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
