About CHINA NOW | For Teachers
About CHINA NOW | For Teachers
In less than 40 years, China has emerged from a Third World country to a recognized major world power. As early as 2009, President Obama already stated that “The US and China will shape the course of the 21st Century” and “ties between the two powers are as important as any bilateral relationship in the world”.
Unfortunately, or because of China’s precipitous rise, California’s (and probably other states’) public middle and high school social studies standards have stopped at the cusp of this incredible change and have not gone any further than 1976.
The 1990 Institute’s CHINA NOW | For Teachers Program was created to fill in this void, to provide the resources that enable teachers to add modern China into their curriculum.
Our first annual Teachers Workshop was launched in the summer of 2013. The subject of China, especially modern China, is both enormous and complex. So each year we select a theme that is most relevant to the major news/issues of that year. We then find prominent U.S. – China experts in all walks of life as speakers/panelists to address topics within that framework. We also try to get speakers that can present diverse as well as balanced viewpoints, giving the teachers, and subsequently their students, the chance to exercise their critical thinking skills. See 2016 Teachers Workshop for more information about this coming year’s Workshop. You can also find other information about all our previous workshops by selecting from the TEACHERS WORKSHOP tab at the top of this page.
Our Lesson Plan Contest Program was started in 2015 to address the need to have quality teaching materials on modern China that teacher can adopt easily for their classrooms. Creating lesson plans is also being emphasized in our 2016 Workshop. Winning lesson plans are published on our website, to be shared by the public for free. See 2016 Lesson Plan Contest to find out more about this year’s contest. You can also read about last year’s contest and already published lesson plans by clicking on the LESSON PLANS tab at the top of this page.
This coming summer we will be launching the resource sharing part of website. Besides winning lesson plans and videos of our Workshop sessions, we will be adding a supplementary resource library on our website. We will be listing news articles, books, videos, and other media that teachers, as well as the general public can access. These will be resources recommended by our China experts community, including teachers themselves.
3/18/15