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When David and Rachel Winton retired from teaching, they were looking for a new challenge. Now they are teaching English to university students in China, a far cry from their careers as school teachers in England.
David and Rachel found this new life through AITECE (Association for International Teaching, Educational and Curriculum Exchange), an organisation based in Hong Kong and linked with the Columban Fathers.
"We were accepted to teach English in Wuhan in central China and live in a serviced apartment on the campus of Hubei University. The facilities we need are on our doorstep: supermarket, post office, bank, and restaurant... even a hairdresser. One further pleasant aspect for us is that the generations live here together in harmony: students, teachers with their young children, and former teachers now in their old age.
Most of the 16,000 students are from Hubei province and live on campus. They are enrolled in graduate and post-graduate programs in the arts and sciences. The campus is leafy and despite the number of students, is not overwhelming in size.
The university has contracted us to teach English to students at various stages of proficiency. Each of us has eight contact sessions of two hours a week with eight different groups of students, the number of students in each class ranging from 16 to 50.
Both of us taught high school students in state schools in England until our retirement, so one would reasonably conclude that we have learnt most of the skills needed to teach effectively. However, we are finding that teaching Chinese tertiary students with just one contact session each week, challenges us in new ways.
Some classrooms are well-equipped, having air-conditioning that makes it much easier to work in the extremes of hot and cold weather. Older rooms are not so well equipped with long rows of desks screwed to the floor, so there is no chance of re-arranging the furniture for small group work or whole class activities in a circle. Some of the classrooms are on the fifth and sixth floor and there is no elevator, but the students would not think of complaining.
When we arrive for class at 8:00a.m we find the students seated at their desks with their textbooks open. We were provided with a basic textbook and whilst we found it helpful, we needed to move beyond it. We needed to get our students discussing topics in which they had some genuine interest and spark discussion. Such discussions often demand that the students use vocabulary that they may not have already learnt, so we teach them some of the words and phrases they might need in the discussion of the day.
We have introduced topics such as 'better city/better life' (the slogan of the 2010 Shanghai Expo), 'China's one child policy' and the difficulties of life on a live-in campus. We have also taught them to sing some English songs, such as 'You are my sunshine' and organised role-plays.
This has helped the students to be less stiff and formal, and to move the lesson away from 'one way traffic' to an interaction between us and them or between the students themselves. We feel we are making progress, but we keep in mind that our cultural backgrounds are so different.
They are respectful and always well-dressed; being scruffy is not part of their style. The students are used to the teacher doing all the talking and so are inclined to be passive.
Unlike our experience back home, there is no need to expend energy keeping order in the classroom; the students are co-operative and work with the teacher. A major difference between our cultures is that while ours is individualistic, their culture puts emphasis on a sense of belonging to a group. This may explain in part their unwillingness to volunteer their individual views to the class, but will agree to do so if directly asked.
It is a great joy to be trying something new at this stage of our lives. Retirement has meant an opportunity to branch out in our chosen profession. We will also take advantage of the opportunity to travel in China and have already had six days in Beijing.
Over the winter break we plan to travel to the south-west and over the summer to the north-west, from where some of our students come, and finally to Shanghai... before we fly home to London."
