By Audrey Lin
On a quiet Sunday morning, a young boy wearing a Jurassic Park shirt and an Avengers backpack secured around his shoulders waited patiently as the elevator carried him up through UC Santa Barbara’s Humanities and Social Sciences Building. He was on his way to Chinese school.
Professor Bella Chen 陈淑娟 (left) and Professor Thomas Mazanec 余泰明 (right) are faculty members in UC Santa Barbara’s Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies and serve on the Chinese School’s board. Photos courtesy of UCSB
The Santa Barbara Chinese School was established in 1985 and has been hosted in a few different spaces over the years. It was held at UCSB in the early 2000s and moved over to the Chinese Evangelical Free Church of Santa Barbara in the 2010s. The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent quarantine prompted a transition into exclusively online lessons.
Now, the Chinese School is back at UCSB in partnership with the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies. Faculty members Professor Bella Chen 陈淑娟 and Professor Thomas Mazanec 余泰明 serve on the Chinese School’s board.
Classes are offered at several levels, including, Introduction to Mandarin 国语入门课 for pre-school students, Intermediate with Pledge to Speak Only Mandarin 中级入门班 全程汉语 for both elementary-school students and children who are heritage speakers. The school also offers Advanced Mandarin for proficient middle- and high-school students, 高级班 全程汉语and Mandarin tutoring for adults 成人中文辅导课. Tuition is $30 per class, with enrolled siblings automatically receiving a 10% discount.
Teacher Jenny Mazanec 余老师 became director of the Santa Barbara Chinese School in early 2024, reinvigorating UCSB’s longstanding affiliation with it. Photo courtesy of the Santa Barbara Chinese School
Teacher Jenny Mazanec 余老师 managed the Princeton-in-Beijing Chinese language immersion program from 2010 to 2015 before she and her husband, Thomas Mazanec, moved to San Barbara in 2017. Jenny Mazanec became director of the Chinese School in early 2024 and reinvigorated UCSB’s longstanding affiliation with it. In-person Chinese classes are now held on campus for the larger community, and UCSB student volunteers are eligible for internship credit.
“When my kids were one and three, I had reached out to the Chinese school upon discovering that it exists,” Jenny Mazanec said. “Because of the infrastructure at the time and limited teachers, their response was: wait until your kids are older and have more [of a] foundation in Chinese because the rest of our classmates are heritage speakers.”
Jenny Mazanec says that while there is a huge Asian population on UCSB’s campus, it is very transient. The Chinese American community is close-knit and rather isolated because many people who raise their children in Santa Barbara are not Chinese-speaking.
“I made it my first mission as principal to break down barriers. Anybody who wants to learn the language, come learn the language,” she said. “I do not care what race or ethnicity, what background you come from. Now we have families who have adopted children from China, and it is touching when I see how appreciative and grateful they are to have this opportunity.”
Promotional graphic for the 2025 Lunar New Year Family Festival at the Santa Barbara Public Library. Photo courtesy of the Santa Barbara Public Library
One of the UCSB student volunteers approaches a red-haired girl sitting quietly at a table. “妈妈早！爸爸早！Good morning, Mom! Good morning, Dad!” they read together from a picture book. Another intern was reminding somebody how to sing the Happy Birthday song to her friend in Chinese, “祝你生日快乐！Happy birthday to you!”
The Santa Barbara Chinese School prides itself on a student-centric pedagogy and small class sizes. Teacher Jie Zhang 张老师 and the three interns were able to give personalized instruction to 10 students, clearly exhibiting the benefits of their 3:1 student-teacher ratio. Certain children were eager to participate from the start, rattling off months of the year in Chinese as Zhang wrote “一月，二月，三月” down in chalk, meaning “January, February, March.” Others warmed up over the course of an hour, becoming excited when Zhang took out materials for today’s craft, handheld projectors made from toilet paper rolls and cellophane. A child painstakingly traced his “春,” the Chinese character for spring, and another doodled flowers on crinkled cellophane, both part of the classroom’s self-sufficient ecosystem.
Teacher Jie Zhang 张老师 leading one of the Chinese school’s Sunday classes.
The interns are trained individually as teaching assistants and given chances to design their own lesson plans. For example, a teaching assistant majoring in Chemistry once conducted basic science experiments and led a lab demonstration. This flexibility creates a supportive environment for not only the young students, but also the interns who are able to develop hands-on skills before pursuing further education in teaching or language learning.
“I learned how to analyze provided materials, identify students’ learning needs. And tailor the session content accordingly,” said Yilin Wang, a UCSB student and teaching assistant. “I learned techniques for maintaining discipline in a lively classroom while keeping students motivated and engaged.”
Examples of students’ writing practice and activities. “春,” the Chinese character for spring (left) and “月,” the Chinese character for moon/month (right).
In February, the Chinese School partnered with the Santa Barbara Public Library to host the Lunar New Year Family Festival. Thomas Mazanec was excited to see communities mix at the event. He said only 20 people RSVP’d but more than 500 showed up and the library staff eventually stopped counting.
“We are trying to think of ways to build up the local Chinese-speaking community and the Asian American community in Santa Barbara and Goleta,” Thomas Mazanec said. “As someone in the [East Asian] department, how do I help promote that? That is part of Dean Berry’s five pillars of the Humanities and Fine Arts Division – public outreach and supporting the community.”
The Santa Barbara Chinese School and UCSB’s renewed collaboration is only in its beginning stages, yet has already established deep roots in the local area.
On that recent Sunday on UCSB’s campus, students lingered to swap snacks, flip through picture books and gossip with each other as their parents looked on fondly. Outside, a few of them rode scooters in the courtyard of Humanities building, shiny wheels clicking over old tile.
Audrey Lin is a second-year Writing & Literature major at UC Santa Barbara. They are a Web and Social Media intern with the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.