Analysis of the Values in the Story of Hua Mulan and a Proposal for Didactic Innovation in a Chinese as a Foreign Language Class
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35869/5647Keywords:
China, Hua Mulan, human values, Mandarin Chinese Teaching, drama pedagogyAbstract
China's millenary culture has many stories and legends, most of which are unknown in the West. One of the best-known is that of Hua Mulan, which presents a series of traditional Chinese societal and cultural values.
Since its inception in the Northern Wei Dynasty (386-534 AD), the story of Hua Mulan has gone through numerous versions until Disney's 2020 film (Caro et al., 2020). Mulan has become an archetypal war heroine in China on her merit.
This paper aims to analyze the traditional human values of Disney's 2020 film Hua Mulan and to make a didactic proposal for a Chinese as a foreign language class using applied drama techniques.
After analyzing the moral values in the film, we have concluded that the two most important ones are courage and filial piety. Other values worth mentioning are honesty, loyalty, and respect.
Using the story of Mulan and theatre applied in the language teaching classroom, a didactic proposal of educational innovation is presented in which the students play the role of Mulan and her relatives. They must represent one of the protagonist's internal conflicts, her decision to disobey her father to protect him and go to war instead. to stage the decision to go to war disguised as a man.
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