) were selected and sent to Yilan (16), Kaohsiung (11), and Kinmen (6) for an eleven-month grant to work side by side with Local English Teachers (LETs) to plan and teach English lessons at designated schools.  During the grant period, some partnerships

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Translation of “Enlightenment” in Late Qing and Republican China Political Thought

Chien-Shou Chen 陳建守 April 30, 2015

My research as a Fulbright grantee at Harvard University concerns the appropriation of political terminology from the West in late Qing and Republican China. Here is a small section of my work, to give an idea of the research my Fulbright grant supports. In recent research, LuoZhitian 羅志田 has argued that during the integration of Western culture, modern China showed some ambiguity in the translation and utilization of imported words. Most understanding towards European historical events took place either through literal translation or through definitionof the meanings of terms, such as “qimeng yundong”(used most often to correspond to ‘Enlightenment’) andit became a core idea of the Chinese translation.The widespread usage of the word “qimeng yundong”started in the late 1920s, and hasbeen widely usedsince then. Most sinophone usage of “qimeng yundong”, refers to its meaning in the Chinese context rather than its original reference to the Enlightenment in European history.       “qimeng”+ “yundong” =“qimeng yundong” Three prevalent meanings circulated within the intellectual field of the late Qing dynasty for the term “yundong,”（運動）, which could be translated ‘movement’ in Chinese today. The first meaning refers to physical movementor exercise form, the second “yundong”refers to movement relevant to the observer, as

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