Assignment 6 Final Project – Language policy in HK International schools

The final website will explore the language policies of a number of international schools in Hong Kong. One interesting fact that transpires from various schools’ websites is that they usually teach English, possibly another Western language and Mandarin. What they do not teach is Cantonese.

Children at the German Swiss International School

This policy might make sense in the light of the global usefulness of Mandarin. But how are children supposed to integrate in a city where they cannot properly communicate with the majority of people? Being able to speak Cantonese is a very essential skill for fully enjoying what Hong Kong has to offer. Reading and writing traditional Chinese characters is also important, as everyone will know who has tried to find his way around a restaurant menu. If they do not learn these skills, these children will be perpetual strangers here.

The next steps are making appointments at the schools to take pictures, interview staff, find students willing to share their experience, and, if possible, to attend class sessions. The main goal is to find out how students feel about the absence of Cantonese from the curriculum and how they get along without it, but also see how the schools justify their policies.

Pictures and audio slides will be suitable to introduce the audience to the campus and the students. Audio voxpops will be useful to reflect students’ opinions on the Cantonese issue. Written text will provide facts about the schools, the programs and a critical evaluation of what is being said by officials and students.

It would also be nice to have a counter-example school where Cantonese is taught.

Probable target schools:

• German Swiss International School
• Hong Kong International School

Assignment 5 – Final Project planning

Research into Hong Kong’s Nepalese community revealed a rich pool of issues that generally relate to Hong Kong as a city with a multi-cultural heritage. This heritage is often taken for granted, for example when Hong Kong is branded as a gateway city where China meets the world. But preserving it requires earnest efforts to integrate, because isolated and marginalized groups will eventually disappear. While personal efforts to integrate are important, it will not happen if there are no institutions to channel them and back them up.

This is why it is worth taking a look at schools in Hong Kong. Many minority children visit international schools like the Sir Ellis Kadoorie Primary School on Hong Kong Island. Here they may learn Chinese, but it is a kind of “integration light” because they can usually fall back into their native language when talking to their friends.

It would be worthwhile comparing the experiences of these children with those of kids who visit local schools. This would involve visiting them in schools, looking who their friends are (especially if any Chinese are among them) and talking to their parents about their views and the reasons why they chose the respective school for their child.

The project will include text explaining the background and the relevance, audio slideshows showing the kids at school, playing with their friends and learning Chinese, as well as audio in which they show off their Chinese skills.

A possible problem is that schools will not allow me to attend classes or to take photographs on their premises. In that case it would mean trying other schools. At any rate it may be wiser to get in touch with families first and see if they know what would be possible and what would not.

As a fall-back option one could focus on the integration efforts of the Hong Kong Integrated Nepalese Society, and in particular their Chinese-Nepalese cultural encounter events.

For background information and analysis I will approach a professor from the Chinese University who does  research on the Nepalese community.

Soundslide project

Please click here to access the soundslide project “Language barriers, bricks and bridges”.

Assignment 4: “How does the tainted milk scandal affect you?”

by Cornelius Rahn

Hong Kong – September 29, 2008 – JMSC - Chinese milk poisoned with the chemical melamine has already killed 4 babies and made over 50,000 sick. Hong Kong is among the places that imported affected goods, and its news media have covered the scandal at length. But most of the people interviewed seemed to lack both interest in and information about the story.

None of the mainland brands involved could be found on store shelves.

The Hong Kong government has banned all products containing more than one milligram of melamine per kilogram, which means stricter rules than those applied by both the European Union and the United States. Despite these efforts, at least two Hong Kong babies have been diagnosed with kidney stones, and melamine has been discovered in baby cereal, milk tablets and candy bars.

Interviewees were asked the question, “How does the tainted milk scandal affect you?”. In some cases, we added the question “What do you think the government should do about the situation?”

Click here to hear selected vox pops

List of interviewees:

1. Mrs. Arnaud, an expatriate from France, shopping at Sai Ying Pun Market

2. Roger from New York City, shopping at Park’n'Shop on Bonham Road.

3. A British woman in her mid-twenties, shopping at the same store.

4. Jaakko, Finnish student at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, interviewed on a walkway above Gloucester Road in Wanchai.

Jaakko (left) says a zero-tolerance policy may be needed

Assignment 3: Soundsliding Hong Kong’s Gurkha community

My team and I are going to do our soundslide project on the Nepalese Gurkha community in Hong Kong. So far my experience with Gurkhas has been limited to war history books and the occasional glance of shotgun-wielding guardsmen in front of banks and expat-clubs, but I am really looking forward to changing that. Gurkhas are currently in the news because many of them are being refused British citizenship, despite the often heroic deeds they rendered to the British army. In Hong Kong, the Legislative Council recently (finally) passed an ordinance to outlaw discrimination on the grounds of race – which is something that the Nepalese community has been pushing for for years. But is all going to be well now? And what are all these soldiers and their families doing now that their brigade has been dissolved? There are a lot of interesting issues.

One thing that is clear from watching many examples is that we have to center this story on human beings. Photos and interviews should tell the story of a few people, maybe a family, who stand as an example of the challenges facing Hong Kong’s Gurkha community.

The first thing for us to do is get a good grip on the facts about this community as well as its history. If we do not know the basics, we will not even know what would be worth asking. The next question is, how do we make contact with people who can tell us their stories and answer our questions? Simply walking into Jordan Road and asking, “are you a Gurkha, by any chance?” would be inefficient, I believe. That is why I am gathering contact details of community representatives, political leaders for example, who know what is going on and can give us some hints of which people are worth talking to. This should help us to “map” the community and gain an overview what the main issues are.

I think we are on a good track because we have set a clear, tight timetable which is carved up into four phases: Getting the background, finding the story, covering and writing, and production. These phases have clear-cut subtasks which you can check on our wiki. This way we always know what needs to be done and whether we are on schedule.

Will we be able to produce professional-quality photos and sound? We have a decent camera and voice recorder, but we think every one of us should be equipped to shoot and record at all time. We will try to obtain a nice balance of photos which give an impression of life in the Gurkha community as well as some that tell the personal story of the people we are covering.

Assignment 2: Father and Son

Father and Son

Originally uploaded by cornelius.rahn

Besides being blurringly beautiful, this photo shows one aspect of traditional Chinese festivities that fascinates me in general: The relationship between father and son.

Daddy is showing the best way to light the candles, and his son gazes intently on those hands moving deftly around the flames. Holding the candle in his left hand, the young one seems torn between observing and giving it a go himself.

This festival seems to provide a good opportunity for families to spend some time together – something that hard-working Hong Kongers do not have so much of. I wonder where the mother was, though.

For this assignment, I mixed together the Tai Hang Fire Dragon Dance and the Victoria Park celebrations for the Mid-Autumn Festival. At the Dragon Dance, I found out that if you really want to try squeezing past hundreds of other photographers all going for the prize in a photo competition, you have to be somewhat suicidal. And then I felt ashamed when I held up my puny camera next to the huge apparatuses that most of those guys had brought along. Also: Next time I will know better than to go for night-time shots – the blur is only cool up to a certain point.

Assignment 1: Still a hot issue – The Central Police Station

1. To find out about conservation efforts in general, and the Central Police Station in particular, I thought it would be a good idea to look at all sides that are likely to provode new angles or start new developments with regard to the issue. There is the government and its departments (http://www.conservancy.org.hk/heritage/CPS_E.htm, http://www.lcsd.gov.hk/CE/Museum/Monument/en/monuments_53.php) which I hope will publish new plans and arrangements as decisions are being made. Of course I realize that it will be our job as journalists to shed light on how such deals are made. There are the partners who have taken charge of redevelopment. Then there are the conservation societies (The Conservancy Association, The Conservancy Association Centre for Heritage), which usually attempt o counter the government by doing their own investigations and organizing public campaigns. They will be valuable sources, but as I found out their web appearances are lacking. Will probably have to ask in person. More or less independent “experts” can help us understand the context of development, so. And of course, news feeds (will create a Yahoo Pipe for aggregation and filtering), Google alerts and blog searches (Asia Sentinel), about the Police Station should help to stay on top of developments. How did I find these links? I went through Wise News searches, read through RSS feeds and called up a friend with whom I worked on urban development projects last year.

2. The first thing I realized is how little transparency there is with regard to heritage conservation projects. Even the heritage conservation societies hardly provide more information than photos of the site. That said, here are some initial questions that I would like to answer: What is the government’s main motivation for its redevelopment plan? Revenue? Branding of the city as “old meets new, East meets West? How is this project linked to the pedestrianization of SoHo? Why is protection linked to antiquity, foreclosing alternative rescue routes (I think this is linked to 1976 legislation, but gotta look into that)? Where will the money go, who will profit (always the most interesting question in a project of “public interest”)? Why is the Jockey Club involved? I think by “following the money”, we can cut to the c*** and find out what rationales really matter in this heritage conservation/redevelopment project on Hollywood Road.

Mario or Sonic? Or both?

Sega or Nintendo? I’ll take them both!

Values and social education at Chinese schools

Claire in front of Eliot Hall

Claire Li Hongliang tells me about her experience at school. I thougt it was particularly interesting that learning how to behave in society is apparently NOT a fundamental goal in the People’s Republic’s schools. But listen for yourselves…

Interview with Claire

Some useful tools for journalists

Hey, I thought I’d use this post to provide some links to some websites that we as journalists may find useful. I will also attempt to describe what they can do for you.

1. The first site I recommend is delicious,  which functions as a web-based bookmark archive. Imagine you’re using a computer in class, and you want to access a site that you have bookmarked on your PC at home. Unless you’ve got an amazing memory, you’re out of luck. Well, that’s where del.icio.us comes in. Sign up, add two buttons to your explorer’s toolbar and you’re ready to save any webpage you like. Using another PC? Easy: Just log into the website and retrieve the bookmark you want. To help you find bookmarks, you can tag them and add a short description of the site. Want to have somebody else have access to your bookmarks? Just give them your account details. In sum, this is a great tool for brainstorming and gathering all relevant sites you and your partners might want to use for a project.

2. You really should check out StumpleUpon. If you really think about it, don’t you have to admit that the range of websites that you use is rather limited. I myself tended to always end up using my standard repertoire of sites, sort if like my father who got stuck on 70′s music. But that’s a damn shame – the net is full of ideas and material that it’s impossible to systematically explore. You’d kind of have to come across them by chance. nad that’s exactly what StumbleUpon does: Based on the fields of interest you indicate, it will “randomly” send you to an internet page that other users have suggested. Then, you can give a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” to indicate whether you like this site and want more of its kind. You will find yourself saying: “Man, I had no idea this brilliant page was just one URL away.”

3. Yahoo Pipes. So you have figured out what RSS feeds are. Good for you. Even better if you could bundle them together, filter them for keywords, translate them and then do some more useful stuff with them? With Yahoo Pipes you can, and you won’t find it hard to do. Using an amazingly easy interface, you can hook up your list of RSS feeds to modules that fiddle with your feeds – until at the end of the pipe, everything that you want comes out and everything you don’t want gets filtered out. Great tool.

I hope you check these out if you haven’t already.