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RCEF and its partner schools use the government curriculum. Our day-to-day goal with rural teachers is to find effective ways of helping students to achieve the learning standards set by the government. In addition, we also work with teachers who want to innovate and create supplementary, enriching curriculum.
Below you find some examples of extracurricular teaching in our pilot schools.You can find the most recent updates by subscribing to our newsletter or visiting the RCEF blog.
Sample projects:
School Newspaper
 In Guan Ai School, we help students organize clubs and projects in which they can take the lead, such as creating a school newspaper. Most newspapers in rural schools are simply filled with essays students copy from other books. However, this one was planned by the sixth grade class and filled entirely with writings and reports from children at the school. They even voted on the name: "Rising Sun." Making the newspaper involved collecting and selecting manuscripts, group discussion, consulting outside resources, typesetting, simple editing, etc. Organized by the children themselves, these activities fostered many different skills. The final product (picture: front page) was a highly visible and tangible achievement by the entire class.
Community Research
RCEF aims for schooling to advance community development. At right, a student practices interviewing and data-collection skills by talking with a villager about what kind of books she prefers for a new village library. Afterwards, he adds his findings to the class and they perform simple statistical analysis to decide how many books of each category to purchase. They feel that their work and learning has a real effect and is important to benefiting their community.
Another example is a recent anti-smoking investigation conducted by third through sixth graders at Guan Ai School. 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.
Making Social Studies More Relevant
 In a unit on “My Family” in third grade Social Studies, one lesson is devoted to the geographic location of students’ homes and directions for getting there. The textbook asks students to draw and describe the public transportation route for getting to their home — a wonderful learning activity, if you live in urban areas served by public transportation, that is. The teacher came up with a new activity that gives students the opportunity to learn about their own community in a hands-on and academically rigorous way. Here is the basic run down of her activity:
Lesson One – Laying down the groundwork. In the classroom, student learned the cardinal directions in terms of the borders of the village. e.g. “Our school is on the southern border of the village.” They each drew a grid representing the streets in the village.
Lesson Two – Positioning the landmarks. Sun Laoshi brought the kids on a walk around the village, grids in hand. They stopped at landmarks such as the village committee compound and shops, and marked them down on their maps. As they walked, they also talked about what direction they were going and recorded the route on their maps with arrows.
Lesson Three – Giving directions. Students talked about the position of different landmarks in relation to each other. E.g. “The water tower is east of the principals’ home.” Then, they learned how to give directions from one landmark to another. E.g. “To get to school from our dorm, we go east after leaving the dorm, turn south past the village committee compound…”
Activities in the textbook with urban biases like this “public transportation” one are not the exception. Every grade had a social studies unit on families this semester. In the second grade unit, the textbook showed pictures of family outings and asked students how they would feel if they were the children in those pictures. The problem is, a lot of the outings were activities that rural people hardly ever engage in, such as a walk in a park. If images of urban family activities represent a happy family, what does that mean for rural children? In the fifth grade, the “family” unit talked about what a “civilized” family. One activity under this topic is to research the number of books, magazines and newspapers in their homes. This might be a good activity if the objective was to encourage rural families to have more books at home for their children, but in this context, it implies that rural families are less “civilized” because they have fewer books.
The curriculum reform is a step in the right direction and opens up a lot of space for the educational experimentation that RCEF does in rural schools. New social studies textbooks are structured to encourage teachers to use activities and discussions instead of lecturing, but still fall short of engaging rural students in learning through inquiry and independent thinking. Many teachers, even some in Guan Ai, will see activities that are not applicable to the rural context and just skip over it. Instead, they will just tell the students what they need to write down in the exam, and have them remember it. Teachers like Sun Laoshi, however, show us that it is possible to modify these activities so that students not only learn the facts and skills required by the national curriculum, but also gain a deeper understanding of their own communities. It does require some extra though and effort, but is definitely now out of the reach of regular rural teachers and students.
Guest Teachers From the Community
RCEF teachers reach out to parents and community members to get involved in education. Here, a local grandmother comes to tell stories to a class while her husband is in a neighboring class giving a living history lesson to the sixth graders about his experiences in the village during Mao's time. Another  student’s grandmother taught paper cutting (see picture) and a talented local woodworker will help students make bookshelves for classroom libraries. In this way, we aim to make use of local resources of the rural areas and cultivate an appreciation of and participation in hands-on skills. Similarly, we strive to bring students out into the real world to learn from people in society, whether through interviewing, observations, or hands-on projects.
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