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Developing and teaching a bookmaking class at Guan Ai School this past summer was an incredibly rewarding

Students hold up their finished books.

experience for me. I love teaching and took advantage of the summer vacation to develop a ten day activity class at the school. Though I developed the curriculum, most important to the class was my partnership with two local Guan Ai teachers: Ms. Xie and Principal Sun.

I have learned through previous work in America and China that education is a truly collaborative experience. It is really a game of constant adjustment as you and your partners try to find how to apply an idea on paper to the reality of twenty young minds sitting before you in a classroom. Because of this you are only as good as the people you work with, and I was fortunate to work with two talented teachers who were eager to give suggestions and to share their expertise. This is especially important to me since I am a foreigner in China who is using my ideas to teach a class abroad. I find that when working with Chinese teachers and students, it is always so interesting (and sometimes a bit frustrating) to discover the new ways of thinking that they share.

Some students looked through library books for inspiration.

I picked bookmaking as a theme for the class because it is a topic that is rich with possibility. Though I called the class a “Bookmaking Class,” in reality it was much more. Using the goal of creating a physical book as a focus, my class was able to expand my students’ literature, writing, storytelling, design, visual storytelling, interview and listening skills through a variety of interactive activities. I did this by first helping my students investigate what a story is. The students learned that regardless if a story is told by picture, text or word of mouth it contains a few essential elements: setting, character and plot. They were then able to organize their own ideas for a story using these three elements.

The most fascinating part of the class was helping the students develop their story ideas, and watching as their text and pictures grew stronger and stronger. Ms. Xie and I worked one-on-one with the students, challenging them to think more deeply about the world that they created in their stories. We tried our best to avoid telling the students what to write. Instead we asked the students questions about their work, as a way to help them expand their ideas. For instance, we might ask:

• Why did this event happen?
• What was the character feeling?
• What happened before/after the event?
• Where is the story taking place?
• What is the most important part of your story?
• What part of your story do you think will be most important to your readers?

Ms. Sun reads a student's story.

After these meetings, the work that the students would bring back would be much stronger. A story that had previously taken two sentences to tell would now take two paragraphs; a picture that had before been a figure standing on a blank page was transformed into an image rich with visual information. These results showed the effectiveness of this technique. I believe that it can be applied to several other class subjects and activities as well.

Had I more time and the ability to adjust the curriculum, I probably would have included some activities that interacted with the students more on a visual and tactile level, but those are minor issues. In all, I feel that it was a successful class that gave me the chance to collaborate with talented teachers. I would be happy to have the opportunity to teach it again so I could expand on the lessons that I learned.

If you are interested in a more detailed description of the class, I’d be happy to share a teaching diary that I kept for the eleven days that I taught. Just email me at marco.flagg@ruralchina.org.