The following is a guest post by Susan Carvalho, associate provost for international programs at the University of Kentucky. The university has been home to a Confucius Institute since 2010. ---------------------------------------------------------------------
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The following is a guest post by Susan Carvalho, associate provost for international programs at the University of Kentucky. The university has been home to a Confucius Institute since 2010. ---------------------------------------------------------------------
Students from a high school in Louville, Ky., get a Tai Chi lesson at the Confucius Institute at the University of Kentucky.
The U.S. State Department’s recent Guidance Directive 2012-06, regarding the use of exchange-visitor visas for Confucius Institute staff, offers yet another example of the ways that international initiatives across higher education are multiplying at a rate that creates challenges for regulatory agencies. As higher-education institutions’ goal of graduating world-ready students becomes not an option but an imperative, we need to work together across the spectrum of higher education, to forge new pathways for getting high quality work done.
The benefits of international cooperation are clear. At the same time, in order to guard against the inevitable risks, we do rely on the expertise of accreditors, the State Department, and other policy drivers – we recognize that they ensure due legal diligence as well as high standards of quality control. Nonetheless, as entrepreneurial initiatives and innovative win-win partnerships pull higher education ever further into new arenas of collaboration, we also need to find timely and workable solutions to the structural challenges we face.
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The Confucius Institute at the University of Kentucky was inaugurated in November 2010, and with strong support from Hanban, the Chinese agency that oversees the centers, as well as our partner Shanghai University and our director Huajing Maske, it has brought substantial and tangible benefits to our community, our K-12 schools, and our campus.
From what we have seen nationally, the work that the Confucius Institutes have been doing in the K-12 sector has been acknowledged to have great value by school districts as well as universities, whose outreach to statewide education has been part of their core mission for a long time. The fear that these teachers would import unacceptable content or pedagogy has proven unfounded, and the program continues to grow apace. The teachers, closely mentored by the universities with which they are associated, have shown an eagerness to adopt American pedagogical standards and locally approved curricula.
The teachers understand that their outreach to K-12 is part and parcel of the mission of the college or university that hosts the Confucius Institute. University resources help them to find housing, adapt to the educational context here, receive orientation as to the culture of the United States and the region where they will teach, and receive other continuous professional development through their host universities.
The State Department directive draws a sharp distinction between university work and K-12 education, but for those of us in the education sector, that line is not so clear. The reason that so many universities are committed to the Confucius Institutes’ support of K-12 Chinese teaching is that having Chinese teachers in the schools raises the level of China literacy for the universities’ future students. Several federal initiatives that promote China awareness in the United States have recognized for a long time that this literacy is sorely lacking across the country. Through the Confucius Institutes, Hanban has offered a path to close that gap, and universities and school districts have lined up to prove themselves capable of implementing this ambitious, and shared, agenda. So what matters to the U.S. universities, and I imagine to Hanban, is not which visa category we use but that we find a way to maintain the substantial progress that has been made.
It is paradoxical that the Confucius Institutes can be university-based but that they cannot implement these core educational programs, essentially because they are university-based. What is time-sensitive here is to come to an agreement on a visa category that university-based Confucius Institutes can manage, but that can also allow them to bring Chinese language teaching to their regions and states. There is significant cost in sending these hundreds of teachers home in June, as the directive requires, but an even greater opportunity cost in not finding a solution that allows them to return for the coming academic year—which means a solution that can be implemented in June or July.
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We hope that the State Department and the universities, working with Hanban, will find a Confucian middle way (neither excessive nor insufficient), that works to the benefit of all four constituencies—the K-12 school districts, the universities, Hanban, and the State Department—and to the benefit of young people in the United States who want and need to know more about China.