It's an "interesting" time to be a tertiary English as a Foreign Language [EFL] Inter-Cultural Communication [IC] teacher in Shandong, China: the summer 2023 semester begins this week (holdover exams from the end of zero-Covid last semester being the immediate priority). The rejuvenation of a winter semester break (and fifth consecutive Chinese New Year) in my Shanghai apartment on Wulumuqi Lu dissipates in early morning reflection for me now: up well before class - at my PC. Before dawn. As I turn 54, I find myself at peaceful solace in these reflective, solitary moments and hope to utilize them well this semester, in ongoing IC lesson planning. I start the reflection period musing over my life and career in China, on what my "cultural story" may offer as auto-ethnography (especially given the recent attention on auto-ethnographic methodologies within Chinese EFL: Busteed, 2022: Huang, 2022; Kulich, et.al 2022) and journey both logically and evocatively from there, using various dissemination means to signpost and even aesthetically render the results.
My IC course begins in a week yet though: am contemplating integrating a personal "cultural story" on the basis of Kulich et.al (2022) and research conducted at Shanghai International Studies University during China's zero-Covid policy. Constructing multimedia elements of my such story trans-culturally scaffolding personal experience in a context-specific Second-Language Acquisition [SLA] student-teacher bridge - to facilitate greater case study discourse analysis applying the introductory theory covered in the course: incorporating auto-ethnographic authentic materials design into Chinese EFL IC pedagogic practice. Narrativized personal story-telling is the concern though: how to incorporate it?
There is a music video I recently saw that I think can be included in this personal "cultural story" introduction to the IC course, and indeed in my other teaching workload this semester, especially to tie into any use of personal video archive content for pedagogic purposes; Public Image Ltd. "Hawaii". The cultural legacy of PiL singer John Lydon in this case being a potential window for Chinese students into Western culture, of personal resonance (I have listened to Lydon over some time now and he is an active icon in a period of history covered in Chinese books on the topic). Either way, as a found artefact, this one has pedagogic potential and I will include it here - as a digital ethnographic record of my Internet browsing (while maintaining this trans-media project) resulting in pedagogic "authentic materials" lesson content selection.
VIDEO 1: Artefact (music video) - PiL "Hawaii" | in style, intent and evocation, the most affecting new popular song I have heard recently in that it directly resonated with my professional pedagogic practice and so was integrated into praxis of such: soothing, basic English, explore evocative meaning for students.
In an interview, Lydon explained his choice of footage as being to evoke inter-personal memory of his prior romantic experience with his wife (who now suffers from late stage Alzheimer's). A videographic feature I am working on - Being in Time - is constructed with a similar montagist methodology and intent and I integrate footage of my parents while they were still alive (my mother died with Alzheimer's). I also integrate footage pertaining to romantic (and other) memories. Aside from the "synchronicity / serendipity" psycho-cognitive context in these associations via social media (YouTube) browsing that intrigues me, it's that auto-biographical qualification of the critical reflection I adopt as an auto-ethnographic framework that best contextualizes my trans-cultural experience as a foreign (Australian) EFL IC teacher in contemporary China. So too, it is the genuine empathy in Lydon's rendition of "Hawaii" that makes it a humanist work additionally intriguing for Lydon's seminal role in the cultural upheavals of the 1970s, the birth of the UK "punk" movement: so distant in tone from "Hawaii" and so ripe for compare and contrast task-setting.
Just as Lydon evokes place memory with autobiographical relevance, the lyrics' evocatively personalized quality I would argue makes the song auto-ethnographic, especially knowing the wider context of Alzheimer's care; and including the song's (unsuccessful) bid for selection as Ireland's entry in the forthcoming Eurovision song contest. Place memory is similarly a theme in my videographic work: it was the conceptual foundation for a video travelogue I filmed over my first year in China, in Xinjiang [XUAR] 2011-12. I began my formative EFL teaching experience (after obtaining a GCTESOL and GDIS in Australia) - establishing the foundations for a decade long EFL pedagogic practice in China (alternating the tertiary sector in Shandong and the private sector in Shanghai) - living and working as a Middle School EFL teacher over that year in Xinjiang. I underwent the "culture shock" process (honeymoon included) there as a participant-observer in the education system, answerable to my Chinese Ministry of Education [MoE] stakeholders, and even commenced an MTESOL by distance (at an Australian university), utilizing what I was learning in designing lesson plans for my Han, Uygur and Kazakh students Indeed, over that year in Xinjiang, I documented my experience in a video travelogue, using a handheld camera: including within my workplace environment - a secured, guarded education facility (as indeed are most throughout China). The emergent rough cut was 8+ hours, covering excursions outside Xinjiang to Chengdu and Beijing but mostly confined to my living, working and travel conditions in Xinjiang.
As I had been a SAR Research Fellow at Australia's National Film & Sound Archive [NFSA] immediately before coming to China, I offered the film to the NFSA to add to my Fellowship work stored there, but the NFSA declined it, sight unseen. As a consequence I thought to expand the project with a written account and use the video as fieldwork data, but as I left Xinjiang (only to return to Australia to complete the in-class requirements of the MTESOL) the project was shelved. The video - and raw footage - remained in a personal archive shot over a decade in China - until I started re-viewing it in the context of Western mainstream media's mis-representational reporting on Xinjiang: specifically that of supposed "forced labor in Xinjiang" as methodological Uygur "genocide". In that context, I sought to re-edit it into a greater perspective of my experience in China (as fieldwork footage). Lacking media production resources, but trained in psycho-analytic film theory, I then sought to incorporate this footage into my ongoing auto-ethnographic trans-media, which had started with contextual publications on a second website and lengthier pieces on a substack account and now extends into post-production of the first part of the intended film series Being in Time.
As an example, I will include here an experimental video I made over 18 months ago in first reckoning retrospectively with my career trajectory, edited under "lockdown" conditions as Covid-19's "emergency response" directions were released through China's Ministry of Education [MoE] and filtered through to the university in Shandong where I lived and worked. Although I now hesitate over some of the transitional choices, however, it does indicate the shifting terrain of the education industry and should be viewed as an (experimental) auto-ethnographic film - an evocative construct borne of personal experience, but extrapolated for socio-cultural comment. It's an introduction also to the film-making style that I use throughout Being in Time and any additional original auto-ethnographic video content featured throughout the trans-media project and this website.
VIDEO 2: Experimental Short | a short film edited to chronicle three stages of my career as an EFL teacher in China - formative in Xinjiang, evolving in Shanghai, and during Covid-19 in Shandong. Using original personal archival footage of Xinjiang and Shanghai and integrating Chinese news as found footage artefact.
The video was followed by two others in a similar style, which sought to contextualize my initial experience of Xinjiang in relation to events and media coverage in Australia of what was at that time being rhetoricized as "cultural genocide". That was the impression of Xinjiang that I had formed prior to arrival: a perspective shaped entirely by Western media and biased in favor of a separatist, extremist and terrorist Uygur diaspora. The facts of the case as I finally researched them belied this: an Australian Refugee Review Tribunal hearing had granted a protection visa to an unnamed Uygur in 2011 (who arrived in Australia on a student visa) who admitted collaborating and communicating with the World Uygur Congress [WUC] in coordination of the 2009 Urumqi riots. Given that the WUC denied such involvement, the Australian government transcript establishes them as liars, deploying the term "human rights abuses" strategically and deliberately in the transcript, without qualification of any evidentiary details, in order to smear and misrepresent China through emotive rhetorical allusion: false empathy. This is an ethical outrage to me - the moment in which the Australian government compromised its integrity to serve an anti-China US/Uygur agenda (not the last of such moments as it turned out).
I experimented with how I could use my footage (and film training) to critically deconstruct this Western narrative: intended as a YouTube series progressively reconstructing my travelogue footage, with contemporary commentary. Budgetary limitations and time constraints prevented more than two episodes from being trialed - they are included below also for archival purposes. Budget. Absence of a creative team. Doing everything myself - original videography, editing, post-production - by myself imposes certain limitations upon my current film-making methodology. However, now that I have returned to the topicality of place memory in "cultural stories" for pedagogic IC purposes and have expanded the scope to include the entirety of my experience in China in Being in Time, I am taking steps to gain resources and anchor the trans-media publishing production base this website coordinates. To which, in Shanghai for Chinese New Year 2023, I began to develop a production team for future videographic work over the coming year. Although my early experimental video series centered on Xinjiang was not carried through, the context they set makes them worth including here, as personal artefacts in a sense.
VIDEO 3: Experimental shorts (2) | intended YouTube series in which I sought to contextualize contemporary Western MSM on Xinjiang in relation to my own participant-observation in the region. Again using personal archive footage, found artefacts and text-based narration of both expository and personal content. NOTE: by error, text in the second video refers to Xinjiang as a "province": it is an "autonomous region" not a province, however. The error escaped the final check-over but, as the work is now only of archival interest, remains. This error will be corrected in any update or future reference.
Needless to add, the "cultural story" I relate in IC class will not extend this far - it is merely an 8 week bridging course for English majors who choose a career path outside of pedagogic practice. But the theory behind it is well-developed and contemporary: I was enrolled in post-graduate study by distance (at a university in Australia) in this research field but had to withdraw for medical and other reasons during the zero-Covid policy in China. With or without the additional Academic qualification at my late-career stage, the research undertaken nevertheless informs my pedagogic practice, in media res: as praxis. Just as, for autobiographical parallel, my formative EFL pedagogic practice in Xinjiang shaped by mid-career and Covid-19 practice. In one respect, having started my career in Xinjiang is merely an autobiographic circumstance of no innate methodological input into my pedagogic practice during Covid-19. But not entirely. With place memory as auto-ethnographic research thus perhaps topical given the current discourse surrounding Xinjiang in Western media, I independently devote time and resources to exploring it, even if it is on the fringes of Academia.
Being in Time is the longitudinal film component thus in what is an independent trans-media auto-ethnography exploring the role of place memory in my professional pedagogic practice as a foreign EFL teacher in China over a decade since first arriving in 2011, in Xinjiang. It is released on this website with 1) a complementary tie-in graphic novel, which further explores the personal narrative in which this investigation occurs, 2) an ongoing explanatory press kit / ebook offering an exegesis of the film series. Part journal, part experimental screen, it is where my late-career segues from exclusively teaching to IC materials and media design and is intended as a business venture, though has not been developed to that stage yet, pending reception and feedback. It's a journey, my cultural journey, commencing here and now but with uncertain course and destination - in media res; praxis. As I remain an EFL teacher, the analytical context through which to frame this auto-ethnographic inquiry is in relation to changing IC pedagogic practice in China.
And here again, place memory of Xinjiang has personal import. Beginning in 2011, research in Urumqi had identified an EFL "problem": as all lesson delivery was in Mandarin, native speaking Han students were at an advantage over their Uygur counterparts in learning English (a second language for the Han, but a third language for the Uygur) (Sunuodula and Feng, 2011: Ahut, 2013). In an experiment to remove this advantage/dis-advantage, my (and foreign teacher) classes were delivered in English, the target language as the medium of instruction, eliminating any preferential Mandarin native-speaking advantage. In this environment, Han, Uygur and Kazakh students had equal access to EFL learning. This was a context-specific factor of EFL in Xinjiang due to its large Uygur minority population that further qualified what is standard native speaker recruitment protocols throughout China. Far from imposing Mandarin on Xinjiang students, the MoE sought to equalize English language learning and take away any Uygur student learning disadvantage - a facet of Xinjiang education that goes unreported in the contemporary Western media accusations of linguistic Imperialism. I have students from Xinjiang every year in my Shandong classes now: to see them have the opportunity for higher education and employment throughout China is heartwarming, as is it to facilitate (and maybe have facilitated in some small way), their successful learning journey.
FURTHER READING:
Contextualizing the Uygur "Genocide" Narrative: Manufacture, Dissemination & Mythification in US & Western MSM Construction of Xinjiang "Human Rights" Discourse
“Genocide Games”: Deconstructing "Forced Labor in Xinjiang" Discourse During the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics (also on Academia)