By Katie Jones and Bri Perkins
For nearly a month, tenth graders
have been working on an integrated project between their Chinese and History
classes. This project is called the Comic Life Project. The Comic Life Project
is an assignment where students create a character and show their experience in
a specific event that they learned about in their History class and put it in a
comic book. Students have been studying Modern China in their History class,
including key figures such as Chairman Mao. In their Chinese class, they have
been learning about different perspectives of key events that happened in
Modern China. For example, Yuli Wang, one of the tenth grade Chinese teachers,
gives perspective on China. Another Chinese teacher for the tenth grade, Lily
Chen, gives the perspective of Taiwan.
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| A sample of the English/Chinese comics students are creating in World History and Chinese. |
That's not the only thing students are doing though. Have you seen tenth graders with
little red books? This is just a small part in this project. When asked about
the red books, Mr. Nuñez, the tenth grade History teacher said, “Ten years from
now most my students will forget dates and names, but I’m confident they won’t
forget being terrorized for two weeks just to carry around a little book.” When
asking a tenth grader how she felt about the little red books, Anjali Phadke
said, “I really like the fact that it’s roleplaying. It’s really annoying for
me right now because I don’t want to have to carry my red book everywhere, but
it’s showing us a time where people actually had to do this.”
During the Cultural Revolution,
Chinese people under the leadership of Chairman Mao were forced to carry around
little red books, a rule enforced by the Red Guard. When asked to summarize
what the Red Guard was, Phadke responded with, “The red guard were usually
teenage students who were basically brainwashed with the fact that Mao was this
amazing person. They would be able to see who did/didn’t have their little red
book, and they could execute or beat them up.” For tenth graders, a select few
students and teachers were chosen to be the Red Guard and randomly book check
students at any time in the day. “I love how frantic some of my students have
been during the red book checks. I can almost see some real terror in their
eyes when I catch them off guard in the hallway or before and after school to
check for their red books,” Nuñez added.
Another part of the integrated
project is being able to choose what event they want to make their comic strip
about. These events include the Mukden Incident, Chinese Civil War, rebellions,
and the Tiananmen Square Massacre. They also get to choose a key figure in
Modern China to include in their comic. When asked where the idea came from,
Chen responded with, “I had this idea six years ago when I met Mr. Grieve, who
was the history teacher at the time; he was teaching Modern China, and I was
working on Comic Life Binder to help teach Chinese. I thought, ‘Wow that might
be a good match.’”
When asked their favorite part of the
project so far, teacher Yuli Wang and Shivani Selvam, a tenth grader, had
similar responses. “My favorite part of this project is to be able to provide
students ‘insider’ perspectives of the historical figures/events,” responded
Wang. “I like the fact we get to choose our event and the people who are in it.
I also like how we get to create our own character, put them into that
historical event, and make our own situation,” was Selvam’s response.
To summarize the entire project, all teachers said the same thing: that making it an integrated project allows for students to gain a better insight than they could in individual classes. Wang said, “We decided to make it an integrated project because of the authentic connection between the Chinese class and the modern China unit in History class.” Chen added, “The most important thing is to build a bridge, connecting culture and language because culture plays such a big part in learning a language. Culture is something accumulated through history. That is why I think this project is important for students learning Chinese.” Along the same lines, Nuñez said, “Making this project integrated with the Chinese classes adds so much more than I would be able to offer myself. All year students have been getting tastes of Chinese culture just from learning the language, and now we have been able to show students the history that formed this culture.”
