Community Engagement
Overview
Teach For China recognizes the importance of supportive educational environments to enabling students to succeed. As such, the organization provides support to Fellows to reach beyond the classroom and invest the full community in their students' success. To take full advantage of the eclectic skill-sets Fellows bring to their schools, Teach For China encourages Fellows to independently develop their own innovative projects, often helping Fellows to secure independent funding or providing other logistical support.
In the past Fellows have helped found school libraries, organized oral English training seminars for local teachers, started recycling programs, and directed school-wide drama productions. Below are some examples of successful community engagement projects:
Mobilizing Students to Tackle Community Issues – Hao Linshuo, Fellow ’10
In 2011, the Fellow team at Heqing Number 2 Middle School secured 12,000 RMB in independent funding to organize an innovative community engagement project. Students were divided into small groups and charged with devising their own solutions to the major problems they saw facing their home communities. They tackled a variety of issues, including environmental pollution, inadequate transportation, and economic inefficiency. Their innovative solutions included community recycling programs, gambling rehabilitation projects, community water usage programs, and economic cooperatives. Each group presented its ideas before peers in a school-wide contest. The winning group from Beiya 北衙 village, which proposed a plan to clean up pollution surrounding their community market, won a trip to Beijing. The trip to Beijing was the first time that any of the students had ridden an airplane or left their home county. During the trip they visited and met with students from Peking and Tsinghua Universities, China’s two most prestigious colleges.
It was thrilling to watch our students develop new skills to meet this challenge. On the one hand, they researched background material regarding the various problems they sought to tackle. For many students, this was the first time they had looked up reference material online or in books. On the other hand, by investigating every corner of their villages, asking questions and interviewing family members, neighbors, and local officials, students forged a more intimate connection with their home communities. Working in small groups strengthened students’ communication and cooperation skills. Having successfully presented their projects before an audience of 1,000 teachers and peers, my students are now more confident in themselves. Many now believe for the first time that, through education, they can have a positive impact on the quality of their own lives and on their community. This represents one of the accomplishments that I am most proud of as a Teach For China Fellow.
Shakespeare Production – Greg Root, ’10 Alum
Extracurricular activities have proven to be an excellent channel for us (Fellows) to reach our students, as well as an alternative conduit for students to discover their strengths. In TFC’s most poignant demonstration of the extracurricular potential of student centered learning, TFC staff, Fellows and local teachers facilitated Heqing’s first student-driven Interdisciplinary Literacy Project, consisting of a full length trilingual Shakespeare production. The project involved over one hundred 7th and 8th grade students whose responsibilities included set production, publicity, and acting. The project redefined the traditional meaning of an “exemplary student” and the way time is spent out of class.
This was the first time students whose strengths were not in academia or sports had an opportunity to exhibit their talents. We discovered that some of the most prominent ‘underperformers’ in the classroom were in fact skilled actors or artists. Furthermore, since all preparation for the play was conducted during lunch and dinner time, every participating student was compelled to strictly budget their free time in order to meet both school and production responsibilities. Notwithstanding this, class participation increased dramatically among those students directly involved in the play, not least because they were offered a real-world application for their English language study.
Likewise, this was a great opportunity for TFC Fellows and local teachers to collaborate on an extra-curricular project. Through close cooperation with the local teachers on my Set Production team, I suddenly found myself much more engaged; this was not only with my school but also the surrounding community, who contributed generously to our costume wardrobe and set materials.
School Library – Ken Saathoff, '10 Alum
TFC is committed to more than just offering fellows valuable life experience; it has an ambitious mission to impact real positive change in rural Chinese education. TFC’s commitment to schools, therefore, goes far beyond putting bodies in a classroom. Rather, as fellows we are researchers and agents of change, looking to what our schools need to provide the best possible education for our students. My English students in Liuhe are bright, incredibly hard-working, and excited about learning, but they have no access to books other than their textbooks. After a trip to a bookstore several hours away, I brought back a few young adult novels in Chinese, as well as picture books in English. The response was beyond anything I could have expected. All forty-four of my students were overcome by excitement, and they passed the books around week after week, each eager to get a chance to read extra-curricular material. I felt bad not being able to afford more books for them, and that they themselves were unable to access a bookstore or library.
