The halfway point of the program, and finally, the long-awaited Social Study Trip! One of the highlights of the program, as mentioned repeatedly in the advertising material, was the ability to go to cities outside of Taipei and complete an independent research project. A core purpose of the SST was to use your newly-gained Chinese skills to conduct interviews with locals on topics related to your project. Honestly, this is a fantastic idea, and a great way to differentiate HTA from other language programs on top of the language pledge. It’s rare to have the option to conduct research in another language, and even rarer to be given such wide freedom to choose your topic. Because I want to study comparative (and humanitarian) education in my future, I decided to complete a research project on indigenous, special, and compulsory education in Taiwan (yes, this was a 3-in-1 research paper — because I really didn’t want to waste the chance to conduct my first actual comparative education fieldwork! I also got way too into it and would like to shout-out my very kind and diligent teachers, who provided detailed feedback on my mammoth of a 5,000+ character paper after the trip.)
The trip was a blast, and I was able to get some AMAZING material for my project. However, I did truly feel pity towards my 2nd-year friends, because as we discussed on the trip, their Chinese level simply was not high enough to interview locals on the street about their attitudes towards religion, temple architecture, and the other (really fascinating and inspiring) topics they had selected. I felt thankful that I was in a position to help them and tried to translate as much as possible, but I still felt sad for a lot of them, because they were very frustrated by the end of the trip — one of my friends was so frustrated at trying to interview people with his beginner Chinese after the 2nd day that he gave up and just resigned himself to Googling the attitudes of Taiwanese people towards his research topic while we were on the trip so he could start his paper. And honestly, I don’t blame him, because it’s not like he had much of a choice. I think the concept behind the SST is great, but the execution could use some more work — lower-level students should either be excluded, do a modified assignment that does not lean as heavily on interviews, or more teachers should be allowed on the trip (only 2 were) so that they can assist the lower-level students with their interviews, as needed. The other glaring problem with the SST is that students simply had no time to actually interview locals as intended, because our schedules were jam-packed with activities that the Harvard Alumni Club of Taiwan (who paid for the SST, in collaboration with Taiwan’s 教育部) had selected for us. While I had a very fun time snorkeling, watching people fish, making rice flour desserts, and touring southern Taiwan, truthfully, even as one of the most advanced students on the trip, even I could barely find time to interview 4 people in 5 days, and I was among the students who interviewed the most people during the SST.
How was the experience of interviewing someone for a SST, you might ask? For me, I had a really life-changing experience of walking by a cram school in Tainan, deciding to knock on the door, and suddenly getting permission to observe a real English cram school’s operations for half an hour. This was the true beauty of having a higher level of Chinese while on a SST — you didn’t need to wait for the rare 10-minute chunks of time HTA had allocated within activities to interview the people we were already with; you could create your own opportunities spontaneously. This was my first time getting to observe a classroom as a comparative education researcher, and I will never forget that feeling — thank you to HTA for providing me with this opportunity!
Overall, I had a great time on the SST and left with a high-quality research paper in Chinese that I’m extremely proud of (and hope to make the foundation of future research, if I have a chance to teach in Taiwan after graduation), but we were sorely missing dedicated opportunities to interview people, and for students whose level did not enable them to communicate with locals just yet, it was very easy for them to become discouraged and check out mentally before the trip was even over.