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Just a short note to say that I'm working the archival documents again. (Note that I say "working them", not "working with them", though that is true, too.) I found a couple of interesting articles in the student/faculty magazine Tung Feng (東風). The two articles are from 1959 and 1960 and focus on the advantages and disadvantages of a university with a "mixed" (foreign and Chinese) staff. The articles themselves are actually some compositions written by students from the Junior English class. Some of the advantages mentioned by the students echo the development rhetoric I was mentioning in a couple of earlier posts. For instance, students suggest that having foreign teachers can help introduce students to new ideas that can help modernize Taiwan/China. They also suggest that it can help them learn about other ways of thinking. This sounds a little like Lerner's "empathy" to me.

There are a couple of directions I could take all of this in, and I'll try several on for size. To the extent that I can find out, for instance, I want to suggest why the editors of Tung Feng would choose to publish two articles/collections of student essays on mixed faculty at that particular time. And I want to see if there is any relation between the time of publication and other discussions that were going on in the magazine and also in the rep letters and other correspondance of the Oberlin reps. It might be a long shot, but it's a way of getting at the issue of what the publication of the student writing is doing in addition to what it's saying.

(Ignore the "continue" link below...)

[development communication] [dissertating] [Tung Feng]