University Times

Pitt’s senior administration grabs most of the headlines. The faculty here get noticed when they bring in research dollars, win teaching awards or publish in their fields.

But behind the scenes, University staff, some 7,200 strong across five campuses, often toil in jobs ranging from the mundane to the esoteric.

From mailroom workers to data entry specialists, costume designers to biosafety officers, photographers to accountants, staff at Pitt perform tasks great and small, year-in and year-out, for the greater good of the University.

This is one in an occasional series profiling University staff, providing a glimpse of some of the less recognized employees whose primary business is making Pitt work.

Pitt’s Confucius Institute (CI-Pitt), housed in the Asian Studies Center, recently was named one of 30 Confucius Institutes of the Year — one of only five North American institutes to receive the honor — in no small part due to the efforts of long-time Asian Studies Center staff member Michele Heryford.

“I’ve really had a remarkably unique career here, because I’ve been allowed to write various grants, and then allowed to organize and run the projects. I’m a person who’s brought in to take something from an idea and make it happen,” Heryford said.

Under the direction of Richard Scaglion, director of the Asian Studies Center, part of the University Center for International Studies (UCIS), CI-Pitt provides Chinese language instruction to school districts and individual schools in the western Pennsylvania region and beyond through classroom instruction by native Chinese teachers and interactive distance learning; supports the training and professional development of Chinese language teachers in this country, and promotes outreach programs on Chinese culture.

This is the second time since it was founded in May 2007 that CI-Pitt has been recognized by the Chinese Ministry of Education’s Office of Chinese Language Council International, or Hanban, as one of the top Confucius Institutes in the world. The first institute was established in Seoul, Korea, in 2004. There are now 330 Confucius Institutes worldwide, including 67 in the United States.

Pitt was awarded a Confucius Institute charter — the first in Pennsylvania and among the first 20 established around the world — following the success of the grant proposal crafted primarily by Heryford, who has been the Asian Studies Center assistant director of external affairs and outreach coordinator since 1997 and since 2007 also has been CI-Pitt’s managing director.

Heading a small staff of a financial manager, an executive administrative assistant and two Asian studies graduate students, Heryford has guided the institute from concept to fruition. Her background in grant-writing and project management made her a logical choice for helping Pitt win a competitive grant to house the Confucius Institute. Heryford also writes the grant renewal request every year.

From modest beginnings, hosting two Hanban-sponsored scholar-teachers to teach Mandarin Chinese to 49 K-16 students in the Pittsburgh region during the first year, CI-Pitt in 2010 hosted 24 teachers and boasted a student enrollment of 2,900 in Pennsylvania and Ohio, an increase of 80 percent over the previous year. CI-Pitt also expanded its partnerships from three partner schools in 2007 to 57 schools in 2010.

“We’re growing in leaps and bounds. It’s been crazy,” said Heryford, who coordinates the program at Pitt, visits partner school districts and institutions to explain the program and evaluate a school’s needs, and travels to Wuhan, China (Pittsburgh’s designated Chinese “sister city” since 1982) to interview teaching candidates from Wuhan University’s master’s program in teaching Chinese as a second language.

“So there’s this triangulation: The Chinese government in Beijing, Wuhan University, which is in central China, and Pitt. Those three entities all have to agree before anything can move forward. It’s working pretty well,” Heryford said.

The impetus for Hanban establishing Confucius Institutes was to meet the worldwide demand for learning Chinese. The Chinese Ministry of Education was asked to develop a program modeled after the Goethe-Institut in Germany and the Instituto Cervantes in Spain — with one important difference, Heryford explained.

“The Chinese government decided to establish them as affiliated with institutions of higher learning, which is very different from the other models that are independent, free-standing institutes of language and culture,” Heryford said.

The Chinese chose Confucius as the name not because of any particular link to Confucian philosophy per se, but because they determined the name of the famous philosopher would be recognizable throughout the world.

“I sometimes have to tell people it’s just a moniker. We’re not teaching Confucianism. Our teachers teach Chinese language and culture,” Heryford said.

“The way our program works is we bring in visiting scholars who are approved by Hanban and volunteer to teach in a particular foreign country. Hanban is the Ministry of Education division that oversees Confucius Institutes worldwide,” she said. “But they don’t give you any guidelines. Partially, because they were going global with this effort, they recognized that every institute might have a different core mission. At the time I had written the grant, Hanban asked if I would help establish the program at Pitt.”

With a Pitt master’s degree and graduate certificate in East Asian studies and Mandarin language training at the Taiwan Normal University Mandarin Training Center supplementing her longstanding interest in Chinese culture, Heryford said, “Actually, this is the perfect job for me.”

Due to the flexibility in how to establish a Confucius Institute, CI-Pitt’s structure came about organically, she said.

“There were a number of institutions in this area that were interested in establishing a Confucius Institute, including St. Vincent College. We got the grant because we have a big Asian Studies Center. But I contacted St. Vincent’s and said: ‘How about if we partner? Whatever the institute ends up looking like, we’ll develop it in conjunction with you, so we have the core base here in Pittsburgh, but we can help you with developing a language program at St. Vincent’s,’” Heryford said.

St. Vincent College thus became the first of seven of CI-Pitt’s comprehensive units, or satellite sites, she said. That list includes the A.W. Beattie Career Center in Allison Park, Upper St. Clair School District; Berks County (which includes 18 school districts), Winchester Thurston and newcomers last year John Carroll University in Ohio and Dickinson College.

“Once I established that relationship with St. Vincent’s, I realized there are other schools in the region that would take on not only one teacher, but several, and could oversee the administration for several schools in their region,” accounting in part for the exponential growth of the program, Heryford said.

Since there are very few Chinese language programs in Pennsylvania outside of private schools, the territory is quite fertile, she said.

“For example, Upper St. Clair was interested. We brought a volunteer teacher in for a year, they loved it, they committed to making the program part of their core, they hired a full-time Chinese language teacher and now they continue to host a volunteer who helps with the middle school program,” Heryford said.

“I don’t go out recruiting school districts; they come to me. These are all school districts that really want this program. It takes an enormous amount of commitment from school districts to take on a volunteer teacher program,” including costs of $6,000-$10,000 per teacher per year, she noted.

“The Chinese government pays their way here and their salaries,” Heryford said. “Everything else we have to negotiate with the school districts. Every school has to pay for housing, health insurance, [local] transportation costs and for a school lunch.”

Each school also must designate a teacher mentor to help the Chinese native smooth over any cultural bumps.

“What I always tell school districts is I’m very hands-on when it comes to choosing the particular person who will work in your school, but I’m very hands-off when it comes to how you manage that person in your district,” Heryford said. “We have kids in New Kensington and then we have kids at Winchester Thurston, a very different set of constituents. I can’t dictate what the curriculum is and how it’s going to be introduced in every single school. We don’t necessarily have a standard curriculum where you have to cover this material by this date,” she noted.

The ultimate goal is not to have Chinese taught at a particular level. Rather, the goal is to get the school district to commit to Chinese language as a permanent part of its core curriculum, Heryford said.

“I tell them all the time, you can’t run a permanent Chinese language program with volunteers. You have to commit to either hiring a full-time teacher or let us withdraw, because we can’t just keep doing this for 10 years,” she said. “It’s not good for your students to have a new teacher every year, especially one who usually needs two months or three months to get up to speed. It’s not going to work.”

Among her most important CI-Pitt duties is interviewing the Chinese teachers in Wuhan, which, along with meeting governmental officials in Beijing, brings her to China as many as six times a year, visits that are paid for through the grant.

“A lot of the way business in China is done is through face-to-face talk. The more you’re there, the more they believe you’re engaged in the overall mission. And government policies change much more rapidly there, because it’s a state-controlled environment,” Heryford said, adding she has to tailor her annual grant proposal accordingly.

For the teachers, who are a typical graduate student’s age of mid-20s to early 30s, the program works like a practicum.

“It’s ordinarily their first trip to the United States. They come here really, truly as scholars. The educational system in China is very dog-eat-dog. If you get up this high you’re pretty good. We’re lucky we have a pool of these amazingly bright, highly motivated teachers. Wuhan University is a top 10 university in China. It’s like working with a Dartmouth,” she said.

The first prerequisite to be chosen for the CI-Pitt program is excellent English proficiency, Heryford said. “That’s why I interview them in-country. I’m really determining them based on their English skill, because I know their Chinese credentials are very good.”

She also looks for potential cultural barriers to success in the interview, she said.

For example, she asks those who request to live with an American family: Do you like dogs? “Because they don’t have dogs as pets in China. It’s really foreign to them,” Heryford said.

“Another question is: ‘How well will you get along with others?’ because they’re all single children; they don’t have any siblings. ‘Will you be okay sharing a room? Working in groups?’” she said.

“They’re really funny in the interviews. It’s like ‘American Idol’ for some of them: They sing, they come in costume. I had one guy who brought a PowerPoint and he kept standing and jumping up and down in the interview and finally he said, ‘Pick me, oh, please pick me!’”

After the teaching cohort is identified, they’re brought to Pittsburgh for a two-week orientation session. During the school year, the group also gets together periodically for “decompression sessions” where they can compare notes, trade shop-talk and vent.

“We’ve learned a lot of things along the way,” Heryford said. “We work hard with the teacher volunteers when they come in to have them bond as a group. That keeps them happy and keeps them from getting lonely, as well as gives them a sense of greater purpose,” Heryford said.

“It’s a fascinating evolution of how they adjust here. Many of them believe: ‘I know your language, I’ve watched American television, I’ve been to your movies, I know your culture; this isn’t going to be a problem for me,’” she said. “To be honest, the people who say that in the interview usually have the worst time of it. We now know what they need to prepare for, but it’s never easy.”

The Chinese teachers also have to adjust to a very different educational system and follow all of their school’s rules.

“The way we teach is very open-ended, creative and engaging, whereas they’re used to a lot of rote memorization and of sitting in class and just repeating things,” Heryford said.

“Also, here students themselves don’t always have a lot of respect for teachers, where in China a teacher is a very exalted position. You would never think about acting out — your parents would get in trouble. It’s considered an honor to be a student and you won’t get ahead if you’re misbehaving,” she said.

“So when they come here it is a challenge to see kids with baseball caps and chewing gum and coffee and talking to their neighbor. We warn them, we really warn them: pages and pages of things to look out for.”

But, she noted, the experience for the teachers often is life-transforming.

“There are a lot of tears at the airport when they go back, because of how well they’re treated here. They go back feeling very positive and saying things like, ‘The United States is not a violent place.’ In China all they hear is the sensational bad news and ‘Baywatch’ or whatever is on re-runs,” Heryford said.

The long-term mission of the Confucius Institute program is bridge-building, according to Heryford, “to make sure we understand one another, which is the first step to avoiding conflict and being able to work together, to develop a global economy that works for everybody,” she said. “I don’t say the playing field is level on both sides. We have very different cultures, structures, means of coming at things. But there are ways that we can understand each other and have a base knowledge for each other. The more people we have like that, the better off we are, all of us. We need more area experts to get there. UCIS is all about that.”

The CI-Pitt program also benefits the University in a number of ways, she said.

“UCIS, of course, has a huge tradition of outreach, and the Asian Studies Center has one of the largest outreach components for Asia in the United States. The Confucius Institute supports a lot of things that go on here in Asian studies that ultimately do benefit the faculty. A lot of our overhead costs for various functions here are supported by the Confucius Institute and should be because we take up a lot of time and space and energy here,” Heryford pointed out.

In partnership with the Study Abroad office, “We have created undergraduate scholarships for the Pitt in Wuhan program. Anywhere from 12 to 20 Pitt students will be going to Wuhan to study for six weeks. They live in Wuhan, but have travel tours out of the city as well,” she said.

“We’re doing a Chinese for engineering program right now for a group of students who are here and at Rice University and they’re going to China in March. We’re doing an evening course with them to support that. We’re probably going to start a Chinese language program for master’s candidates at our business school. We’re still in talks with the International Business Center, but it looks like a program will come out of that.”

CI-Pitt recently signed a memorandum of understanding with the School of Information Sciences to share in the cooperative relationship with Wuhan University that originated out of the CI-Pitt/Wuhan partnership.

“Wuhan sends delegations here to look for areas of collaboration and we’ve gone and taken people there as well: the dean of the business school, for example,” Heryford said.

“Pitt also benefits from something that is less quantitative, namely that Pitt’s reputation in China is becoming quite impressive. There is an understanding of the significance of the Confucius Institutes in China. They don’t set Confucius Institutes up randomly. They set them up in places where they believe they would have long-term economic and political interests — and when I say political, I mean an ability for local governments to work together,” she said.

As an offshoot of the CI-Pitt/China relationship, Heryford briefed Mayor Luke Ravenstahl on diplomatic courtesy prior to his trip to China last October.

“If you have a group of 2,900 kids in our region taking Chinese, what a great thing it is for the image of the city going forward that we are creating constituents who actually understand their country,” Heryford said. “The Chinese are very comfortable with that. They’re not going to drop down businesses in a place they think is hostile toward them. The one thing we want is for the Ministry of Education and the Chinese government to look favorably on Pittsburgh as an economic region that is China-friendly. So, it’s a public relations movement as well.”

—Peter Hart