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In early June, Sara Lam, RCEF’s Executive Director of Programs, spoke about the Integrative Rural Education Program to around 60 students at Shanxi Agricultural University. The talk was enthusiastically  received and many students participated in a lively question and answer session afterwards. The seminar was organized by a student rural volunteer group called Peasant’s Children (农民之子）. One of their leaders organized the meeting notes below.

一．会议主题：乡村儿童教育
二．会议主讲人：林治美老师
三．主办方：山西农业大学农民之子乡下孩子
四．与会人员：山西农大农民之子成员及山西农大在校生
五．会议内容：

会议第一部分——林老师介绍发言
目标：1.培养老师
2.设计课程，课程如何发展以更适合孩子们及农村的发展。 Read the rest of this post

In the previous post, I wrote about how RCEF designed special tests in Math, Science, English, Language Arts, and Social Studies for students. Our goal was to measure their skills beyond the textbook.  Below are some examples of questions from the Social Studies test.

What do you think is the most important of China’s ancient inventions and why?

This question was from the fifth grade test.  On the most basic level, we were testing whether students remember information about the inventions.  All of the students did.  We were also testing their ability to make sound arguments, backed up by evidence, to support their claims.  Finally, we wanted to see if students would actually compare the significance of one invention with the others, rather than only explaining why their chosen invention was important.  Unfortunately, hardly any students did this.

Here’s another example:

Your class went to Xinle Village to investigate smoking. Do you feel that the smoking problem there is serious? Why? What actions do you think we should take now that we’ve done this investigation?

This question was in both the 5th and 6th grade tests.  The students had done a community research project investigating smoking habits in nearby villages.  In the first part of the question, we were testing whether students could back up their opinions with evidence from their surveys.  Among the 32 students in 6th grade, only three students talked about the general hazards of smoking without referring to the specific situation of the village they investigated.  Among the remaining 29 students, Read the rest of this post

Historically, education in China has been very exam oriented.  In the past, the main goal of many scholars was to pass the imperial exam, which would allow them to become civil servants.  Nowadays, schools and teachers have their eyes on the university entrance exams （高考）.  This focus on exams starts at first grade, or even kindergarten.

Here, most schools use the same strategy for exam preparation.  They plough through the curriculum to leave as much time for exam preparation as possible.  At the end, they usually have well over a month, which they spend doing dozens of practice exams which they buy from the many vendors who stop by every school to peddle their exam papers.  The problem with this approach is that it gives students much less time during the semester to learn concepts and come to thoroughly understand them.  At Guan Ai, in addition to encouraging Read the rest of this post

Pei Wei Feng answers a question during adult English class

Since the beginning of the school year, Sara Lam and I have been leading an adult English class every Tuesday and Thursday at Guan Ai Primary. The class was created because teachers at Guan Ai, English and otherwise, expressed interest in improving their English skills. From the beginning, seven teachers, or half of the teaching staff, have faithfully attended the class. I thought many teachers would initially be interested in the class, but I expected their attendance to fall off as their classes became busier or they became discouraged in their language skills, but thankfully they stuck with our class and it has become one of the most satisfying components of the work I do at Guan Ai.

When we started the class, we were not sure how it would operate; Sara had a little experience teaching adults and I had none.  The first thing we planned to do was assess the teachers. As I expected, the teachers had quite large vocabularies; however, they did not have the capacity to use the words in conversation. This is the result of how English has traditionally been taught in China. Students are taught “mute English” where they learn how to read and write with minimal speaking practice. Considering this, we decided that the main goal of the class would be to improve the conversational skills and pronunciation of the teachers, while also supplementing their vocabularies. Initially, we started by choosing topics of interest to the teachers, like food, and teaching the relevant vocabulary words and then trying to facilitate English conversations. This worked with minimal success. It was difficult to get teachers to speak beyond directly answering our questions. Instead of operating like a conversation, it was more like taking turns trying to answer our questions. If the teachers were going to remain interested in the class, something needed to change.

Read the rest of this post

The Dulangkou principal and teachers warmly welcomed RCEF to their school

Dulangkou  Middle School is located in a rural township but is one of the most-visited schools in the world. Ten years ago, it was a failing school in grave danger of losing students. Facing possible closure, it embarked on an education reform effort to raise students’ test scores with a radical new way of teaching. Instead of a teacher lecturing and students learning by rote, the principal instituted new policies in which teachers could only lecture very little and the rest of class time was given to students’ learning in groups and teaching each other. Over the years, they refined their system into a clear process in which students take charge of much of their learning and the teacher acts more as a facilitator and monitor. Test scores improved dramatically, students exhibited great initiative and teamwork, and Dulangkou became a much-touted example of successful student-centered teaching reforms.

In February 2009, RCEF invited three teachers from Dulangkou Middle School to train the rural teachers at Guan Ai Primary School, our program site. They planned and taught lessons together using principles from the Dulangkou methods, adapted to the real situation of teaching Guan Ai’s primary school students. After the successful training, Read the rest of this post

Four years ago today (April 28), RCEF was incorporated as a nonprofit organization! Much has happened since then and the dedicated RCEF staff and volunteers continue to work towards improving rural education in China.

Our newsletter and annual reports provide an overview of this work but to give you a more up close and personal view, we’ve created a special selection of “Dispatches from the Field: Reflections of RCEF in rural China 2008″.  These writings were taken from the RCEF Blog which was started last year to offer a window into our programs.

A lot has happened, but not enough. Thank you for support in the past four years and please do continue to support us in the future!

Click here to read the “Dispatches from the Field”.

A little while ago I had the privilege of taking part in one of Intel’s global education initiatives, Intel Learn. It’s a non-profit program by the computer processor maker that is run in cooperation with governments around the world. Its aim is to enable students in developing communities to develop not only information technology skills, but also the equally important soft skills that today and tomorrow’s information workers do and will require.

Intel Learn is a program that I had come across last year whilst looking for resources that might help me with my own IT extra-curricular class. Stumbling upon their site was a bit of a revelation as, in detail and articulated beautifully, was a curriculum for IT education that could have literally been written for RCEF.

Compare our mission statement,

“To promote education for people in rural China that empowers them to improve their lives and their communities.”

with this description from their brochure:

“The Intel Learn Program is a… hands-on curriculum… that tap[s] into children’s interest in their own communities while nourishing their curiosity with creative, technology-driven projects.”

Creativity? Tapping into children’s interest in their own communities? Hands-on curriculum? It’s like they’re describing us. I hope you can understand why I was so excited about this opportunity now. Read the rest of this post

This New York Times article describes how some young Japanese are trying out farming since they can’t find jobs or are being laid off in the cities. The government is sponsoring farming training programs as part of its economic stimulus efforts. The mostly elderly farming population in Japan is said to “welcome” the young help, but is this arrangement sustainable? It’s hard for Japanese to buy land to start their own farms and farming skills take time to cultivate. According to the article, farming and life in the countryside is “romanticized” in Japan.

In China by contrast, many unemployed young people grew up in the countryside and are not eager to return to the reality they know firsthand. Tending the land is usually left to their parents and grandparents or, increasingly, to companies and large-scale mechanized farming. I wonder whether there are sustainable farms or cooperatives being started and run by independent young Chinese.  The fourth grade boys at Guan Ai have recently become very interested in bee-keeping and making honey. The Guan Ai principal took them to visit a bee keeper in a nearby village and she was quite surprised to see all the youngsters so interested. Maybe this will be the beginning of an apprenticeship program…

A rural teacher recently told me that what rural youth need most are skills that will prepare them to make a good living in their hometowns.  He says if they can make a stable, honest living, their views towards education will change for their children and the next generation. However, education methods have to change first. That’s our job–RCEF, Guan Ai School, and all the teachers out there who care about rural students’  futures.