The Cal Poly graphic communication department will spread its knowledge overseas this year. Xiaoying Rong, associate graphic communication professor, and Penny Bennett, professor and associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts, have been invited to speak and teach about digital printing in China.
Rong was chosen to give the keynote address at CIFEX|RemaxAsia 2012 and at iPrint Expo in Zhuhai, China in October. The event is sponsored by “Recycling Times Magazine” and is expected to have 10,000 in attendance.
“Xiaoying going over there is very significant,” graphic communication department head Harvey Levenson said. “It’s a terrific honor to be a keynote speaker for the event like that. That says something about the respect that Cal Poly and graphic communication has internationally.”
Rong, an expert on traditional and digital printing and substrates, ink and toner technology, teaches and manages laboratories in these subjects. She will be speaking about the transition from offset to digital printing at various printing and publishing facilities throughout the U.S. and China. After the October event, her presentation will be published in “Recycling Times Magazine.”
The Zhuhai organization reached out to Levenson in hopes of having someone from Cal Poly speak at the event. Levenson directed them to Rong, a China native who also worked there.
Rong is excited for collaborations, future research opportunities and possibly meeting prospective exchange students and faculty in China, she said.
In addition to providing the keynote address at the October event, Rong will teach at Shanghai Printing and Publishing College throughout June. She said she looks forward to the opportunity to interact with young Chinese students.
“I used to be a student in China,” she said, “but now I can see the different generation of students and what they’re interested in in graphic communications.”
The opportunity will come with a challenge, however. The class size will be much larger, with one classroom holding 140 to 160 students, Rong said. On top of that, there will be no labs associated with the class, so students will lack in the “Learn By Doing” model Cal Poly students go by, he said.
“(Graphic communications) is hard to explain, especially those technical concepts, without having any hands on experience with it,” Rong said. “We have to make sure all the students get engaged.”
In order to make the class as enriching as possible without a lab, Rong plans to include many videos and lectures in the presentations.
“Our students here have a lot of hands-on experience that will clarify a lot of concepts,” she said. “And then they can get into the lab and see it. (In China), maybe I’ll get some samples and they can touch it, but without seeing and touching it in their own way in a lab environment, it’ll be really hard for them to do it.”
Penny Bennett, recognized expert on digital printing, will also teach at the Shanghai college, for her second time at the school. Bennett was first invited to the school through a professor from an affiliate college of the Shanghai Printing and Publishing college that she had mentored at Cal Poly in 2005.
Bennett will teach two courses: Introduction to Graphic Arts and Digital Preparation to about 160 students.
For this summer, Bennett anticipates the challenges she faced her first time teaching at the school. During her last visit, she said, she realized the majority of the students were not thoroughly proficient in English.
“It seems that if they didn’t have a good grasp of English, which some of them didn’t, what would be the motivation for them to stay engaged and stay tuned in?” she said.
To address this issue, the college provided Bennett with two teaching assistants that acted as selective translators.
Despite the language barrier, Bennett developed personal relationships with several of her students. They would join her for lunch at the school cafeteria to practice their English while getting to know each other, she said. Through this, she was able to better familiarize herself with the culture, which is important so she can bring cultural awareness of the industry back to her Cal Poly students, she said.
Bennett was also able to explore the graphic communication facilities during her stay. Her discoveries of the advanced technology came as a surprise, she said.
“I sort of made an assumption that China must not have that great technology; I don’t know why I thought that,” she said, “so that was a pleasant surprise for me.”
In some aspects, the industry is in fact more advanced than the U.S. Levenson said. Graphic communications is better here compared to other nations, more specifically China,. There is a better understanding of business applications such as marketing and communication, he said.
However, Levenson said, Asia plays a big role in producing the technology used in graphic communications. The continent has also become a very important service provider in that many buyers of print purchase their products abroad, Asia being one of those places, he said.
“It brings back to our students a sense of how the industry is handled around the world,” Levenson said. “These professors … they’re bringing back vital information on developments in these countries and what the profession is like, what the issues are and how to best communicate with counterparts in China. It makes the program here a lot more cosmopolitan.”