This is "A Very Brief Introduction to Chinese Culture (English)". This couse aims to cultivate students' basic cultural literacy, providing them with a basic understanding to Chinese culture. It deepens their awareness of Chinese history, society and cultural life, fostering a stronger sense of national pride, by acquainting students with China's geography, history, cultural traditions, customs. The course focuses on developing students' ability to effectively present various aspects of Chinese culture in English, contributing to the dissemination of Chinese culture.
This curriculum and the course design departs from the traditional method of ‘cultural-symbol-focused’ teaching and learning, and emphasizes guiding students to trace back, search for, and recognize the "roots of culture." One of the most noteworthy merits in this course is the section of carefully selected "guidance documents" and related questions, encouraging students to step back and observe the origins and central concept of cultural phenomena before delving into cultural knowledge. This section of enables students to fundamentally understand cultural phenomena, integrating learned content cohesively, avoiding isolated and superficial learning about cultural symbols or representations.
Simultaneously, the course aims to steer clear of misleading tendencies, such as "historical nihilism" (denying historical inevitability) in history education and addresses issues of fragmentation, excessive concretization, and entertainmentification present in traditional cultural education.
The curriculum adopts a combined approach of in-class and extracurricular learning, covering three main categories: China's fundamentals (introduction: meaning of culture, geography, Chinese language), Chinese history, Chinese thought (philosophy, religion), and the lives and arts of the Chinese people.
