The RCEF Blog 博客

Selling eggs may just be an ordinary thing in the eyes of villagers but it can be an exciting learning experience for the students from Guan Ai Primary School. Five of our students, Sara Lam and I (Principal Sun) went to the marketplace as an out-of-school educational experience to sell the eggs from the chickens [...]

This post was written by Xiaochun Li, a first grade teacher at Guan Ai Primary School. She is part of a team of teachers and RCEF staff who work on the library and reading program at the school. 以下的博客是关爱小学的李晓春老师写的。她是学校图书和阅读项目的一名负责人。 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [...]

While visiting the United States this summer, Sara Lam and I had the opportunity to participate in a week-long training at the Foxfire Museum and Heritage Center in Southern Appalachia. The center is located on Black Mountain in Mountain City, Georgia. Foxfire was originally the name of a class that was started in 1966 by [...]

Music class, like art class, is a rarity in rural China. The Guan Ai School students are lucky to have music class once a week. However, with little exception, teaching does not address any music concepts or learning beyond singing. The textbooks are basically “song books”. That’s why we welcomed the chance to have Music [...]

Students at Guan Ai take exams twice a semester, a mock at half-term and a real one at the end of term. While these exams do a decent job of tracking progress of students, they do have their inadequacies. Much of the content on the exams can be mastered by repeating similar questions ad nauseum [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Classes at Guozhuang have actually finished now and I’m now back in the safe confines of Guan Ai School in Shanxi. I do miss the students at Guozhuang though, as they really were a great bunch. Throughout the course and, I dare say, wherever and whenever I teach I try to teach students how to [...]

I’m coming to the end of my time teaching here in Guozhuang village and have taught the students many different things, including net browsing, word processing and email. But more than these specific skills I would like to think that I have also taught them how to learn for themselves, which is surely the skill [...]

Computer classes have been going on for a few days here at Guozhuang and things are going quite smoothly. We have ten students of varying ability, though none of which are very experienced. The plan is that this first class will go on to teach other villagers how to use computers, thereby increasing uptake (purchases) [...]