Contents
Organizational Updates
RCEF Case Study Published
Executive Director of Programs Sara Lam published an article in the journal Positions: Dialogues on Education.
Guan Ai Teachers Start a Blog
Rural teachers share their thoughts on education and teaching in a village school.
Curriculum and Teaching
Raising Chickens: Part Three
Guan Ai School students learn how to keep their chickens healthy in this community research project.
Networking and Training
Rural Classroom Reading Clubs
RCEF staff and teachers join a budding movement in China to promote reading discussions in schools.
RCEF Meets with American NGOs
RCEF Co-Executive Directors visited educational models in Washington, DC and California.
Donor Updates
Recognition of Recent Donors
We warmly thank the donors to RCEF in November 2009
RCEF Case Study Published in Journal
Above: Sara Lam working with students in RCEF's program in Shanxi Province.
A detailed article describing RCEF’s educational initiatives at Guan Ai Primary School was recently published in the journal Positions: Dialogues on Education [lichang.org]. The journal focuses on unique perspectives in education. The article, Curriculum Reform in A Rural Village: the Experiment of Rural China Education Foundation, was written by RCEF Executive Director of Programs Sara Lam and describes RCEF teachers' professional development methods, challenges, and lessons learned. The article is in Chinese but an English translation will be posted on our website in the near future.
Click here to read the article.
Guan Ai Teachers Start a Blog
Above: Mr. Pei, one of the teachers featured on the blog.
Recently, the principal of Guan Ai School, Sun Huimiao, started a blog for Guan Ai! It's a great idea and the teachers have taken to it with enthusiasm. The account is shared by all the teachers and each teacher posts on it at least once a week about any topic related to the school. Some have shared stories about students or how they deal with problems in teaching or thoughts about education in general. The blog can be viewed here.
It's really exciting for us to see the teachers writing and sharing about their work. For the last two years, RCEF has worked to help rural teachers feel more comfortable and capable of doing exactly this. We welcome you to log on and leave them comments! Here's a post from Mr. Pei, a fourth grade math and physical education teacher:
"The last time I met my classmates from college, everyone shared what they are doing now. Some of my classmates became civil servants. Some are doing business. One is the assistant manager of an advertising company. When they asked me what I did, I said I am teaching at an elementary school. At first, everyone said, "Oh what a good job! That's a safe place where you don't get blown by the wind or wet in the rain. That's pretty nice." But suddenly the direction of the conversation changed. Why would a man want to be a teacher? The salary is not high, just a few hundred a month. At a private school (like Guan Ai), there are almost no benefits. It must be hard to even find a girlfriend! My face got red.
Actually, every person has their own opinion. Some people like to be officials and enjoy the feeling of superiority. Some like to do business and enjoy the feeling of money in their hands everyday. What I like is a peaceful and uncompetitive life together with innocent children. This is how I feel fulfilled everyday. I like to see the pure smiling faces of the children. I like to see their eyes filled with the desire to learn. I like to use my knowledge to help students solve problems!
As for what my friends said about my salary being low, that depends on your attitude towards work. If you like your job, you will make it your own mission. I'm not that interested in money anymore, much less benefits. And as for a girlfriend? I think their thinking on this point is wrong. Any rational girl choosing a boyfriend would pick me because I am caring, patient and loving towards children. Her future with me will be very happy. So I'm not afraid!"
Chicken Raising Project: Part Three
Above: Students prepare to weigh a chicken.
Last month, Executive Director of Programs Sara Lam reported on her extracurricular elective class for fourth through sixth graders at Guan Ai Primary School. Their goal is to learn more about their village environment and resources. The students voted to learn about farm animals and how to raise chickens. Here, Sara shares the latest phase of the project.
After more than a month of planning and preparing for our chickens, we finally brought the chickens home. Since then, we’ve been busy learning about the daily needs of the chickens and ensuring that they grow up safe and healthy.
Our first concern was the chickens’ diet. The students had interviewed a few different villagers about what they feed their chickens. All of them described their feed as a mixture of ground corn and wheat bran. Suspecting that this is not a balanced diet, I did some research online. I started looking on Chinese websites because I hoped that the students could find the information on their own, but could not find good recipes for homemade chicken feed. Most people who didn’t just feed their chicken corn and wheat bran bought feed containing chemicals and hormones, which the students had already decided they did not want to use. On English websites, I found a lot of great recipes developed by agriculture departments of universities or regular folks who raise chickens organically. This is not the first time I’ve had difficulty finding high quality resources in Chinese for community research or service-learning projects. In the US, I would not only be able to find a wealth of information online or at the library, including resources made especially for children, but I would also be able to draw on bibliographies created by other educators who have done similar projects. This shows the great need for projects like ours to find or create resources that can be shared with other educators.
I selected a recipe and bought large quantities of the ingredients including ground corn, ground wheat, wheat bran, ground soy beans, powdered fish bone and salt. In class, I explained to students the nutrients that each ingredient provides and gave them a list of the percentage each ingredient should make up in the feed. The students then calculated how much of each ingredient to add to make up a total of 30 pounds of feed. They took turns weighing the ingredients and adding them to a bucket. At last, we had our homemade, nutritious, organic chicken feed!
In order to keep track of the growth of our chickens, we decided to weigh them every two weeks. The chickens were too light for the scale we had for measuring students’ weight, so we used the traditional scale that is used in markets. Mr. Yang, a school administrator, taught the students where to hang the chickens, which took turns being weighed in a plastic bag. He also taught us how to adjust the metal weight and how to read the markings to determine the chicken's weight. The students took turns measuring and recording the weight of each chicken. We have several white chickens that look very similar to each other. The students decided to take all of them out of the cage at the same time and have one student carry each one to avoid a mix-up. The chickens did not like being held for such a long time and one of them wriggled free. A dog happened to be on the playground and tried to catch the chicken as food. It was quite a scene with the chicken being chased by a dog and a dozen kids, followed by another dozen children chasing after the dog!
Not long after we brought the chickens back, we noticed that there was bloody diarrhea on the pans below the cage. I asked the students to identify the sick chicken, and they were able to spot it because it had a dirty and swollen behind. The person who sold us the chickens told us that it was coccidiosis or an infection of the intestines. I bought the medicine he recommended, and the students used the instructions on the package to calculate the amount that should be added to the chicken’s water. Then, they removed the needle from a syringe and used it to feed the medicine to the chicken each day. Unfortunately, a few days into the treatment, it snowed heavily in the village for days, and so the inside of the chicken cage became moist. The chicken’s condition worsened. In the end, two of our chickens died. We heard from the chicken farmer that a number of his chickens had died during the several days of snow as well. After this sad incident, we winterized the cage by covering it with tarp.
Rural School Reading Clubs
By Sun Chuanmei, Program Manager
Above: Two rural teachers, Ms. Li and Ms. Shang, traveled to Hangzhou to learn about reading clubs in schools.
With RCEF's support, we are fortunate to have had the opportunity to participate in a reading-related conference in Ningbo and Hangzhou. The “Ningbo 21 Education Reading Forum” took place at the end of October, and the “Fifth National Meeting of Reading Classroom Clubs” in Hangzhou took place in late November.
The Director of the Taiwan Xiaoyu Association, Dr. Zhao Jingzhong, said in his reading club discussion forum that reading clubs should be student-centered with discussions at their core. They should also guide children to read strategically. The method emphasizes sharing of the same reading material between teachers and students. Presently, in China, these reading activities are promoted by Dr. Wang Lin and Professor Mei Zihan of East China Normal University. In Zhejiang Province, there is even a community of school-based reading clubs. A new school of practice called “Thousand Island” is formed around such clubs and is very likely the first of its kind in China. Urban education bureaus in cities like Hangzhou, Ningbo, and Chengdu are promoting classroom reading movements from the top down.
In some districts of Hangzhou, reading clubs are now part of a standard school curriculum and are a part of the teacher evaluation system. It looks like reading clubs have become widespread and lively in many urban Chinese schools. However, at rural schools in the countryside, things are still quiet. There are many reasons for this, but despite the challenges, we very much want to give the reading clubs a try in RCEF's rural schools. We want to use this method to heighten children’s understanding and passion for reading so that they gradually develop a lifelong reading habit.
The reading clubs are quite strategic in how they run. Their organization is different from regular school subjects like Language Arts and Mathematics. They focus on the big picture of a reading instead of on details. They do not aim to explain all the difficult parts of a book to a student, but rather encourage students to tackle difficult passages for themselves. Reading clubs allow for students to continue reading without necessarily understanding every detail of a book. A reading club should follow the principles of “Interest First and Child-Centered”. More specifically, it can be broken down into the following eleven strategies: 1) Sustain freshness and completeness throughout the reading process 2) Apply critical reading when suitable 3) Explore and discover 4) Encourage questions 5) Heighten reading expectations by encouraging students to guess, imagine, and form opinions 6) Avoid classroom teaching that disrupts fun and joy; 7) Provide ample reading selection 8) Share reading experiences 9) Form healthy reading habits 10) Design activities of varying levels 11) Adjust and find new strategies based on practice.
These reading strategies could be hard for language teachers in rural areas to adopt. Over time, classroom reading activities can slowly become just another dry and meaningless language arts class, losing its original nature, and libraries can slowly become display rooms filled with dust-covered books. These scenarios make this reading project both painful and enjoyable for me.
We are trying out the classroom reading clubs witih fifth graders from two rural schools. We plan to facilitate five classroom-based reading club sessions. Two students will read books that have the same themes and then share reading experiences with each other. Hopefully, this will provide practical experiences for rural classroom reading clubs.
RCEF Meets with American NGOs
Above: Sara Lam and Diane Geng (first row, second and third from left) after a presentation about RCEF in Washington, DC.
Co-Executive Directors Sara Lam and Diane Geng traveled to the U.S. in November for the annual Echoing Green Fellows conference. They took the opportunity to network with American NGOs and supporters since China and the U.S. face common challenges in teacher and curriculum quality and development.
Sara and Diane had the opportunity to talk with some of the best innovators in these areas, including the Apple Tree Institute for Education, the Center for Inspired Teaching, Kid Power, Hyde Leadership Public Charter School, New Leaders for New Schools, and Ashoka Youth Venture. They also gave presentations at the Global Fund for Children in Washington, DC and at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, where a joint forum was organized with two other organizations working in rural China — Zigen Fund and the Rural Education Action Project.
Donor Roll
We are grateful to all the supporters who donated to RCEF in November 2009! (A complete list of donors through the years is available here.)
Gold Sponsors ($5000-$9999)
Greg & Liz Lutz (Berkeley, CA)
Silver Sponsors ($1000-$4999)
Anonymous
Bruce WT Yen (Baltimore, MD)
Bronze Sponsors ($100 to $999)
Anne Hsieh (Stanford, CA)
Kathryn Corro (San Francisco, CA)
Ray & Jia Lyn (San Jose, CA)
Ruth O’Connor (Davis, CA)
Sharon Hasslen (Menlo Park, CA)
Shirley Hung (Fountain Valley, CA)
Weiwei Li (Rockville, MD)
Supporting Sponsors (under $99)
Jifeng Cheng (Chicago, IL)
Tianwei Li (Irvine, CA)
The RCEF Newsletter is a monthly publication about the educational initiatives being carried out by RCEF 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!
2010 RCEF Calendar Available
This limited edition 2010 calendar takes you through the students’ enriching school year and helps to spread RCEF’s mission.
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From our Blog:
Guan Ai Helps Teachers Grow
A new teacher says she feels fulfilled by the constant learning going on at Guan Ai.
Students' Empathy Shines Through
The principal of Guan Ai shares a story about how students showed their caring for her.
Click here to read (in Chinese).
Homework Competition
Two students invent a way to keep each other accountable to finish their homework.
Click here to read more (in Chinese).
Ms. Li Reflects on Reading Conference
Ms. Li, a rural teacher in RCEF's program, traveled to Hangzhou to learn how to organize class book discussion groups.
Beekeeping Journals
Curious fourth graders took on an independent project to learn about raising bees.
RCEF History Slideshow
Four years ago, RCEF was incorporated as a nonprofit organization. This slideshow marks major milestones in our development.
Click here to view
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
Past Newsletters
RCEF posts monthly and quarterly newsletters on our website.
Click here to read past issues