Category: ReConnect China school visit

First school visited: Discussing China with students in Vienna

As announced earlier on this website, ReConnect China experts are starting to get involved in school visits across Europe since September. On October 14, the very first of these school visits took place in Vienna.

Gábor Szüdi and Philipp Brugner, our team members from ZSI, visited the BORG 3 in Vienna-Landstraße, a public higher education school. This school is member of the European Parliament Ambassador School network and as such is regularly involved in extracurricular activities related to European political education.

Over two hours, our experts engaged the group of eleven students in a lively discussion on China and its political and economic system in particular. They gave a presentation (its content was built on the learning materials prepared by the ReConnect China MOOCs) to quickly introduce the ReConnect China project and to outline the basics of the Chinese political (the party-state, the CCP, CCP structure, PRC central state institutions) and economic (the Mao era, the reform period – Deng Xiaoping, the Xi Jinping era, EU-China trade relations) system. With nine Mentimeter questions to provoke students having a guess about some specific facts relating to China, an interactive element with real-time results was added to spice up the presentation.

The visit concluded with a world café setting for two groups which took time to write up and visualise their thoughts, ideas and concerns regarding the future of EU-China cooperation.

From our side it was particularly interesting to present our work to a young and non-expert audience, requiring to choose a comprehensible language for a complex topic.

The results of the Mentimeter questions can be found in Vienna school visit_Mentimeter results

 

Start of ReConnect China school visits in September

During the project’s first review meeting with independent experts in January 2024 in Brussels, the project consortium was recommended to intensify its engagement with youth as one of the project’s key target groups. As a result from follow-up discussions within the team, we are happy to announce a new project activity – “The ReConnect China school visits”!

In the coming months (and continuing in 2025), various project partners will visit secondary schools in their home countries to present the project and – more importantly – to raise the interest of these young learners about China as a fascinating country.

How does it work? ReConnect China experts visit schools, come to a class and engage students in interactive lectures. Different aspects such as China’s society, economy or politics are presented to the young cohort in a suitable format and in a non-scientific language. At the same time, our experts will be closely collaborating with the teachers for the design, content and questions to be discussed with the class. Visits will last for about 45-60mins. The targeted age level of students is between 15-18 years, but our experts are flexible to adapt their visit’s programme also to younger individuals upon request.

Currently the project plans to organise its first school visit in September. Concrete names of potential schools have already been suggested within the team, with whom the respective partners are now getting into contact.

If you are interested to be visited by the ReConnect China project, just get in touch with us. Please write to Mr. Philipp Brugner (brugner[at]zsi.at) and Mr. Gábor Szüdi (szudi[at]zsi.at). We would be delighted to discuss a visit with you!

Official ReConnect China School visit advertisement.