The RCEF Blog 博客

We just heard the shocking news of the passing of Liu Laoshi, a good friend and mentor. Liu Laoshi was a teacher and rural development activist who played an invaluable role in helping us learn about rural China. He was one of the first people we talked to who expressed a coherent vision for rural [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

This semester I have been teaching 3, 4, and 5th grade English at Dongwuxing and Xiaochao Schools in Yongji, Shanxi Province. Here in rural China, English is not one of the main tested courses, and grades in English do not affect students’ entry into middle school. Therefore, whenever I go over to teach English, and [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]