Educational Program in Search of Old Beijing

Sometimes you forget to explore what is right in front of you…

In November we had an amazing opportunity to work with students from the Peking University High School. They wished to connect with the history of the city that their parents and grandparents had known.

The students spent four days based at the Beijing Postcards gallery. We divided the course into different tasks, each focused on discovering the city’s history. The first three days were dedicated to the study of sources, examining maps, written history and finally oral history. The last day we spent exploring the old commercial district of Dashilar.

Every day followed a similar pattern. First, we gave the students condensed, in-depth knowledge about a certain topic through a talk or presentation. Then, the students were thrown into an activity where they needed to use the knowledge with which they had just been presented. This activity could be a scavenger hunt, a quiz or an interview.

Outside of class, with the help of ration coupons, old pagers, bicycles and other items from the not so distant past, the students asked their families questions that helped uncover and connect them with a Beijing that existed not so long ago. The family anecdotes about black markets for ration coupons and a granddad that built his own television - because otherwise he would have had to wait for years to buy one - helped the students realize that Beijing’s history is also their history.

Beijing Postcards’ job was in many ways not to teach, but to create the framework of a think tank within which the students could express their ideas, and in so many ways we learned just as much as they did!