Healing lives
If education ought to cultivate independent thought and schools should aim to better every child that passes through them, then Vincent Tsai, faculty advisor to the journalism club at Taichung Municipal Hui-Wen High School, has realized his expectations as an educator through school periodicals.
Since the founding of the school’s journalism club, Tsai has borne witness to his students’ progress. The topics for reports in the school publication HWSH were originally suggested and assigned by Tsai, but now the students are coming up with article ideas themselves. The “Age of Mist” issue explored the subject of air pollution. “A Decade of Glory” examined the fairness of housing allocation in Hong Kong and the disappearance of local dialects there. The content—160 pages in each issue—is both substantial and insightful. The most recent issue focuses on clinical depression, using a questionnaire designed by the John Tung Foundation to survey depressive tendencies among junior and senior high schoolers. Students interviewed a clinical psychologist as well as the performing artist Lu Lu, who has battled depression, and Si Yi, a writer of books on healing. The layout and design, moreover, suit the content. The background color of the pages switches from black to gray to white, as if one’s emotional state were moving from a deep, dark valley toward the dawn of a new day.
Year by year, various adjustments have been made. Today the periodical has a cover committee. The students in charge of photography lead the planning—finding models from within the school community and looking for shots connected to the theme of each issue. For instance, for “Age of Mist” two students wore gasmasks as they stood amid urban smog. Yet aside from the students on the cover representing the school, HWSH—with its focus on societal issues and its off-campus reports about people in the community—could easily be mistaken for a commercial publication.
Tsai believes that working on campus publications cultivates not only writing skills but also other virtues and talents, such as courage, marketing, time management, and communication skills. All are honed over the course of working on stories for publication.
For example, Tsai has discovered that after working on the publication for two years, children who were initially rather taciturn and melancholic now show much more confidence and can teach the skills they have learned to their juniors. He has encouraged students with depression to write pieces for publication, providing them with the validation of seeing their work in the school magazine or even, in one case, winning an award for literary excellence in central Taiwan. Witnessing these improvements gives Tsai great joy. He quips that he would like to advise HWSH until he is old and bedridden.
In a demonstration of the power of young activism, news reports and petitions written by the journalism club at Taichung’s Hui-Wen High School helped to save the Huilai Monument Archaeology Park from redevelopment.