Faculty, staff, students and the public can experience today’s China without updating their passports or buying a plane ticket as the KVCC International Studies Program continues its fall-semester series.
Theo Sypris, a KVCC instructor in political science, will talk about his experiences in China on Monday, Nov. 13, at 2:30 p.m. in The Gallery (Room 1550) on the Texas Township Campus. Sypris visited that nation in the summer of 2005 as part of a faculty contingent taking part in a U. S. Department of Education’s Fulbright-Hays Group Projects Abroad initiative. The presentation is free and open to the public. Sypris’ trip featured lectures and workshops, as well as visits to universities, colleges, businesses, government agencies, archeological and geographical sites, temples and cities/villages.
The itinerary included Beijing, Tianjin, Xian, Kunming, Guilin, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Shanghai, and Suzhou. Lectures and workshops were held at Beijing Normal University, Peking University, Chaoyang Community College, the Chinese Academy of Social Studies, Tianjin University, Nankai University, the Marco Polo Foundation, Guangxi Normal University, Nanjing University, Zhejiang University, the Shanghai Petrochemical Institute, Jiaotong University, and Huadong Normal University. Among the topics were education reform, the community movement in China, religions in China and their traditions, Sino-American relations, East-West connections, the silk industry and its history, China’s approaches to economic development, the Chinese-Moslem connection, minorities in Chinese culture and history, Sino teaching and learning strategies, education collaborations between China and the United States, and Chinese vocational schools and how they compare to America’s community colleges. His group visited Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, the Yangtze River, the Great Wall, the Ming Tomb, the Museum of Terra Cotta Warriors, the Provincial Historical Museum, the Big Wild Goose Pagoda, the Jade Buddhist Temple, the Great Mosque of Xian, horticultural gardens, the Stone Forest, the Reed Flute Cave, the People’s Square, the Shanghai Museum, Elephant Trunk Hills, the tombs of Sun Yat-Sen and the Ming Dynasty, the Shanghai Stock Exchange and a tour of China’s largest city, the Yu Garden, Shanghai’s major economic-development zone, and 5,000-year-old remnants of one of the earliest civilized places on the planet. Also on the itinerary is the region described thusly by Marco Polo: “In heaven, there is paradise. On Earth, there is Hangzhou and Suzhou.” Sypris has headed KVCC’s International Studies Program since 1990 and spearheaded the development of the Kalamazoo-based Midwest Institute for International/Intercultural Education that seeks to infuse components of international education into courses in all fields and disciplines. More than 50 community colleges in the Midwest are involved. Sypris, a KVCC instructor since 1986, earned his bachelor’s in psychology and biology from the University of Michigan in 1982 and a master’s in economics from Western Michigan University in 1986. He guided a similar Fulbright-Hays excursion to Vietnam in the summer of 2002. |
