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Sun Laoshi takes students out of the classroom and into the village for the activity she designed on map-making and directions.

Third grade social studies teacher, Sun Huiguo, recently taught a great lesson on map-making and directions, with little help from the curriculum or textbook.  In a unit on “My Family”, one lesson is devoted to the geographic location of students’ homes and directions for getting there.  The textbook asks students to draw and describe the public transportation route for getting to their home — a wonderful learning activity, if you live in urban areas served by public transportation, that is.  Sun Laoshi did a great job tying the curriculum’s learning objectives back to rural communities.  She came up with her own activity that gives students the opportunity to learn about their own community in a hands-on and academically rigorous way. Here is the basic run down of her activity:

Lesson One - Laying down the groundwork. In the classroom, student learned the cardinal directions in terms of the borders of the village.  e.g. “Our school is on the southern border of the village.”  They each drew a grid representing the streets in the village.

Pei Laoshi helps a third grade girl get oriented as she tried to find the right spot for a landmark on her map.

Lesson Two - Positioning the landmarks. Sun Laoshi brought the kids on a walk around the village, grids in hand.  They stopped at landmarks such as the village committee compound and shops, and marked them down on their maps.  As they walked, they also talked about what direction they were going and recorded the route on their maps with arrows.

Lesson Three - Giving directions. Students talked about the position of different landmarks in relation to each other.  E.g. “The water tower is east of the principals’ home.”  Then, they learned how to give directions from one landmark to another.  E.g. “To get to school from our dorm, we go east after leaving the dorm, turn south past the village committee compound…”

Activities in the textbook with urban biases like this “public transportation” one are not the exception.  Every grade had a social studies unit on families this semester.  In the second grade unit, the textbook showed pictures of family outings and asked students how they would feel if they were the children in those pictures.  The problem is, a lot of the outings were activities that rural people hardly ever engage in, such as a walk in a park.  If images of urban family activities represent a happy family, what does that mean for rural children?  In the fifth grade, the “family” unit talked about what a “civilized” family.  One activity under this topic is to research the number of books, magazines and newspapers in their homes.  This might be a good activity if the objective was to encourage rural families to have more books at home for their children, but in this context, it implies that rural families are less “civilized” because they have fewer books.

The curriculum reform is a step in the right direction and opens up a lot of space for the educational experimentation that RCEF does in rural schools.  New social studies textbooks are structured to encourage teachers to use activities and discussions instead of lecturing, but still fall short of engaging rural students in learning through inquiry and independent thinking.  Many teachers, even some in Guan Ai, will see activities that are not applicable to the rural context and just skip over it.  Instead, they will just tell the students what they need to write down in the exam, and have them remember it.  Teachers like Sun Laoshi, however, show us that it is possible to modify these activities so that students not only learn the facts and skills required by the national curriculum, but also gain a deeper understanding of their own communities.  It does require some extra though and effort, but is definitely now out of the reach of regular rural teachers and students.

Related posts:

In a previous post, ‘“School talk” — My biggest pet peeve‘, I wrote about how textbooks and teachers fail in challanging students to think about ethics and moral dilemmas — they use scenarios in which “the right thing to do” is painfully obvious, and students feel the need to answer according to (what they perceive as) the teachers’ moral standards.  In another post, “The challenges of teaching the new science curriculum“, I talked about how the curriculum reform has (or hasn’t) translated into changes in how science is taught in the classroom.  The new textbooks are full of coll experiments and activities, but leave teachers at a loss in terms of how to execute them in class.