Mixing Innovation with Tradition

Pandemic Silver Lining: Mixing Innovation with Tradition

While Yale-China was able to maintain a full cohort of Fellows in Hong Kong throughout the pandemic, Fellows found themselves unable to return to the mainland for nearly two years. With the chain of new and returning Fellows thus broken, the incoming Yali Fellows had to rebuild the program from the ground up, melding tradition with innovation and perseverance with creativity. Five Fellows, including two who had been at Xiuning pre-pandemic, arrived in November 2021 to spearhead Yale-China's sole education program in the mainland at that time, and to rebuild many of the traditions that had been absent for the previous two years while also creating new ones. “The end result was a set of Yali traditions with varying degrees of Xiuzhong flavor,” says Kate Rosenberg, Xiuning ’18-20 and Yali ’21-22. Some traditions, like a student Christmas party and a weekly conversation hour for English teachers, were always unique to Yali, but without senior Fellows who had been there before to guide them, the newcomers had to recreate them from scratch. Others, from daily activities in the English Library to the English Musical, have long been present at both mainland sites, albeit in slightly different forms. For these traditions, Fellows were able to draw at least partly on the experience of the two former Xiuning Fellows. While they may have had to figure out how to work the stage’s lighting system, the Fellows were able to easily divide the responsibilities of producing The Little Mermaid by following what Xiuzhong had done in the past. In Hong Kong, where programming continued mostly uninterrupted, the pandemic still led to new innovations. Realizing students’ writing skills had deteriorated due to pandemic disruptions, Fellows created a virtual writing center to tutor their students in one-on-one and group environments. They also established a biweekly Reading Circle, which not only helped students improve their English mastery, but also became both a discussion hub and a social space for students and Fellows. “The thing about traditions is that they are always changing, and new ones can always be created,” added Rosenberg. “The lack of institutional memory this year may have created obstacles, but it also created opportunities to do something new.”

Above: Kate Rosenberg with her former students Below: Yali Fellows and the cast of the The Little Mermaid celebrating a fantastic performance