Improve Educational Equity in Rural China

Dear Donors,

Last month, we held a weeklong education seminar for teachers in Fuyang, Anhui. The seminar is a part of the OCEF Pilot Library Project that focuses on training and helping educators develop a healthy reading environment for school age children. A total of twenty four teachers participated. The teachers come from different parts of China at where OCEF has long-term local funding programs. They have been teaching with very limited resources and are very eager to learn new knowledge and skills. During the seminar week, they visited several different well-established school and community libraries, and then spent the rest of the time practicing reciting passages, sharing stories, doing hands-on activities, analyzing book passages, watching performances, and browsing through educational forums. After the seminar ended, we received very positive feedback from all the participants.

We hope that through seminars like the one in Fuyang, we can help teachers in better evaluate the reading environment at their respective schools and promote their students' interest in reading. After we worked with multiple schools on building libraries, we realized that the mere existence of books was often not sufficient to encourage children to learn independent reading, make it a part of their lives, and truly find pleasure in doing so. We have to consider many factors, such as the age-appropriateness and diversity of the books, the organization and accessibility of the libraries (lighting, seating space, catalogue, open hours, etc), and the schools' cooperativeness in ensuring reading is integrated into everyday classroom practice. We soon found that the most efficient and effective way to keep all of these factors in check and continuously improve the reading culture in a school is to have motivated teachers who strongly believe in reading for enjoyment. Unfortunately, working at rural schools seated in poverty and desolation, often the teachers simply do not have an up to date knowledge of children's literature and pedagogy. Therefore, we started the Pilot Library Project, in which we focus on helping the children through helping the teachers. The teachers go through training seminars and take what they learn in the seminars to set up independent reading sessions, story time, book clubs, and guided reading in their classes. We hope that, by keeping such practice consistent, the children will grow up in a lively reading culture within the school environment and benefit from the experience in the long run.

Without your help, we could not have made any of these possible. Once again, thank you for your kindness and generosity!

Sincerely,

Overseas China Education Foundation

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