By Victor Xu
Wang Siyang woke up at 4 a.m., hurried out of the Hutou Hotel with a pen and notebook, and ran to the nearby bank of the Wusuli River, which borders Russia in northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province.
A before-daybreak interview allowed her to talk with fishermen, who had been ordered by the local government to cease fishing from September to October as a part of an ecological preservation measure. That morning, a few men were sitting around repairing their nets, near a fishing boat sitting silent at the dock.
“I was curious about the fishermen and wanted to talk with them,” said Wang, a journalism major. Her assignment, for her freshman seminar The Art of Narrative Writing on the Road, was to find out what daily life was like for ordinary people. For Wang, how these fishermen fished, what they ate, and what they did when the work was done would provide the essential material for a story.
Wang and the 14 other students of Professor Li Xiguang’s seminar left Beijing for the Wusuli River by train on Oct. 1. They arrived three days later, stayed for a day, and spent three days coming home, with several stops along the way.
Every year since 2003, Professor Li, who is the academic dean of the Journalism School, has taken students to remote locations during the weeklong National Day holiday to practice their interviewing skills by talking to the various characters they meet. Such road trips also give him an opportunity to teach more than the how-to’s of reporting.
“A freshman is just like a blank page to fill. He or she lives in a world of fantasy before the campus life and has grandiose aims but limited abilities. This is why I take them on trips—to help them see realities and to gain self-knowledge,” he said.
The freshman seminar is a reform program for teaching and learning at Tsinghua University, according to the Academic Affairs Office. Each course in the program encourages students to discuss, debate and write essays on special topics under the guidance of professors -- a departure from the traditional lecture-oriented approach of the Chinese education system.
The program began in the autumn of 2003, with 31 courses taught by top professors of the university such as President Gu Binglin, Nobel Prize winning scientist Chen Ning Yang, and other academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering.
Professor Li Xiguang and his freshman seminar. (Photo by Chen Tianhan)
So far there have been 112 courses in the Freshman Seminar Program, and more than 2,000 freshmen have participated. Students chosen for the seminars are randomly selected by computer through the Academic Affairs Office.
Each seminar has a 15-student limit. “This is to ensure every student has a chance to speak and to debate,” Professor Li said.
Professor Li believes the experience benefits everyone involved. “The freshman seminar is a perfect teaching approach for teachers and students. It inspires both,” he said.
In 2003, Professor Li led his freshmen to Kerqin Grassland of Inner Mongolia. The class interviewed a Mongolian lama, a wrestler, a singer, a sheepherder, a “barefoot” (country) doctor, and other interesting characters. Last year his class went to Deshengbao (Victory Castle) near Datong, Shanxi Province. There, the students found that some bricks from the castle walls had been removed by local residents to repair a livestock shed.
This year’s trip to Wusuli River logged the most kilometers of the three excursions, with a round-trip travel distance of 4,000 km. The long train-and-bus trips give everyone many chances to chat with each other and find interesting people to talk to along the way.
“I encourage the freshmen to talk with the passengers on the train and to discover the stories of the cooks, the trainmen and others,” Professor Li said. “A good journalist must be a good listener and writer who is good at grasping the details.”
Sophomore Chen Tianhan, who went on the freshman seminar trip to Deshengbao in 2004, said the seminar gave him the chance to understand people from different parts of society and to become more aware of the responsibility of the journalist. When it comes to journalism, he said, field study is much more useful than listening to lectures.
Wang Siyang enjoyed the excitement of travel. “We kept traveling on and on, never staying at the same hotel for more than one night,” she said. “Even on the train, we would be given assignments, to interview or to talk to strangers and find stories, to observe the people and things around us and find details that might be interesting, to grasp inspiration that flashed through our heads and jot it all down, to tell what kind of information is useful and what is not.”
Huang Junren, a student from Hunan province in South China, said he had never taken part in such a long trip before. He valued the experience because it gave him a chance to overcome his shyness by speaking to his classmates and the train passengers.
“It was ground-breaking for me,” Huang said.
Wang Siyang said, “Mr. Li kept us thinking all the time, and believe me it was tiring, but at the same time it was enjoyable. Knowing for sure that I was learning and improving gave me a feeling of great satisfaction.”
