Connecting Australia & Asia

Asia Education Foundation National Conference
16th  17th June, 2014
Sydney, Australia

Hyde Park, Sydney. Photo by Mark Pegrum, 2014. May be reused under CC BY 3.0 licence.

The Asia Education Foundation National Conference, under the title New World – New Thinking, opened with an overview of the importance of Australia’s relationship with Asia as we move into the Asian Century.

The official opening address was given by Scott Ryan, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Education. He indicated that the Federal Govt aims to raise the proportion of Year 12 students studying a language other than English from the current 11% to 40% within a decade, and he stressed the importance of initiatives like the New Colombo Plan.

This was followed by a panel which turned the conference theme into a double question: New World? New Thinking? Natsuko Ogawa, Hayley Bolding, Okhwa Lee and Gene Sherman spoke about the increased Asian presence in international settings and, more particularly, the national Australian setting, across areas as diverse as art, business, education and law.

In his insightful talk, Xi Jinping: Uniting the Tribes of Yan’an, John Garnaut, the Asia Pacific Editor for Fairfax Media, suggested that the Chinese economy is a complex outcome of personal interest, business interest and national interest, and that you need to understand politics to comprehend it. In a country where you can’t talk about politics, you talk about, and argue about, the past. A power vacuum developed around weak leaders like Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin, with Xi Jinping emerging as a new, powerful leader. Contemporary Chinese history is complicated by citizen economic empowerment, the information revolution (like China’s microblogging services, where corruption is highlighted, forming a kind of virtual civic space where a physical civic space doesn’t exist, though the state is now clamping down on this), the laws of economics, universal values and fading revolutionary legitimacy. He argued that the key historical distinction which matters in current Chinese politics is that of the traditional rural red tribe against the urban white tribe. Xi Jinping’s real achievement has been to unite these tribes.

In her talk, Student-centred strategies in teaching Chinese pronunciation, Qianwen Deng outlined a number of strategies for helping students to learn about Chinese tones. In our talk, Multimodal stories: Languages and cultural exchange, Grace Oakley and I showcased the Australia-China Council-funded project we’ve been working on, where Australian and Chinese students are creating and exchanging digital stories. In his talk, Whole school Indonesian focus, Jonathan Peterson outlined four factors which have been important for building student numbers in languages in his school: continuity from primary to tertiary; in-school promotion; a link with an Indonesian community; and a whole-school focus.

Commitments elsewhere didn’t allow me to stay until the end of this conference, but it was great to spend a day in the company of more than 500 educators who see the importance of connecting Australia more closely with Asia as we advance further and further into the Asian Century.

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