The RCEF Blog 博客

Sara Lam and I were recently interviewed by Fred Dintenfass of eChinacities. He had some very good questions like:

“What can Americans bring to education in China?”

“What kind of cooperation do you get from the government?”

“Have you had problems with teachers who were resistant to your programs?”

Below are a few excerpts from the interview, the entirety of which you can read here.

A lot of RCEF volunteers are from America – a country with one of the worst education records in the industrial world. What can Americans bring to education in China?

We are often misunderstood as promoting “American-style” education in China. In fact, many of our staff and volunteers are mainland Chinese and RCEF follows the curriculum standards of China’s own Ministry of Education. That said, we do see similarities in the education reform needs of China and America. Both countries struggle to balance solid academic performance with the development of well-rounded skills for the real world. Since America has a more decentralized education system compared to China, alternative systems have been able to flourish and there is a wealth of experience in innovative curriculum and teacher professional development. Also, some American education reformers like Michelle Rhee are boldly challenging problems like teacher accountability and bureaucracy, which plague education systems around the world. We pay attention to what lessons American’s education reform movement may have for China in the future.

What kind of cooperation do you get from the government?

For years now, the Chinese Ministry of Education has been promoting a more student-centered curriculum. However, their well-conceived standards have yet to genuinely trickle down into most rural classrooms. Rural teachers need year-round coaching and practical methods that are proven in the rural context in order to make a genuine, lasting change. The local education bureau is positive about RCEF working here and hopes that once we have developed effective methods, we will work with a wider range of schools.

The Rural China Education Foundation leadership is primarily composed of young foreigners without a great deal of teaching experience – have you had problems with teachers who were resistant to your programs？

Teachers everywhere exhibit resistance when asked to replace familiar, rote methods with more unpredictable and challenging student-centered methods. Rather than coming in and telling teachers what to do, first we listen to what teachers perceive as difficulties or problems in their lessons and discuss with them about how they can solve them. Once they have someone to bounce ideas off of and get feedback from, they can often come up with much better methods themselves.

We’ve already had many successes where teachers who originally rejected ideas as unfeasible, went on to try them out with the encouragement and support of RCEF. When Guan Ai teachers take a RCEF idea and figure out how to make it succeed in their classrooms, they make the methods their own. In the future, the program won’t be maintained by the ideas of outsiders, but continually refreshed and legitimized by the discoveries and successes of the rural teachers themselves.

Also, we’d like to clarify that we require RCEF Teaching Coaches to have solid classroom teaching experience in primary or middle school. We prefer to hire Coaches who are from China and have rich expertise in rural China education already, but they have proven extremely difficult to find. Thus, as we try to develop homegrown experts in the rural teachers, we are open to recruiting from overseas in addition to mainland China. Fluent Mandarin skills are a must!

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