Concordia Journal Home > Archives > June 12, 2008 issue >

Mother knows best 

By Barbara Black

Ying Liu has only been in Canada for a year and eight months, but she’s graduating this spring with a Master’s in Educational Studies. Montreal is a long way from Hunan province in southern China, where she earned her undergraduate degree.

She heard about Concordia’s Department of Education from a Chinese friend here in Montreal. When she checked it out on the Internet, she decided to apply. She was determined to help her mother revolutionize the teaching of vocational education in China — no small task.

Liu’s mother teaches vocational studies. Mother and daughter have often talked about the limitations of an educational system that tends to emphasize rote learning over critical thinking. When she came to Concordia, she knew she had found what she wanted.

“The professor asked the students what they thought,” Liu recalled. “I gave the answer. The professor asked me how I knew it was right. I said, ‘Because I read it in the book.’ He said, ‘How do you know the book is right?’”

It reminded her of her mother, who often encouraged her with pithy metaphors. “She told me, ‘Don’t be like the frog in the well, who only sees its sides. Be like the bird in the sky, who can see everything.”

Liu devoted her comprehensive paper to the importance of cultivating critical thinking, choosing one’s own path instead of blindly following others. She thinks China could benefit from this approach to both curriculum and the teaching technique to make the training of skilled workers more sophisticated and specialized.

“Vocational education has come to play an important role in the field of education, because it is seen as the solution to the problem of skilled labour shortage in China,” she wrote. “However, the low quality of vocational education not only leaves the problems of labour shortage unresolved but also leaves vocational students facing unemployment after their graduation.”

Liu loved studying with encouraging professors like Arpi Hamalian. Currently she has jobs in a restaurant and a university laboratory, and she’s learning French. She plans to visit her parents, and then come back to Canada for at least three years. She remembers her mother’s parting advice: “I will miss you, but this life experience will be good for you.”