Destination Shanghai

It all began in a paddy field in Nagano,Japan at the end of the last millennium.

"There's a Chinese guy wants to talk. He wants to twin with an English school", came the message as we tramped through fields filled with the most expensive rice in the world.

I met the aspiring twinner in a wooden bath that night. There was a poem about a horse written on a scroll on the wall of the farmhouse in which we were staying. My host read the poem in Japanese, the next woman spoke it in Mandarin and the final delivery came in Shanghai dialect.

All the speakers could read and understand the poem but none could follow it in the the language of the other. Thus began for me a consuming interest in the people and cultures of the Asian coast of the Pacific Rim and for my county an experience for our children which I suspect won't be bettered elsewhere in the UK.

In the third millennium thus far, hundreds of Derbyshire students have already enjoyed exchanges with schools and families across Japan and China. And by next year, if our latest plans hatch successfully, a third of our secondary schools will have direct interchanges with Japan and China, taking the number of students who have visited these countries into the thousands by the end of the decade.

There are two reasons for me planning a blog from Shanghai. Firstly, I want your sympathy. But secondly a little envy wouldn't come amiss either. After all, travelling east is not all jet lag and closeted meetings in smoke filled conference centres. There are sea slugs and snake skins to be sampled, freshly sliced and wriggling sea cucumbers to consume, delightful dogs to be digested and ducks sprinkled with deep fried crispy scorpions to be scoffed.



So as Derbyshire's dustbin for disgusting dietary items, imagine my delight when this summer, an invitation from Shanghai Foreign Languages School dropped on Dave's desk. Would I kindly fly, at their expense, to an International Symposium at the school in the week before Christmas.

Having checked that the four Shanghai soccer teams had a home game that week, I gladly accepted.

However, there's no such thing as a free lunch, so the penultimate sentence of their official October letter of invitation politely read "Besides, you are respectfully requested to provide a synopsis of your 3000 word thesis on Cross-cultural Education and Probationary International Elite Cultivation by the 9th November by fax or e-mail."!

Of course, I wasn't just going to present a paper. The visit was also a chance to go to many of the fourteen schools in the Yangpu district of Shanghai that the British Council identified as our next tranche of destinations for Derbyshire students.

Whilst Derbyshire will be responsible for drawing up the template agreements for international exchange relationships, there are going to be conditions on our schools before they become fully involved. Their domestic curriculum will need to be developed to incorporate Chinese cultural and language elements. There again, one of our top performing secondary schools in a highly deprived area already teaches Japanese to GCSE level. They have collaborative progression options available in conjunction with the local tertiary college to AS and A level and they did that even before becoming a specialist language college!

We are confident that if one can do it so can others. And looking ahead, what sort of parent nowadays wouldn't be rather pleased that in preparing their children for the third millennium, their school had already recognised the potentially enriching experience of engaging with the tiger economies.

And what, you may ask, about the 3000 word thesis on Cross-cultural Education and Probationary International Elite Cultivation? A doddle. My meanderings through Japanese texts had already equipped me well. They have the perfect proverb.

"SAVOUR THE DEADLINE. IT IS MERELY AN EXCUSE TO STAY AWAKE ALL NIGHT."

Dave Wilcox's "Blog from Shanghai" together with his provocative paper on Cross-cultural Education and Probationary International Elite Cultivation is available on http://wanderingwilcox.blogspot.com/