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Duke Students Act on Dream by Helping Rural Schools in China

Duke students send more than a dozen voulunteers to rural China to open libraries, offer technology training and teach English

For three years, they had talked a lot about contemporary China. Over time, the discussion group for the Chinese-speaking community in the Durham, N.C., area illuminated a contrast -- a concern about development in China on one hand and a lack of action on the other.

By February, a group of Duke University students was tired of talking.

The students, all of Chinese origin, hatched a plan to send more than a dozen volunteers to Chinese schools during the summer of 2004 to open libraries, offer technology training and teach English. They appealed to Duke's Asian/Pacific Studies Institute for $2,700 and recruited friends to help.

For their destination, they picked rural China, where some had grown up or visited or done field research. They called their work the Dream Project.

"It's really empowering," said Katie Xiao, a junior political science major. "There's only so much thinking you can do. Then, it's about action."

The Dream Project -- the official name as a nonprofit agency will be Dream Corps for Harmonious Development International --is guided by a Chinese saying, "Growing trees is a decade-long business. Cultivating persons is a century-long project."

The mission is to address the divide between rural and urban China by improving schools, promoting technology, encouraging economic growth and improving the quality of life. Volunteers plan to do this each summer by working closely with teachers, community leaders and students.

"There are a lot of NGOs and government foundations," said Jun Luo, a fourth-year graduate student in philosophy. "They're donating money and equipment. But we are committed to going there again and again to see to the long-term effective use of the resources in a way that is welcomed by the local folks."

Ralph Litzinger, director of the Asian/Pacific Studies Institute, was one of several faculty members from Duke and UNC who supported the project. Litzinger, associate professor of cultural anthropology, called the Dream Project "academic activism at its best."

"The Dream Project is one of the first of its kind in the U.S. academy," Litzinger said. "At Duke, it represents the creative ways in which graduate students, undergraduates and faculty in Chinese studies have been working together to devise new programs that are geared toward addressing issues of education, unequal development and advocacy work."

This summer 15 volunteers --including scholars from Beijing and the University of Pennsylvania as well as locals from the Hunan Province --visited rural villages in central, west and north China. Each of the teams interviewed teachers, students and parents to better understand the public school curriculum and community commitment to education.

"We visited 10 schools," said Huaiyuan Chen, a senior. "Every one had a library. Every one had books. But none of them were open. The teachers didn't use the library as a resource to teach."

The problem, Chen said, was that teachers were geared toward teaching students to pass state tests --not teaching for the sake of learning.

At the Lingfang Central Elementary School, for example, the Dream Project team taught students how to manage the library, and taught teachers about the role of the library in education. They also arranged for nearly 300 books to be donated to the library.

In the Shandong Province, volunteers spent much of their time teaching English, hosting seminars comparing the American and Chinese education systems and exploring how the rural schools might use technology to boost student achievement. Xiao and junior Calvin Kung shared American magazines, such as "The New Yorker" and "InStyle," and taught music lessons.

Their team also helped the Lou Zhuang Township develop a Web site, making it the first township in the county with its own site.

"Calvin and I were like celebrities," Xiao said. "The students brought out their notebooks and had us write messages. We were autographing like crazy."

Afterwards, one student wrote a letter to Kung, saying, "Wow. The world is so big. We didn't know before you came."

Duke sophomore Da Liu and a doctoral student from Peking University went on a fact-finding trip to the Tucheng Township in the Yunnan Province.

It was the most remote of the Dream Project sites, where one village in the township doesn't have electricity and some children who were enrolled in school -- and dozens were not -- had to walk an hour to get there. Most students only had 45 minutes a day to work on homework; other free hours were spent farming.

One young girl, who talked to the volunteers about some problems in her school, inspired the idea of creating a "seedling fund." The idea would be to identify intellectually gifted but financially needy elementary students and provide a scholarship to support their education and offer them opportunities, such as trips to other parts of China, to broaden their world view.

In their interviews with parents, students and teachers at six schools, the volunteers learned about the need for technology training and physical education equipment, which they provided. They taught the students to take care of the new equipment.

"These kids can really start to manage something themselves -- rather than just doing what their teachers and parents say," Liu said.

The Dream Project leaders took their ideas to Beijing on June 22, hosting a conference at Peking University for scholars, school principals, non-governmental organizations and volunteers. More than 50 people attended, asking pointed questions about whether the enthusiasm that led to this summer's success stories can be sustained from Durham.

Xing Hu, a public policy master's student who is the group's president, says yes.

She and other volunteers are studying the research they collected and planning for next summer. They are asking themselves what rural communities really need and how the Dream Project can best contribute.

"We are there to introduce innovation and expose them to new ideas," Xiao said. "The main problem in the rural villages is they don't have the teaching capacity of the city schools."

No details have been finalized, but she expects volunteers to return to the same three communities next summer, and to eventually add more sites. Their work will continue to revolve around schools as central to a community's health, with an eye toward opening more libraries to be used as public gathering spaces.

"We want to achieve a big impact," Hu said.

 

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