KU News Release

President of Chinese university to visit KU’s Edwards Campus

OVERLAND PARK — High school students in eight Kansas communities and in Arkansas will test their Chinese language skills this week with Ma Min, president of China’s Huazhong Normal University, when he visits the University of Kansas Edwards Campus in Overland Park.

Ma will visit the Confucius Institute at the Edwards Campus, 12600 Quivira Road, at 4 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 27, to dedicate a new interactive distance learning classroom that is helping to meet a growing demand for Chinese language classes in Kansas and the Great Plains region.

Ma and Robert M. Clark, vice chancellor of the Edwards Campus, will greet the high school students via state-of-the-art equipment funded this summer by $50,000 from Hanban, the Office of Chinese Language Council International; the Edwards Campus; and KU’s Confucius Institute.

At 6:30 p.m., Ma will meet with KU Chancellor Robert Hemenway at the chancellor’s home in Lawrence to sign an agreement to begin a direct exchange program between KU and Huazhong Normal University in Wuhan, China. In June, Hemenway met with Ma in Wuhan.

The Confucius Institute’s distance learning classes and the direct exchange program are indicative of demand from parents and students in the United States for Chinese language training, said William Tsutsui, executive director of the Confucius Institute at KU.

To help meet this demand, the Confucius Institute partnered with the Southeast Kansas Education Service Center in Greenbush to offer high school classes in Mandarin Chinese to school districts across Kansas through interactive distance learning.

Since the Confucius Institute opened at KU in May 2006, the number of high school students studying Chinese in Kansas has increased from 24 to 217. The number of Kansas teachers certified to teach Chinese jumped from one to 10. Tsutsui said there are 21 Kansas school districts offering Mandarin Chinese classes and that he expects those numbers to grow.

“Thanks to an innovative agreement between the Kansas Department of Education and Hanban, with the cooperation of the Confucius Institute and Huazhong Normal University, which facilitates the certification of trained visiting teachers from China, young Kansans in Pittsburg, Galena and Clearwater, for example, are learning Chinese,” Tsutsui said.

With the distance learning classroom, eight Kansas high schools are offering Chinese language classes: Washburn Rural, Lawrence and Lawrence Free State, Madison, Marysville, Valley Heights, White City and Winfield. Classes are also being taught in Beebe, Ark. Confucius Institute instructors are sending enrichment and after-school programs in Chinese language and culture to elementary and middle schools across Kansas.

The distance learning programs at KU’s Confucius Institute are a nationally significant pilot project in the use of interactive distance learning to teach Chinese and are bringing Mandarin to parts of Kansas, especially to rural areas, where no Asian languages have ever been available for students, said Tsutsui.

KU’s Confucius Institute was the fifth such institute to open in the United States when it was dedicated in May 2006. The first four were located in Washington, D.C.; Chicago; New York; and San Francisco. China has now established more than 150 Confucius Institutes and projects so that by 2010, nearly 100 million people worldwide will have learned Chinese as a foreign language.

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The University of Kansas is a major comprehensive research and teaching university. University Relations is the central public relations office for KU's Lawrence campus.