Students sport a willingness to learn

A shared language

Over the monthlong program, learning was not a one-way street. The delegation members also contributed by giving a "sport education model" class on the campus with their partners — postgraduate and undergraduate peers in the same physical education major at SUS. They designed and taught the class together, offering volunteers innovative PE courses that blended Chinese and American features.

The volunteers were also SUS students, who are neither sports nor physical education majors. They attended the special lesson almost every morning throughout March. Each lesson lasted 1.5 hours, and involved badminton, basketball and fitness routines, among other sports and activities.

Liu Yixi, a 20-year-old SUS student majoring in journalism and communication, was one of the volunteers.

She shared with China Daily that the lesson was nothing like the PE classes she had taken before, and it has triggered her interest in doing sports.

"The whole class was like playing a game, which made us work in teams and compete with each other. After warming up, the teacher would normally divide us into several teams. We would brainstorm a team name, and each team member had a role, such as the coach, trainer, equipment manager, cheerleader and timekeeper," she explained.

"Then, as a team, we would do some sport and compete to be the champion and get an award.

"I found it very interesting and motivating," she said.

She was particularly impressed by the teamwork and sportsmanship aspects highlighted during the class. Students would be given extra points if they showed team spirit, or for showing friendliness and respect to rivals.

In fact, the Wyoming experience was not exclusive to this class, but has been demonstrated in other subjects as well. Since the two universities started cooperating in 2018, SUS has sent many students to visit UW, where they gained the knowledge that they later utilized in classes back in China.

Simonton was glad to see the integration of the Wyoming experience, too.

"One of the cool and really important things is, we've been able to exchange the strategies that we use a lot in the US, but are less familiar in China, and vice versa. The SUS PE students are amazing. We taught them a class one week, and then they used our strategies and tried them with their peers," he said.

"We may be speaking different languages. We may have different values. We may have different views on many different things. But, we have this common interest in sport, and it connects us no matter what," said Marsh.