Diane Geng and Sara Lam (l to r)

Even with the end of the semester fast approaching, Diane Geng and Sara Lam, Co-Executive Directors of the Rural China Education Foundation (RCEF), were kind enough to take some time out of their busy schedules at Guan Ai Primary School in Shanxi Province to explain the state of education in rural China and the innovative approaches RCEF is employing to improve the quality and utility of rural Chinese education.

Why China?
As Chinese Americans, we both have a natural connection to China. Furthermore, China is home to the largest pool of children in the world and around 80% of them grow up in rural areas. The kind of schooling they receive will influence the kind of adults they become. Thus, it’s critical to focus on educational quality and preparing students to improve their lives and communities.

What is RCEF currently focused on at the moment?
We work in Guan Ai Primary School, a rural boarding school of 185 students in southwest Shanxi Province. Guan Ai is our laboratory for developing teaching methods and curriculum suited for rural students. We aim to accumulate expertise and develop approaches that can be shared with other schools. After developing solid methods and materials at Guan Ai, we will train and network more educators across rural China to improve education at their schools.

What makes Guan’ai a good place for the Rural China Education Foundation?
Its principals are more progressively-minded than most in China today. They started Guan Ai on the belief that every child deserves love and respect, no matter their academic performance. They had the will to reform teaching methods at their school but needed in-depth assistance with resources and methods. At the same time, RCEF had vetted many rural schools looking for a laboratory in which we could develop effective methods for rural school reform. It was hard to find schools with strong leaders who share our vision. Thus, when the Guan Ai principals invited us to work with them year-round, we felt it was a good partnership.

Guan Ai is also located in a rural environment typical of many villages in northern China. Rural boarding schools are common now as parents migrate and leave their children behind. We hope that the lessons learned at Guan Ai will be applicable to rural schools in more areas throughout China.

What kind of cooperation do you get from the government?
For years now, the Chinese Ministry of Education has been promoting a more student-centered curriculum. However, their well-conceived standards have yet to genuinely trickle down into most rural classrooms. Rural teachers need year-round coaching and practical methods that are proven in the rural context in order to make a genuine, lasting change. The local education bureau is positive about RCEF working here and hopes that once we have developed effective methods, we will work with a wider range of schools.

One of the things RCEF is working on is teacher training – what qualifications must teachers obtain to teach in rural China?
Since 2000, all teachers in China are supposed to be certified. However, if a rural school has a teacher shortage, it may hire “temporary teachers” (daike laoshi) from society who do not have to meet these requirements.

Are China’s rural areas different enough that approaches developed in one area would need to be significantly retooled for use in another rural area?
Step-by-step teaching methods should not be blindly copied from one school to another or even from one teacher to another. They always have to be adapted to the needs of the students. Instead of giving out recipes for good teaching, we want to share the process of how our best practices come about. Our experiences will not only serve as proof that student-centered teaching can succeed in the rural context, but offer guidance and inspiration to other teachers to start on a path of experimentation and innovation. An important thing to remember is that even when one teacher or principal wants to reform, a lot of social and political factors have to be in place for success. These include support of colleagues, parents, and the community. Sustainable reform is not easy and it doesn’t depend just on the teacher or principal’s individual will. Every school’s journey will be different and the factors of success varied. RCEF hopes to leverage our hands-on experience at Guan Ai to offer concrete support and lessons learned to more rural teachers and principals in the future.

Are the initiatives the Rural China Education Foundation is enacting in rural China applicable in the urban areas as well?
Some of our student-centered teaching principles are universally applicable. However, one of RCEF’s core beliefs is specific to the rural context: rural education should contribute to rural development. Unfortunately, rural education currently facilitates a brain drain to urban areas. Students are implicitly taught that urban culture and lifestyles are more desirable, and that the goal of their education is to make a good life for themselves in the city. The students who are left behind in the village have not learned knowledge and skills needed to improve their communities. They often have low self-confidence and a low sense of efficacy, having been “failures” in school. In response to this, RCEF promotes education that encourages students to learn more about their communities and provides opportunities for them to make a concrete difference. This does not mean that we encourage rural students to stay in the rural areas or confine themselves to their local communities. Rather, we hope that no matter what their future path, students will use their resources and networks to support rural development on whatever scale they can. 

A lot of RCEF volunteers are from America – a country with one of the worst education records in the industrial world – what can Americans bring to education in China?
We are often misunderstood as promoting “American-style” education in China. In fact, many of our staff and volunteers are mainland Chinese and RCEF follows the curriculum standards of China’s own Ministry of Education. That said, we do see similarities in the education reform needs of China and America. Both countries struggle to balance solid academic performance with the development of well-rounded skills for the real world. Since America has a more decentralized education system compared to China, alternative systems have been able to flourish and there is a wealth of experience in innovative curriculum and teacher professional development. Also, some American education reformers like Michelle Rhee are boldly challenging problems like teacher accountability and bureaucracy, which plague education systems around the world. We pay attention to what lessons American’s education reform movement may have for China in the future. 

The Rural China Education Foundation leadership is primarily composed of young foreigners without a great deal of teaching experience – have you had problems with teachers who were resistant to your programs？
Teachers everywhere exhibit resistance when asked to replace familiar, rote methods with more unpredictable and challenging student-centered methods. Rather than coming in and telling teachers what to do, first we listen to what teachers perceive as difficulties or problems in their lessons and discuss with them about how they can solve them. Once they have someone to bounce ideas off of and get feedback from, they can often come up with much better methods themselves.

We’ve already had many successes where teachers who originally rejected ideas as unfeasible, went on to try them out with the encouragement and support of RCEF. When Guan Ai teachers take a RCEF idea and figure out how to make it succeed in their classrooms, they make the methods their own. In the future, the program won’t be maintained by the ideas of outsiders, but continually refreshed and legitimized by the discoveries and successes of the rural teachers themselves.

Also, We’d like to clarify that we require RCEF Teaching Coaches to have solid classroom teaching experience in primary or middle school. We prefer to hire Coaches who are from China and have rich expertise in rural China education already, but they have proven extremely difficult to find. Thus, as we try to develop homegrown experts in the rural teachers, we are open to recruiting from overseas in addition to mainland China. Fluent Mandarin skills are a must!

 

 

The RCEF organization is largely comprised of a volunteer network that spans several continents and the RCEF blog allows people anywhere in the world to check in on what you’re doing and add their feedback – what role has the internet played in the development of RCEF?
The Internet is critical to our functioning. First, most members of the public, donors, and volunteers find us through our website. Our volunteers do their tasks for RCEF through the use of email, Skype, Google Documents, Huddle, wikis, etc. It’s been a powerful way to bring like-minded people together to work on a cause without regularly meeting each other face to face. We have an online library of articles about rural China as a service to the general public. A new project is an online database that will be used by rural teachers across China to communicate and share good lesson plans and strategies with each other.

How different are the lives of rural and urban Chinese students?
Incomes of the families of rural students lag far behind those of urban students. They generally have less access to information and exposure to things outside their hometowns. Few students have been outside their immediate county or even had the chance to visit the tourist attractions near their villages because of admission fees. They know few people who have gone to college or who have non-farming or migrant labor jobs. There are few if any libraries, parks, or organized youth activities. They usually have at least one sibling since the one-child policy is more relaxed in rural areas. Starting in primary school, they may have to board at school because their parents migrate to cities to work or their village schools are consolidated to a central school far away form home. Villages are less crowded then cities so in their free time, rural children have more space to run around. They also have more natural exposure to land, trees, plants, and animals.

What percentage of rural Chinese go on to high school? College?
About 10-20% of rural students go on to high school. Less than 5% go on to college, compared to over 70% of students from China’s major cities.

Testing is a major part of the Chinese education system, what challenges does that pose for educators trying bring innovation to their classrooms? What challenges does it pose for RCEF?
Grades matter and measurably improved academic scores for all (not just the naturally gifted students) are an essential part of RCEF’s work. Better teaching methods should translate into better grasp of knowledge and how to apply it both on test questions and in the real world. Thus, innovative student-centered teaching and good test performance don’t need to conflict. Proving that is key to gaining widespread trust from parents, other schools, and society. A major problem now is that most teachers spend too much time drilling test problems and many students still meet with poor results. Thus, we are trying to help teachers develop more effective ways for test preparation that help students do better but don’t take up as much time. Over the past month, RCEF Teaching Coaches and Guan Ai teachers have been analyzing final exam content and question formats, figuring out better ways to help children master different sections, and putting children in groups to help each other understand.

What have you learned from your time with RCEF in rural China?
We’ve learned that whole school reform is necessary to support teaching reform. For example, teachers needed to feel more stable in their jobs. Crumbling and overcrowded buildings pose basic safety hazards and physically limited what teachers and students can do. Seeing how these problems got in the way of better teaching, we decided to broaden the scope of RCEF’s work to encompass whole-school reforms rather than focusing narrowly on curriculum and teaching. We are now providing Guan Ai School with comprehensive support in management, professional development, teacher salaries, and networking. That’s why our program is called the “Integrative Rural Education Program”.

What has been the most rewarding part of working in rural China? The most surprising?
The most rewarding part has been seeing students who were deemed hopeless at other schools flourish under the care of teachers who are sensitive to their needs and won’t give up on them. A fourth grade boy who barely spoke in class, never did work, or look adults in the eye last semester has changed so much that he was able to recite a long poem by himself in a big loud voice during a class show and now eagerly participates in class activities, answering questions, and working well with others.

The most surprising part has been how comfortable and convenient it is to live and work in rural China. When we tell people in China that we live and work in a village, the first thing they say is “That must be so hard!” or “It’s so noble of you to live in such terrible conditions to help rural schools!” Except for a few small inconveniences like the lack of showers and flush toilets, a lot of villages are nice places to live! Villagers are very friendly and take good care of us. We enjoy peace and quiet, fresher food and fresher air. Telecommunication is no problem at all as we have great cell phone reception and wireless internet connection in our office and homes. What more could we ask for?

What will the economic downturn mean for RCEF as US based not for profit organization?
We hope that members of the public will continue to contribute financially to RCEF despite the economic downturn. Our mission is long-term so we need ongoing support for our students, teachers, and staff as they engage in this process of reform.

How will the economic crisis affect students in China’s rural areas?
The main consequences have yet to be seen. Prices for various fall crops fell considerably and we’ve heard that it’s harder for some parents to maintain their migrant jobs in the cities. We’ll probably see after the Spring Festival how many locals go back to the cities to work. A big cash crop in this area—asparagus—is due to be harvested in the spring but the European markets that it is usually exported to will probably have suffered. 

What is the next step for RCEF
We’re going to be developing our methods at Guan Ai for the next two years and then expanding to work with teachers and principals at more schools. In the immediate future, we’re looking to bring on new RCEF Teaching Coaches and construct a new dormitory at Guan Ai.

Stay tuned to new developments, stories, and lesson plans out of the Guan’Ai school on the RCEF blog
More about the Rural China Education Foundation on their main site

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