Among Us

Confucius has a famous saying that goes 三人行，必有我师焉, which teaches that we can all learn from each other. Among Us, there are teachers, students, researchers, scholars, practitioners, etc., and the roles are constantly revolving.

The project Among Us aims to bring NYUAD students who share a passion and an ambition in cultural and language exchange, regardless of the native languages, to the classrooms in the local Emirati K-12 schools where Chinese language and culture courses have integrated into the curriculum, to observe, to learn and to practice in service teaching, and to evaluate and reflect on the intercultural communication endeavors that will lead to more future cross-disciplinary encounters.

https://www.i-got-one.org/ 

The website has attracted 6500+ text contributions as of April 2025, from students of NYU Global Network and global learners from other institutions regarding their learning strategies on Chinese characters, showcasing a diversified perspectives from various cultural and linguistic backgrounds.

Hanzi Globe (https://hanzi-globe.netlify.app/), an interactive online gallery of the shared learning strategies on Chinese characters that connect to location-specific cultural and linguistic understandings, crowdsourced by I Got One/Among Us project. This piece of work was featured in one of the recent exhibitions.

As of April 2025, the project has solicitated over 100 graphic designs, all created by the Chinese learners and native Chinese students of NYU Global Network. Those are not simple conversion of the character shapes, but rather visual storytellings of the intercultural narratives from both the native and non-native learners’ perspectives.

In collaboration with Interactive Media Business (IMA) and Community-engaged Learning (CEL) Office at NYU Shanghai, our proposal received $1,000 as seed funding. The project is titled Creative Pathways: Extending College Classrooms through Community Engagement and Pedagogical Toolkits.

Project Researchers