At this point, we are more than halfway through our Beijing-based, ChinaVine-driven field school, and everything is moving along according to—and in many ways, exceeding—our plans. As co-directors, we spent many hours planning and imagining the experience we’d like students to have in Beijing, the whole time realizing that, ultimately, much of the experience would be in their hands. And, luckily, they have taken that responsibility on and have worked with us to successfully conduct rewarding fieldwork and engage the tasks of documentation and interpretation with an enthusiasm that has made our jobs easy.

The results of their work will be visible on VineOnline (and our course site) toward the middle of August 2011. Each team of student field workers has been tasked with producing two posts for VineOnline—one for each site we’ve visited during our time in Beijing. The first site was Jiangou, a village to the north west of Beijing where we focused on cultural tourism (including “red” tourism efforts that explore the history of Communism), pilgrimage traditions, and rose cultivation. The second site was Songzhuang, to the east of Beijing. As an “artists’ village,” Songzhuang has grown in the past twenty-five years from a place where a handful of artistic pioneers sought affordable work space distanced from the urban renewal of Beijing to a home for over five thousand artists and the site of a “cultural and creative cluster” promoted heavily by regional government. In each site, the students have listened, interviewed, photographed, and otherwise documented the cultural practices and traditions we have encountered. They’ve also eaten, and the image at the top of this post represents a meal cooked for us by artist that ChinaVine has worked with for the past three years: Mr. Her Xue-Sheng. He graciously hosted us during our time in Songzhuang, preparing fresh noodles in the style of his home in the Ningxia region.

So, in the coming weeks be sure to check the VineOnline site in order to follow up on the work produced by the field school students. Their posts will be rich, multimedia explorations of the artists, places, and cultural practices that pull together documentation and interpretation in a manner that extends the mission of ChinaVine. In the meantime, be sure to poke around in this Flickr set highlighting some of the sights from our weeks in Beijing.