"Duoye" dance - a form of communal dance that involves hundreds of people at a time in the community, and here being emulated by the children every day as part of their outdoor activities (not just performed for guests).
Embedding Culture in Everyday Interactions – A Visit to an Indigenous Preschool in China
By: Junlei Li
How do indigenous and ethnic minority communities sustain and pass on culture to young children? This was a question that I have encountered over the years in the United States, Canada, and Australia. Last year, we started documenting these practices in Waterloo, Canada in an indigenous preschool which serves children and families who are ethnic minorities in the region. They had embedded indigenous values and traditions in the design, decoration, and rituals of the school, and perhaps more importantly, in the way they built relationships with children and families. We hope to share more about them in a later issue.
Two weeks ago, I had the opportunity to join a Chinese faculty colleague who had studied children’s dance in the ethnic minority region in Western China on a visit to a local preschool, bringing with me the same set of questions. We visited a 30+ year-old public preschool run by a director who started over three decades earlier as a teacher in the school. There were close to 400 children in the school, and nearly all of them belong to one of three ethnic minorities in the region. Over 95% of the teachers also belonged to the indigenous tribes of the area.
We arrived very early in the morning before the children entered the school and started filming and observing. The way children and families walked all the way to the classrooms and the warm transitions between parents and teachers reminded us of the Canadian preschool we had visited. The children were dressed in their traditional garments as they often do, not for guests’ sake, but as part of the cultures they carry.
At 8:30 am, an hour after we arrived and the official start of the school day, the director led us to the school entrance and asked us to “re-enter” because the children needed to have a proper welcome ceremony for us. They held a long bamboo stick across the stair walkway, and sang a song of welcome in their local dialect (and even managed to squeeze the word “Harvard” into the song!). The children brought us tea and only after we drank the tea was the bamboo “roadblock” lifted, and we walked again into the school.
The most stunning and astonishing sight was the entire school full of young children dancing and singing in synchrony to a dance and music form called “Duoye”. This is very much the same way that the community-at-large gathers on important occasions and forms large circles of hundreds of people to sing and dance. In the U.S., we often talk about establishing consistency between schools and families, usually meaning that families ought to help reinforce school values/norms. Here’s a beautiful instance of the school simply trying to mirror what families and communities do – “reciprocity” on a larger scale in school-family partnership.
Two weeks ago, I had the opportunity to join a Chinese faculty colleague who had studied children’s dance in the ethnic minority region in Western China on a visit to a local preschool, bringing with me the same set of questions. We visited a 30+ year-old public preschool run by a director who started over three decades earlier as a teacher in the school. There were close to 400 children in the school, and nearly all of them belong to one of three ethnic minorities in the region. Over 95% of the teachers also belonged to the indigenous tribes of the area.
We arrived very early in the morning before the children entered the school and started filming and observing. The way children and families walked all the way to the classrooms and the warm transitions between parents and teachers reminded us of the Canadian preschool we had visited. The children were dressed in their traditional garments as they often do, not for guests’ sake, but as part of the cultures they carry.
At 8:30 am, an hour after we arrived and the official start of the school day, the director led us to the school entrance and asked us to “re-enter” because the children needed to have a proper welcome ceremony for us. They held a long bamboo stick across the stair walkway, and sang a song of welcome in their local dialect (and even managed to squeeze the word “Harvard” into the song!). The children brought us tea and only after we drank the tea was the bamboo “roadblock” lifted, and we walked again into the school.
The most stunning and astonishing sight was the entire school full of young children dancing and singing in synchrony to a dance and music form called “Duoye”. This is very much the same way that the community-at-large gathers on important occasions and forms large circles of hundreds of people to sing and dance. In the U.S., we often talk about establishing consistency between schools and families, usually meaning that families ought to help reinforce school values/norms. Here’s a beautiful instance of the school simply trying to mirror what families and communities do – “reciprocity” on a larger scale in school-family partnership.
In the art room, the teachers showed us completed and work-in-progress art. Unlike most preschools which showed individual students’ work, nearly all of the works here are “collective paintings”. Children all contributed and drew and painted parts of a larger picture, and the pictures often captured the collective activities of their school community and the larger social community, like the Duoye dance or the collective communal meals (called “Hundred Family Meals”). What’s important is that children weren’t documenting ideas and concepts told to them through folklore, but cultural activities that they regularly take part in both in and outside the preschool. The practice in which children contribute collectively to meaningful cultural and social activities (e.g., art-making) rather than pursuing these skills as individual achievements also echoes the Learning by Observing and Pitching In (LOPI) framework developed by developmental anthropologists such as Barbara Rogoff. The interactions feel like a combination of directed engagement (Reciprocity Y) in order to create a genuine sense of inclusive community (Inclusion Z).
As is our custom, we did a “Simple Interactions Workshop” with the teachers in the school and nearby communities. The director asked us, “Could you please bring the world into our classroom?” and we asked the director, “Could we bring your school to the world?”
During the workshop, we chose a video segment we had just filmed that morning, and asked the teachers to reflect and describe what it meant. It was one of the less “visible” cultural practices at the school, but quite extraordinary. Children were using a real wok with hot sizzling and popping oil (hot enough that the children squealed in both delight and some healthy fear) to cook a culturally unique “oil tea”, whereby tea leaves are fried first before being cooked. And of course, the teas were served to all the children in the room as well as guests. It was not a performance judging by children’s familiarity with the routine. I’ve seen plenty of schools in China and in the U.S. that have simulated kitchens, but I have never seen young children actually use a piping hot wok to do real cooking like they did here. Of course, the teachers were nearby to coach the children, but the children were in the lead. When the teachers described their own work, they helped us understand that even though “oil tea” was a cultural ritual, very few children were ever directly involved in making it, even in their families. Here, the teachers act as culture bearers to scaffold children’s apprenticeship in these cultural rituals, in addition to what the parents or grandparents might be doing at home. In the U.S., the complex history of race, class, and housing created schools where the teachers’ social and cultural backgrounds mismatch those of children and families in lower-income communities. It was a helpful reminder to observe how naturally the indigenous teachers integrated cultural rituals into children’s learning and play.
It’ll take a long while for me to savor this experience. What kept popping into my head was that this preschool, in a rural Chinese community of ethnic minority tribes, embodied so many of the academic concepts we think about, write about, and talk about in academia, but rarely get to see in real life – sustaining indigenous/ethnic minority culture, individual and collective identity, communal living (meals, art, cooking), and important rituals that link school with family and community. True to the principle of Positive Deviance, whatever challenging problems we might have in education, somewhere, someone (or some community) has already found a way to address it, often with little fanfare or external recognition. We are glad that now we have the story of this preschool to share with the world.
In the art room, the teachers showed us completed and work-in-progress art. Unlike most preschools which showed individual students’ work, nearly all of the works here are “collective paintings”. Children all contributed and drew and painted parts of a larger picture, and the pictures often captured the collective activities of their school community and the larger social community, like the Duoye dance or the collective communal meals (called “Hundred Family Meals”). What’s important is that children weren’t documenting ideas and concepts told to them through folklore, but cultural activities that they regularly take part in both in and outside the preschool. The practice in which children contribute collectively to meaningful cultural and social activities (e.g., art-making) rather than pursuing these skills as individual achievements also echoes the Learning by Observing and Pitching In (LOPI) framework developed by developmental anthropologists such as Barbara Rogoff. The interactions feel like a combination of directed engagement (Reciprocity Y) in order to create a genuine sense of inclusive community (Inclusion Z).
As is our custom, we did a “Simple Interactions Workshop” with the teachers in the school and nearby communities. The director asked us, “Could you please bring the world into our classroom?” and we asked the director, “Could we bring your school to the world?”
During the workshop, we chose a video segment we had just filmed that morning, and asked the teachers to reflect and describe what it meant. It was one of the less “visible” cultural practices at the school, but quite extraordinary. Children were using a real wok with hot sizzling and popping oil (hot enough that the children squealed in both delight and some healthy fear) to cook a culturally unique “oil tea”, whereby tea leaves are fried first before being cooked. And of course, the teas were served to all the children in the room as well as guests. It was not a performance judging by children’s familiarity with the routine. I’ve seen plenty of schools in China and in the U.S. that have simulated kitchens, but I have never seen young children actually use a piping hot wok to do real cooking like they did here. Of course, the teachers were nearby to coach the children, but the children were in the lead. When the teachers described their own work, they helped us understand that even though “oil tea” was a cultural ritual, very few children were ever directly involved in making it, even in their families. Here, the teachers act as culture bearers to scaffold children’s apprenticeship in these cultural rituals, in addition to what the parents or grandparents might be doing at home. In the U.S., the complex history of race, class, and housing created schools where the teachers’ social and cultural backgrounds mismatch those of children and families in lower-income communities. It was a helpful reminder to observe how naturally the indigenous teachers integrated cultural rituals into children’s learning and play.
It’ll take a long while for me to savor this experience. What kept popping into my head was that this preschool, in a rural Chinese community of ethnic minority tribes, embodied so many of the academic concepts we think about, write about, and talk about in academia, but rarely get to see in real life – sustaining indigenous/ethnic minority culture, individual and collective identity, communal living (meals, art, cooking), and important rituals that link school with family and community. True to the principle of Positive Deviance, whatever challenging problems we might have in education, somewhere, someone (or some community) has already found a way to address it, often with little fanfare or external recognition. We are glad that now we have the story of this preschool to share with the world.
Children perform a welcome ceremony where guests are "blocked" on the road until a song has been sung and tea has been shared (a custom that's often seen in villages).
Children learning to cook "oil tea", a unique tea tradition involving hot sizzling oil pans! (I don't think in the U.S. we'd ever imagine children can handle that!)
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"100-family meal": children's collective drawing of communal meals where whole villages eat together.
Teachers who are from the same ethnic groups.
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