Teaching Comparative

PBS "China from the Inside"

Pardon my reminiscing. I just saw an announcement about a PBS series about China that's going to be broadcast beginning January 10. It reminded me of past experiences in recording television programs recorded under fair use provisions of the copyright law for teaching.

In 1977, I hauled home a reel-to-reel video tape recorder and a little television that had the proper jacks so I could record an episode of "Roots" for our department. (Each of us who felt technologically competent did that during the run of that series.)

Then there was the time in 1983 (the pre-comparative government days), when I paid my older son $1.00 an episode to record the Emmy-winning PBS series The Heart of the Dragon hosted by Robin MacNeil. I was teaching about China in a World Studies course at the time.

For several years after I began teaching Comparative Politics, I showed Carma Hinton's 1985 film All Under Heaven about the political evolution of a Chinese village from the revolution to the 1980s. The film was part of a series called One Village in China. The village was the one her father, William Hinton, called Long Bow in his books Fanshen and Shenfan.

(Data collected by Hinton for Fanshen was the basis for a set of lesson plans developed at Harvard as part of the "new social studies" back in the mid-'60s that was one of my first experiences with the idea of getting students to try to structure what they were learning. I thought it was very successful.)

But enough of the past wonders of videos to help teach about China.

On Wednesday, January 10, PBS will begin a new series entitled China from the Inside. (Thanks to the guys at China Law Blog for the alert on this one.)

The series will reportedly delve into both China's history and its current political landscape and will, among other things, examine China's treatment of women, its problems with air and water pollution, religion in China, and the government's slow response to the AIDS epidemic. The documentary's four parts will consist of the following:

• Power and the People
  
• Women of the Country
  
• Shifting Nature
  
• Freedom and Justice

Here's a link to the PBS China from the Inside website. You can watch previews of the films and check local broadcast listings at the site. There's also a link for educators that has a list of content standards, a globalization lesson, an environment lesson, and a list of sources. The lesson plans include film clips, activities, supplemental articles, and "classroom extensions." There's also a link to a discussion site for the series.

Let's hope for good things.

posted by Ken Wedding @ 7:50 PM