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The article below from China Daily reports the startling statistic that “…the number of rural schools nationwide fell 43.7 percent from 2001 to 2009, and the number of classes in rural areas dropped 35.7 percent.” Since many village children now have to go closer to cities for school, they end up boarding and have less contact with their homes and communities. RCEF’s program tries to ameliorate this growing disconnect by developing curriculum that helps children to explore issues in their surrounding environment through service learning.

The article below is a snapshot of a situation that is typical for rural schools across China. I was pleased to read about Qiu Jiansheng’s rural community college in Fujian. He was an early friend and teacher of RCEF as well.

Harsh Lesson as Schools Struggle
BEIJING, March 29 (Xinhuanet) — The Peitian village primary school in western Fujian province opened for its spring semester with 29 children enrolled in classes from first to fourth grade. In the 1970s, 375 pupils attended classes up to sixth grade.

The shrinking numbers are typical of many areas in rural China, but it has added poignancy for Peitian residents. Their village has a storied history of scholarship dating back more than 500 years. Read the rest of this post

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RCEF provides an egg a day for students at Xiaochao Primary School in rural Yongji, Shanxi Province. Another non-profit, the Rural Education Action Project, has been studying the consequences of malnutrition in rural primary school students and is also evaluating the “egg a day” project in Shaanxi Province. I wonder if their research and policy briefs helped to attract authority’s attention to the problems.

From China Radio International on March 28, 2011:

Authorities of China’s education, finance, and health sectors are working together to push forward the improvement of nutrition for students across the country, especially in rural areas of western China, an education official said Monday.

They are working on guidelines to push local authorities to pay more attention to the nutrition of students, Xu Mei, a spokeswoman for the Ministry of Education, told a press conference.

Due to efforts from the central and local governments, the overall nutrition conditions of primary and junior middle school students have improved much, but it is still a “grave challenge” in underdeveloped rural areas, Xu said.

Some boarding schools have no dining halls, plus students’ poor financial background all called for more attention from local authorities to improving nutrition of students, she said.

In China, the central government pays textbooks of primary and junior middle school students who are from poor families, while the local government offers food subsidies to those poor students living and studying at boarding schools.

Starting from autumn last year, a primary student from a poor background could receive an annual food subsidy of 750 yuan (around 114 U.S. dollars), and a junior middle school student could receive 1,000 yuan per year, Xu said.

Also, since 2007 China has initiated a national project to renovate buildings at junior middle schools in rural regions in the country’s central and western parts.

Of the total 12 billion yuan invested in the project by central government, a quarter is arranged for the renovation of dining halls.

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Sometimes people assume RCEF promotes “American-style” education in China. However, the kind of education RCEF promotes–relevant to students’ lives, connecting of skills and knowledge to solving real world problems–is not the norm in any country. The below editorial from the New York Times describes a successful case of U.S. high school students picking the topics they want to study and thereby renewing their passion for learning. The author says this should be practiced more in the United States where the “current educational approach doesn’t just fail to prepare teenagers for graduation or for college academics; it fails to prepare them, in a profound way, for adult life.”

China has a rich history of educators who connect studying to answering real world problems.  As RCEF Research & Development Director Sara Lam writes in a RCEF Teaching Book to be published this year, “Tao Xingzhi, China’s most influential modern educator….advocated making the whole of society a school in which students could learn how to participate in and transform their communities. These were not just lofty ideals. Tao was very successful at implementing these ideas in his rural schools until his work was disrupted by the Japanese invasion, and started a college for teachers based on this approach which is still running today.”

In short, RCEF’s educational philosophy isn’t from any one country–the principles are universal.

March 14, 2011
Let Kids Rule the School
By SUSAN ENGEL

New Marlborough, Mass.

IN a speech last week, President Obama said it was unacceptable that “as many as a quarter of American students are not finishing high school.” But our current educational approach doesn’t just fail to prepare teenagers for graduation or for college academics; it fails to prepare them, in a profound way, for adult life.

We want young people to become independent and capable, yet we structure their days to the minute and give them few opportunities to do anything but answer multiple-choice questions, follow instructions and memorize information. We cast social interaction as an impediment to learning, yet all evidence points to the huge role it plays in their psychological development. Read the rest of this post

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RCEF students in rural Shanxi Province practice expressing their own opinions and listening to others in this book discussion circle.

RCEF strives to cultivate 5 life skills and attitudes in rural Chinese children: self-confidence, communication and leadership skills, independent thinking, empathy, and social responsibility. These sound a lot like the 5 skill areas promoted by “Social Emotional Learning (SEL)”, which you can read more about in Jay Mathew’s Washington Post education blog (below) and the website of CASEL, a non-profit organization which promotes SEL in the United States. CASEL highlights some of the “best programs” backed by at least one well-designed evaluation and that offer more follow-up to teachers beyond an initial training. Mathews reports below that a study of a broad range of such programs found that classroom-based programs where an individual teacher was in control of implementation, fared the best. This is heartening because in China, where it’s difficult if not often impossible to get school-wide–much less district- or society-wide–support for SEL, our current hopes lie with motivated individual teachers and their actions in their own classrooms.

Making students smarter AND better
By Jay Mathews

One of the great failures of high schools, my favorite subject, is the lack of effective training in productive behaviors and attitudes, such as cooperating, being on time, making eye contact, speaking persuasively, offering suggestions and focusing on tasks.

Many educators are trying to develop programs that teach these traits. Some call this character education, which has been around for decades. A few schools and school systems have made progress. Most have not.

Now a study offers renewed hope. An approach called social and emotional learning (SEL), which trains students to think and act in positive ways, can make a significance difference in school achievement, according to this research. The next step will be to see if it has the same effect on life and work after graduation. Read the rest of this post

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A student used leaves and other plant material to create animals and stories.

It’s no surprise to RCEF that Chinese children can be incredibly creative! Many past examples of the creativity of our rural students spring to mind–the artwork of Xie Laoshi’s students (see photo at right), the song and dance created by Guan Ai School’s “Little Librarians”, fifth-grader Ren Chao who turned scrap materials into all kinds of wallets, cars, and boats. The article below, originally from the Shanghai Daily, reminds us that it’s often parents and the formal education system that obstruct the development of children’s natural creativity.

Creativity, tiger moms and Dibidogs

BEIJING, March 12 (Xinhuanet) — Finland is known for relaxed parenting and education, yet its students are famous for academic superiority and are known for creativity. Liang Yiwen talks to a Finnish expert.

Finland and Shanghai are poles apart when it comes to education and parenting, yet students from both places top the academic charts – and in the latest international ranking Shanghai was No. 1 in math, reading and science.

Finland, after being No. 1 for a decade, is now No. 3 behind South Korea, though all scores are close on the testing by PISA, the Program of International Student Assessment.

The high scores are achieved in countries with very different parenting and education systems. Finland is known for relaxed education that emphasizes individuality, informality and love of learning; China and much of East Asia are known for rigorous, test-oriented education, the importance of high scores and strict, “tiger mother” parenting. Children bear a heavy burden and high expectations. Read the rest of this post

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Starting this semester, rural high school students may be eligible to receive financial aid from the Chinese government. This continues the government’s efforts in recent years to close the gap in financial resources between urban and rural education. Much remains to be done though in the area of teaching quality–the next frontier of education improvement in China and the field that RCEF focuses on. Below is a September 26 article from Xinhua News elaborating on the new program:

BEIJING, Sept. 26 (Xinhua) — High school students from low-income families will receive financial assistance from the Chinese government from this semester.

According to the circular issued jointly by the ministries of finance and education on Sunday, the government plans to offer an average of 1,500 yuan (200.59 U.S. dollars) every year to students from low-income families. The minimum amount will be 1,000 yuan and the maximum amount will be 3,000 yuan based on the situation of students’ parents.

The program is expected to cover 20 percent of high school students nationwide but the percentage will vary in different provinces, the circular said.

In the more developed coastal provinces, about 10 percent of students will benefit from the program, while 20 percent in the central provinces and 30 percent in the less developed western provinces.

The percentage could be higher in rural areas, less developed regions and areas inhabited by ethnic minority people, the circular said.

China has a nine-year compulsory education program and the three-year high school education should be funded by students themselves.

According to the circular, besides the state program, high schools are also encouraged to set up scholarships and cut tuition for students in need.

China has launched several policies to help needy students in the past few years, including offering free textbooks to all students from rural areas and state subsidies to needy students in colleges and vocational schools.

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This summer when the staff came together to reflect on the year, every person discussed the feelings they had from their educational experimentation. The one thing that was most comforting was that our reading project has already begun to bear fruit.

Ms. Wang Yanzhen, a first grade teacher in our program, dotes on reading and enthuastically participated in RCEF’s curriculum exploration and experimentation. In teaching lower grades, she took into account the special traits of young students and started out with picture books to cultivate their interest in reading, observation skills, imagination skills, and skills of expression. At the same time that the children were building all these kinds of skills, they were also receiving a good moral education.

For example, the reading helped students better understand feelings like love, friendship, courage, and patriotism. While reading, they came into contact with the author’s feelings and were shaping their character and tastes. They were developing empathy and caring for others that exhibited itself in the most beautiful behavior.

Ms. Wang recalled that once she was in a bad mood because of something that happened during work. She sat in front of her classroom and, thinking about the unhappy event, began to cry.  She didn’t know how to resolve the conflict and had no passion for work. Just then, some of her students ran up to her and said, “Don’t be sad, teacher.  We’ll tell you a story. We’ll dance for you….” They put on a skit for her and made her laugh. Ms. Wang thought to herself, “At such a young age, it is remarkable that they can care for my feelings. This kind of empathy and caring must come from the story we read.”  Ms. Wang felt much better and more encouraged about her work. I hope that our program can foster such moral behavior in more and more students.

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Over the course of this school year, fourth and fifth graders at Guan Ai learned all about sweet potatoes. Past lessons in this year-long unit included explorations into the history and culture of the sweet potato and how it is eaten and used in the village: [Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3]. Principal Sun of RCEF partner Guan Ai Primary School  was a lead teacher on this project and describes the last steps of the project which took place in May and June.  To see a video, click here.

After designing and building a brick planter covered with a plastic sheet for incubating the seedlings, pairs of students took turns monitoring the seedlings. They recorded the date, temperature, and growth conditions in a chart. At first, the temperature in the incubator was relatively high (around 28 degrees Celsius) but there was a period following of about ten days in which the temperature was low (around 18 degrees Celsius). The students were worried that this would cause the seedlings not to sprout but after half a month, they finally came up.

Since sweet potatoes are not a major cash crop in Houjia Village, most people don’t pay much attention to the details of their cultivation. We wanted the students to learn more technical knowledge and practice finding information from outside materials. I went online to look for relevant text and gave copies to the students to read. However, they couldn’t understand the content so the teachers went back and extracted the highlights from the articles, turned them into language that the children could understand, and let the students read again.

I realized that covering the top of the incubator with soil wasn’t the best method because once water got on it, the top layer became very hard and this could affect the growth of the seedlings. It would have been better to use crop residue and straw as a covering. After the seedlings started to come out, we had to cut little openings in the plastic covering to let air come in. We watered them every day and they grew well. Read the rest of this post

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