Student’s visit preserves local culture
Print Edition
When Tongji University student Peng Jing was a volunteer teacher in Nuodeng Village in southwest China’s Yunnan Province, the experience sparked a strong interest in its history and culture.
Therefore she recruited five people at the university with the same interest to collect and edit the history and culture of Nuodeng. Last June, after a year in preparation, a series of textbooks were published.
The books answer questions about how Nuodeng was formed, what the village was like when its salt industry was at its peak, and the legends pertaining to the Bai ethnic minority. The series covers the history, folk customs, religions, handicrafts and natural environment in short stories and cartoons.
Peng and her team also designed social activity courses to go with the textbooks.
“Nuodeng is one of the oldest villages in Yunnan with a history of over 1,000 years. I hope these textbooks can open a door for children to get to know their hometown,” Peng said.
When she visited Nuodeng for the first time she was still a sophomore, and the only thing she knew about the village was Nuodeng ham, which became famous after the “A Bite of China” series was aired on CCTV.
To her surprise, the local children knew very little about their own culture. Only some senior residents knew about the village’s history and traditions. “If we don’t do something, the traditional culture might be forgotten forever,” Peng said.
Peng and her team managed to collect information from 30 schools, and more than 80 percent of them expressed a willingness to teach the local culture but couldn’t find suitable textbooks.
Upon hearing this, the team members checked large numbers of documents and interviewed people who had tales to tell of local history, folklore.
Writing the text was a major challenge for the college students as they had not only to convey what was in ancient documents and materials in straightforward language, but also had to make the stories interesting for primary and secondary school students.
With the help of experts and professors in Shanghai, the textbooks were published after about six months of editing and revision.
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