January 3, 2011 - Shanghai
Well, I made it with no difficulty. I tried to take a picture of the yellow smog as we descended, but it didn't capture the impact! I asked the greeters if it was "bad weather today" and the reply: "Pollution!” So conjure up your stereotype and you hit it pretty much on the money! Today I give my first lecture -- this one to 80 pre-service teacher candidates at Shanghai Normal University.

Greetings from Shanghai on day #2.
My day at Shanghai Normal began with a beautiful lunch -- I especially love the tiny boiled shrimp and cucumber. An orange glass contained pumpkin, and the meal also included black mushrooms and edamame, as well as slices of beef (looks like pork) and several kinds of fish. There was much more on the table! We then walked around the campus -- you see a typical building and some unusual branching trees all set for the winter months. The students are filing into my lecture -- there were about 80 of them, and I showed them an interpretive discussion, which seemed to interest them. I am pictured with the graduate student, Fiona, who found me on the Internet and helped to arranged the lecture. It was a lovely day.

January 7, 2011 - Shanghai
Greetings to you after a most memorable day #3 in China. The tall building that you see below is the site of this conference on philosophy of education and educational research in China. There are about 30 scholars and their guests from the US and around China, many but not all of them philosophers, so about 50 people in the room (I counted the house, as I have been taught to do by my husband!).


It was a long, intense day, but most memorable. As I listened, I looked at the beautiful flowers that you see here -- there were three arrangements like that on the table. Then for dinner, another beautiful banquet at a local restaurant.
Tomorrow, I lead interpretive discussion with faculty of Fudan College for two hours.
January 8, 2011 - Shanghai

What you see above is a view of Shanghai as seen through a dirty window 24 floors up. Does it look like NYC? Maybe, but not exactly. Tomorrow we will take a tour in the city and I will take more photos. Perhaps we will have some NYC lookalike views then.
What was amazing? Tonight I led an interpretive discussion with 16 faculty members from Fudan College. THAT was amazing. I began by learning all their names, as I always do. Doing so was not as hard as I thought it might be. We discussed a poem called "Schoolmaster" by Yevtushenko, which is 40 lines and one with which I am very familiar. I read it to them in English, and someone in the group read it in Chinese. … Some translating of the comments was necessary, but very little. The conversation was flowed very easily -- both about the text (which lasted more than 90 minutes) and about the discussion itself, which lasted another two hours! They did line-by-line analysis, then argued about whether one could find the meaning of a poem by doing that, whether you could do text interpretation in the absence of information about the historical context, translation issues, etc, etc. What struck me was the eagerness with which they embraced the whole exercise. Really very moving. For some of them, it was clearly new, but they all stuck with it -- and just kept raising issues about the discussion. I could not have asked for more.
Tomorrow we have a half day of the conference and then a "concert" -- a singalong featuring an American medley of songs, which I will play on the piano in the coffee lounge on floor 15 of our building. It will be our last meal together. Afterwards, we go on the tour.
I am loving these people. One student, from Shanghai Normal University, is coming to NU to be my research assistant for a year so that she can learn about interpretive discussion. That is going to be wonderful, I think. She is very bright, and her English is excellent. She'll help me get the book for Harvard finished in the coming year.
January 9, 2011 - Shanghai
Greetings again from Shanghai. It is now Sunday, January 9, 2011, and the international conference on "The Role of Philosophy in Education and Educational Research" at Fudan University was concluded today. The sessions lasted only until noon, but once again we covered a lot of ground. We focused upon themes that have arisen before -- the goal of education in China today, nature of and need for moral education, and the problems of equity in this country. One reason why the conference has been so compelling is that the philosophical discussions are all rooted in very real, pressing problems. For example, we were told that there is great inequity between the schools in the cities and those in urban areas, between educational opportunities for people who are physically and mentally fit and those who are not, between the affluent and the non-affluent. We were told that primary school-aged children can be tested up to 35 times during the year to prepare them for the standardized test that they will take at the end of that year. At this conference, the hunger for an alternative approach to education was palpable.


Today, I give a fourth presentation, this time to educators and teacher educators at East China Normal University. Then it is off to the Shanghai Museum. In the evening, I will have dinner with the family of one of the Fudan conference organizers. I look forward to talking with the 11-year-old son about his schooling experiences, etc.