*Only one of the three stories is live.
More and more Chinese international students are entering Canadian schools.
Growing up and going to school in Canada, I’ve always noticed a stigma towards the large (and growing) population of Chinese international students in our schools. In 2015, Canada had 120,000 international students from China alone (The Canadian Magazine of Immigration, 2016). These students are often misjudged by their Canadian peers, largely because they struggle to communicate themselves effectively in English.
As a result, there exists a subtle, yet persistent prejudice against these students.
Veronica and I, the creators of this project, are both Canadian-born Chinese. But despite our Chinese heritage, we too had many of these prejudices and misconceptions.
Purpose of the project
Our goal: to raise awareness about the existence of these misconceptions and understand why they exist.
We also wanted to challenge Canadian students (including ourselves) to ask themselves if they held any of these misconceptions, and if so, to reconsider them.
We chose interactive narratives as the medium for our project because storytelling is perhaps the most powerful way to evoke empathy.
Listening to the stories of Chinese students
We interviewed eight Chinese international students to learn about their experience coming to Canada and living here. Repeatedly, these students expressed these main struggles:
Embarrassment. They are scared of making mistakes or saying the wrong things, and many are embarrassed about their accents. This holds them back from speaking to Canadians.
Frustration. Their true personalities are "trapped" because they cannot express themselves in English. As a result, they are categorized quickly by their Canadian peers and people make assumptions about them.
Exclusion. Because of the language barrier and cultural differences, they often miss out on jokes or have nothing to talk about with other students.
The misconceptions that exist
Next, we interviewed ten Canadian students to get their thoughts, assumptions, and opinions on Chinese international students. These were the most common negative assumptions we found:
- They don't try hard enough to learn English.
- It’s annoying when they speak Chinese in school.
- They isolate themselves and only stick with other Chinese students. They chose to come to Canada, therefore they should try harder to integrate.
- They have other schools in China that they could be going to instead.
- Their main reason for coming here was to learn English.
Surprising our readers with their own preconceptions
Our challenge: how do we evoke empathy and challenge assumptions through a website?
We realized that most of the challenges of being a Chinese international student revolved around the misconceptions that their Canadian peers had of them. So, our goal was to make our Canadian readers think and recognize their own preconceptions before moving on to learn about the Chinese students' perspective.
First, we ask the reader to offer their own existing opinions on Chinese students.
Upon entering the experience, the user is prompted to answer questions about their opinions on Chinese students. This is how we collect their current preconceptions.
Before reading the stories, the reader must express their opinions on Chinese students through a questionnaire.Next, we proceed to show them real life stories of individual Chinese students. Our stories use a combination of text and audio to make the experience more immersive.
The narratives use dream-like animations to portray memories.After reading each story, the reader is confronted with and reminded of their original preconceptions, based on the questions they previously answered.
The reader's own opinions are then juxtaposed with main points from the Chinese students’ story that they just read.
The opinions and assumptions of the reader are matched side-by-side with key points from the story they just read.We did this by carefully matching key points from the Chinese students’ stories with common assumptions made by Canadian students.
We carefully paired 1:1 the opinions we heard from Canadians with key points from the Chinese students’ perspective.
The intention is to surprise the reader and challenge them to reconsider any misconceptions they may have had.
Bilingual stories: English and Chinese
Each story consists of video and audio recordings of Chinese students that we interviewed. To make the stories feel more genuine, all the video and audio clips are offered in both English and Chinese. English because our target audience was Canadian students, and Chinese because we wanted our participants to be able to fully express themselves in their native language.
The reader can listen to the story in English or Chinese.Technical details
I coded the questionnaire using PHP to store the user's answers. JavaScript and CSS animations were used to create the interactive narratives and scrolling effects.
Links
*Only Andy’s story is available. The others had to be refilmed, which we didn’t have the chance to do.
