Contents
Program Update
New School Year BeginsA look at RCEF's plans for the new school year.
Curriculum and Teaching
Anti-Smoking Project Video
Guan Ai students talk about the anti-smoking project they did in three villages.
Profile from the Field
American Photographer Looks Back at Six Months in Rural China
Marco Flagg shares his experiences working with RCEF at Guan Ai Primary School.
Professional Development
Teacher Training in Hebei Province
Guan Ai teachers attended a training based on the educational philosophy of Tao Xingzhi.
From Rural China to Southern Appalachia
RCEF Program Staff visited the rural American South to learn community education methods.
Donor Updates
Recognition of Recent Donors
We warmly thank the donors to RCEF in July and August 2009
New School Year Begins
By Sara Lam & Diane Geng, Co-Executive Directors
The new school year began at our program site, Guan Ai Primary School, on August 20. You can read on our blog about how Teaching Coaches helped Guan Ai teachers analyze textbooks and create lesson plans for the semester. Teachers also decorated their classrooms to make them more warm and inviting--something that is very rare in rural Chinese schools.
This school year RCEF staff and Teaching Coaches will build on the foundation from last year to take our innovative curriculum design to the next level. We spent last school year helping Guan Ai teachers become more proficient at teaching and coaching each other. We also helped the Guan Ai principal set up an in-school professional development system.
This year, RCEF staff will focus on the areas of greatest strength and value added. Given our track record from last year, we feel that RCEF's strongest suit is in creating lesson plans that help students experience and learn about issues in their environment. This includes teaching textbook concepts in ways that make use of rural cultural and natural resources to help students learn more effectively. It also includes extracurricular activities like service-learning projects.
Service-learning is a concept that is very new to China and RCEF has already piloted some service learning projects at Guan Ai which we want to deepen and broaden this year. An example, the Anti-smoking Project, is described below. We will collect baseline data for evaluation, along with basic quantitative evaluation data and anecdotal qualitative evaluation data to track our progress.
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CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT
Anti-Smoking Project Video
By Sara Lam, Executive Director of Programs
Above: A Guan Ai student handing out "Duilian" (messages affixed besides doors) to villagers during anti-smoking presentation.
Cigarette smoke is a huge health problem in rural China. Most men begin smoking as teenagers and it is acceptable to smoke anywhere, including in enclosed spaces and in front of children. Thus, when Guan Ai students took on an anti-smoking project to educate themselves and village adults, they were embodying RCEF's mission to promote "education that empowers students to improve their lives and their communities".
Above: The pair of "duilian" handed out by the students.
In the first phase of their community project, the students went to different villages to interview villagers about their smoking habits. After the interviews, students summarized their fundings with reports and graphs. This was a chance for them to put what they learned in Math class about statistics into practice. For example, some calculated that the amount of money spent on cigarettes in Wang Village could have bought 80 computers or120 refrigerators! Students then learned about the hazardous effects of smoking through newspaper articles, and photos. Guan Ai School also invited a local doctor to come and talk to students about smoking's effects on the body. After synthesizing all of this information into their own written reports, students took action to return to the villages they surveyed and tell villagers what they'd learned.
Click on the image above to view the video.
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PROFILE FROM THE FIELD
American Photographer Looks Back at Six Months in Rural China
By Diane Geng, Executive Director of Operations
Above: Marco Flagg, having fun with some of the students during SVP2008.
Marco Flagg is a native New Yorker who moved to Beijing to study Chinese. He was a long-time volunteer in RCEF and had a passion for learning more about rural development in China. At the beginning of 2009, he moved to Guan Ai Primary School to work with RCEF, documenting our work in photos and video. Below are Marco's reflections about his time with RCEF at our program site in rural Shanxi Province.
How did working with RCEF and living at Guan Ai School compare to your expectations?
I really didn’t know what to expect when I came to work at Guan Ai. I did have a fear that we wouldn’t be able to take showers during the cold winter months but luckily that wasn’t the case. All in all the experience gave me so much. I got to work and live with some truly dedicated, hardworking and (thankfully) fun people that made the twelve-day work weeks just fly by. I also learned so much during my time there. Though not isolated by any means, the village is fairly untouched by Western culture. This really forced me to reach out and try to understand a different way of life. So I guess you could say I came to Guan Ai with only the expectation to learn new things.
What do you think people who have never been to Guan Ai should know about RCEF’s work here?
I think that people who have never been to Guan Ai should know that the programs RCEF are developing at the school are making a difference. I have seen first hand the results of the team based learning approaches through the exceptional teamwork that the students of my art class applied. I have seen inquisitive minds that are unleashed upon the village when students go interview locals during their Society class projects. I have seen the confidence that students display when they have gained the ability to stand in front of a crowd of villagers and present a report about the harms of smoking. Lastly, I have witnessed the budding confidence and leadership ability of Guan Ai teachers as they present their work to their peers. All these things are the results of programs that RCEF has helped enact at the school and is proof that it is on the right path. I still feel there is a lot of hard work ahead but everyone should know that it’s on its way.
Looking back on your time at Guan Ai, what achievement makes you feel most proud?
Looking back I am most proud of the storybook class that I helped teach with Ms. Xie (Guan Ai's art teacher). For one, I love to teach though I guess it is more of a hobby than anything else, so having the opportunity to design and teach a class with the help of a skilled local teacher was a great opportunity. I am also proud of the class because even though I designed the class outline, it was truly a collaborative effort. I bounced ideas off of Ms. Xie and we had the flexibility to adapt to the needs of the students. As a foreigner working here, the pleasant surprises (and sometimes a little frustration) that you get from developing and teaching a curriculum is always eye-opening and powerful.
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PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Teacher Training in Hebei Province
By Diane Geng, Executive Director of Operations
Above: RCEF Staff and Guan Ai teachers on a nature walk.
In late July, a delegation of teachers and staff from Guan Ai and RCEF boarded a train from Shanxi for a long trip to Hebei Province. We went to attend a training session organized by an NGO called "Life Education Action”. The main purpose of the training was to spread the “seeds” of Tao Xingzhi’s works and philosophy.
Tao Xingzhi is one of China’s most progressive educators. He was a student of John Dewey’s at Columbia Teacher’s College and promoted “life education” in China through founding and running several progressive schools for common people (i.e. workers and rural students). He also started a rural teacher training institute. Tao wrote a great deal about his education philosophy which is pithy, clear, and inspiring. Although his name is famous in China, the details of his educational values, and in particular his focus on ideas about rural education, have largely been forgotten. After the training, we went on a hike to a nearby Huaguo Mountain (named after the mythical mountain in “Journey to the West”) along with rural teachers from a local school. We also went to the seaside town of Beidaihe for a day so that Guan Ai teachers from land-locked Shanxi could experience the ocean for the first time.
The following are the main takeaways from the conference:
- Teachers and principals in China often don’t know that one of their own—a native Chinese—was one of the biggest proponents of the kind of education now being promoted by the national curriculum reforms. They hear more about foreign (western) educational theorists and go to training courses where overseas educators speak, but few people have read Tao Xingzhi’s writings or know what he did. He is seldom discussed even though his values are often promoted.
- After Tao Xingzhi’s death, there have been too few people working in rural areas to continue developing curricula and teaching methods that embody his principles. Today, many people talk about his philosophy but few people know what it means in practice. The work and achievements of Guan Ai teachers is therefore of historical and practical importance. They can see themselves as “descendents” of Tao and also as pioneers, turning philosophy into much-needed practise suited to the needs of today's rural children.
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From Rural China to Southern Appalachia
By Kiel Harell, English Teaching Coach
While visiting the United States this summer, RCEF Executive Director of Programs 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 a teacher at a nearby high school who experimented with different teaching methods in his English classes. His students began writing and publishing a magazine composed of stories and information they collected from their communities. The magazine, also named Foxfire, was well received in Appalachia and the United States at large, and subsequent best-selling books were released cataloging articles from the magazine. Some of the royalties money was used to buy a large plot of land where the Foxfire Museum and Heritage Center is now located, a decision made by students from Foxfire classes.
While the Foxfire class and magazine continue to operate in a nearby school, Foxfire has become more than just a class for students. In the mid-1980s, the Foxfire team started teacher outreach programs to disseminate their methods to schools outside their region. They created training courses at their center for teachers and administrators to learn about the methods and theories behind their magazine class. Coupling the experiences from their classroom and the educational theories of John Dewey, they created a curriculum based around core practices. These practices promote the creation of student projects beyond the original magazine class to all different types of student-centered community projects.
Visiting the Foxfire Center and participating in the course was a hugely educational experience for us. The content of the course was especially relevant to our work because community service projects and community research have been a large part of the curriculum we’ve been developing at Guan Ai Primary School this last year. We were able to use the time to reflect on our past projects in terms of the core practices developed at Foxfire in order to improve them and come up with new ideas for this year. Some of the core practices refer to areas that we need to improve on in RCEF's current community projects. For instance, the Foxfire method emphasizes on-going reflection, assessment and evaluation. In the class, we were given examples and materials that explain how these components can be more fully integrated into a project.
In addition to the lessons on teaching methods, we also gained valuable insight for RCEF as an organization that hopes to expand. The Foxfire approach was developed in a rural school and distributed successfully to diverse educational contexts, something that RCEF hopes to do in the future. They have forty years of experience on RCEF and a myriad of experiences and insights from the scaling up process. Thankfully, the organizers of the course were willing to adapt the structure of the class to allow us to learn more about the processes involved in building a national program out of Foxfire. This partnered with all of the new insights into teaching made it an incredibly valuable trip for RCEF.
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DONOR UPDATES
Donor Roll
We are grateful to all the supporters who donated to RCEF in July and August 2009! (A complete list of donors through the years is available here.)
Grants
Tiger Woods Foundation ($25,000)
Bronze Sponsors ($100 to $999)
Anonymous
Lijuan Cai (Princeton, NJ)
Menghui Cao
Rowena Geng (West Sacramento, CA)
Anne Hsieh (Aiea, HI)
Microsoft Matching Gifts (Princeton, NJ)
Jun Hou (Hoboken, NJ)
Ning Hu
Hongzheng Lu (Pittsburgh, PA)
Bailey Peng
Stephen Potter (Seattle, WA)
Jingbo Wang (New York, NY)
Rongxun Wang (Redmond, WA)
Supporting Sponsors (under $99)
Xi Zhang (New York, NY)
The RCEF Newsletter is a monthly publication about the educational initiatives being carried out in rural Shanxi Province, China.
Read more about RCEF's mission and main program site Guan Ai Primary School.
Contact Us
Donate
You can help rural Chinese students reach their potential. Contributions are 100% tax-deductible in the U.S.
Checks payable to "Rural China Education Foundation" can be sent to:
PO Box 92424
Rochester, NY 14692-0424
Donations can also be made online!
From our Blog:
New School Year, New School Training
RCEF Math Teaching Coach Steven Liu helped rural teachers map out their curriculum for the semester.
Click here to read more
How I Prepared for the Start of School
Read how Ms. Li, first grade math teacher at Guan Ai School, planned her lessons during a RCEF training.
Click here to read more
Creative Tests for Creative Students
Read about the language arts and social studies questions designed to test the creativity of students at Guan Ai School.
Click here to read more
Midterm Examples
See more examples of RCEF-designed questions that test skills beyond the textbook.
Click here to read more
RCEF History Slideshow
Four years ago, RCEF was incorporated as a nonprofit organization. This slideshow marks major milestones in our development.
Dispatches from the Field
A special collection of blog posts gives an up close and personal window into our experiences on the ground in rural China
Guan Ai Adult English Class
RCEF's Sara Lam and Kiel Harell lead an innovative adult English class twice a week at Guan Ai Primary School. Learn about the methods they use to teach rural teachers.
Pilgrimage to Dulangkou
Dulangkou Middle School is located in a rural township but is one of the most-visited schools in the world. Find out what makes this school so special.
Hands-on Technology for Rural Children
RCEF's Steven Liu reports on an Intel Learns curriculum that teaches computer skills in rural schools.
Click here to read more
Work for RCEF
RCEF seeks energetic individuals to join our full-time staff team in China.
Past Newsletters
RCEF posts monthly and quarterly newsletters on our website.
Click here to read past issues