Mutual Healing in the Hills: Volunteer Teaching in Guizhou
By Ziting Jiang and Tianyi Ma
Mutual Healing in the Hills: Volunteer Teaching in Guizhou
By Ziting Jiang and Tianyi Ma
In this piece, Ziting Jiang and Tianyi Ma follow the efforts of DKU volunteer teachers in a rural, mountainous area of Guizhou, as both they and their students struggle to learn and come to understand one another.
Standing atop a hill in the mountainous region of Tongren, Guizhou, Helene Gu, a senior undergraduate from Duke Kunshan University (DKU), looked out over the undulating hills surrounding her. The scene reminded her of what she had heard numerous times from her father, who had described growing up in a similar type of mountainous area.
“He was raised in a rural area in Jiangxi, just like here in Tongren,” Gu said. “My grandmother was the only teacher in his village. It was because of her that my father had access to quality education resources and eventually went to a university in the United States, changing his destiny.”
Although she was born and raised in the United States, Gu herself had always been interested in rural education in China’s impoverished regions. “That’s why I’m here,” she told a reporter at the scene.
Gu was standing on a hill in a place considered one of the least developed provinces in China. And she was there, in part, to follow in the footsteps of her education-oriented grandmother before her: As part of a nation-wide volunteer teacher program to assist less-developed areas of the country. With a GDP per capita of $7,693 in 2023, Guizhou province ranks 28th among 31 provinces and municipalities economically, according to the Chinese government.
Economics mirrors educational attainment. According to the seventh national census released in 2020, Guizhou lies at the bottom of the educational rankings in China, with 48.63% of its citizens failing to finish nine-year compulsory education and less than 6% having the opportunity to pursue higher education.
To combat this situation, in 2003, the Communist Youth League Central Committee and the Ministry of Education co-released a new initiative: “University Student Volunteer Service West Program,” which encouraged college students to assist with elementary education in less developed regions. This initiative has been continuing and, according to the latest data from the program’s official website, the number of students volunteering has reached 100,000 per year.
Duke Kunshan University (DKU) is one of the institutions participating in the volunteer teaching effort. As a global institution based in Jiangsu – a well-developed area that was listed as third by China’s GDP per capita ranking in 2023 – the province is home to DKU, which actively organizes volunteer teaching activities as part of its mission to foster social responsibility and contribute to the broader community, according to Jingjing Zhou, one of the organizers of the DKU volunteer group.
Starting in 2021, the university has sent over 40 students in total to primary and middle schools in Tongren, Guizhou, according to the official DKU website.
In the summer of 2024, 20 DKU undergraduate students took part in the voluntary teaching program at Tongren No. 33 Elementary School. Constructed in 2019 and equipped with teaching facilities that include computers, electronic whiteboards, and projectors, the school looks like most primary schools in urban areas. That’s because of co-operative financial support coming directly from Jiangsu province, Guizhou’s supporting partner.
Tongren No. 33 Elementary School, which has developed with financial support from Jiangsu province.
The school has 733 students in total, a large number of whom are Miao, an ethnic minority in China coming largely from Guizhou, Yunnan, and other areas of southwest China. Among all the students, there are five physically and mentally disabled students, and 173 described as “left-behind children” – those whose parents make a living in distant big cities, leaving them with elderly relatives. Multiple problems plague a number of these students’ homes: alcoholism, drug abuse, even parents incarcerated for domestic violence, according to a number of the faculty at the school. Limited resources are available to assist with these kinds of problems, but teachers at the school said they regularly do home visits to check on children’s welfare.
To further assist these children, DKU volunteers were paired up with teachers across different grades to assist with class management and curriculum design. The DKU volunteer teachers hailed from diverse well-developed urban regions, such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Jiangsu. Three international students were also involved, including Helene Gu from America.
DKU Volunteer team and the leaders from Tongren No. 33 Elementary School.
The first day of class, the classroom dynamic stunned some volunteers: Chaos reigned over the entire class. Children immersed themselves with their own activities, conversing loudly with their neighbors. They spontaneously ran to the back of the classroom, scuffling with each other. Whenever volunteers asked a question, all the kids rushed to answer, without raising their hands.
“I thought children in the mountains would be as eager for knowledge as described in news reports, but it turned out that nobody listened to us,” said Yimeng Yuan, one of the voluntary teachers there.
Overwhelmed with the disorder, the volunteers turned to the school’s teachers for help. The scene that unfolded next chilled them: Picking up a ruler on the podium, a teacher whipped it at the offending child’s backside without saying anything.
Some volunteers were taken aback by such forms of enforcing discipline.
“This is by no means acceptable in our schools. Teachers are not allowed to physically reprimand students in any way,” Yuan said.
National law backs up Yuan’s view – even if traditional methods persist in some areas. In 2021, the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China explicitly prohibited corporal punishment in schools. This practice was adopted in big cities even before the regulation, but for relatively less-developed areas like Guizhou, common knowledge dictates that traditional practices of child-rearing and discipline continue to be practiced.
The volunteer’s experience in the first day led them to question the effectiveness of their efforts. “I began to question the purpose of our presence. What can we truly offer these children in just two weeks? What substantial change can we bring to them?” said Sheng’en Li, another volunteer.
Disheartened by the gap between ideals and reality, the volunteers almost lost their motivation. In their hotel rooms in downtown Tongren, a 20-minute drive from the outskirts of the city where the school was, everyone spread out listlessly on their beds without a word. Silence enveloped the room.
All of a sudden, the advice given during the pre-departure training by Shilai Li, team leader of the Beijing Dandelion Social Heart Team, who had worked at the first junior high school specifically established for migrant children, struck Yuan. “She mentioned that teaching support should start not with what you want to teach, but with what the students actually need. This made me reconsider our curriculum, thinking about the different perspectives we could bring to them.”
To better understand these students’ desires and needs, Yuan visited their homes with a local teacher, Ms. Ran. “I had expected the students there to be living in poor conditions, but the reality was still astonishing when I actually saw it with my own eyes,” said Yuan. “I was taken aback by the children’s living conditions; I had never imagined that such scenes, which I thought only existed in TV dramas, were their reality.”
Yuan doing a home visit with Ms. Ran, to understand the needs of Tongren students.
Yuan was referring to the fact that a number of the students face problematic domestic issues – parental alcoholism, domestic violence – and a larger number were left-behind children, living with grandparents as their parents worked at factories in large cities such as Shanghai and Shenzhen.
“They have no choice but to seek jobs outside. Large cities have more opportunities. The entire family relies on them,” Ran explained.
Typically, these kids were not the only children in their families. Four or five children per family was quite common. Some parents struggle to care for such large families: One of the Tongren students suffers from narcolepsy, but is one of many siblings; he often falls asleep in the hallways of the school and other locations. His parents know about the condition but lack the money to treat it. According to one of his teachers, his parents have said as long as he goes to and comes back from school alive, it’s okay.
As members of the Miao ethnic minority, families in Tongren have not been regulated by the national birth control policy in the same way as the majority Han ethnicity, who could only have one or two children before the introduction of the three-child policy in 2020. “Because of the heavy financial burden in these families, many of my students choose to drop out to work after middle school,” Teacher Ran said.
After returning to the base, Yuan shared her observations with other volunteers. Helen Gu, the Chinese-American volunteer whose grandmother had been a teacher, was moved by the plight of some of the children.
“I felt heartbroken because I could have easily been born in such a family,” said Gu. “So, I thought to myself, what would I do if I were these children, living in these circumstances?”
After communicating with the schoolteachers, the volunteers decided to design the curriculum based on the children’s interests, focusing on all-round development education with lessons including art, sports, and life skills.
Looking at the wall filled with stickers about these children’s dreams, Yuan noticed that most of the students were thinking about conventional careers like teachers, police officers, and doctors. She began to introduce different professions in the format of a “Life Auction,” where the children could bid on their favorite careers using “creativity,” “leadership,” and “expressive skills” as auction tokens.
Students actively participate in the “Life Auction”.
During this activity, Jiali Zheng, a local kid who harbored a love for painting yet lacked professional support, discovered a newfound realization, saying: “This is the first time I realized that being an artist can also be respected and recognized.”
Discovering the children’s interest in creative work, Yuan also decided to introduce collage poetry. With cut-out words from articles, the kids could piece together colorful poems on cardstock. “I was amazed to find that the children who had low test scores created some of the most imaginative poems in the world,” said Yuan.
The collage poem that was made by children. One of the lines reads: “A gaze is only a kind of indifference; sadness builds up ages of silence.”
At the end of the class, students pasted all the snippets of the poems together into a crown and garlanded it onto their volunteer teacher’s head.
Yuan was not alone in creating classes around students’ interests. Gu, the Chinese American volunteer, also developed unconventional courses. She found that the children were curious about her background. “They kept asking me why I have a Chinese face but am an American,” said Gu.
Harnessing the children’s curiosity, she shared her own story, themed around the American Dream, telling the kids how her father, who was born in the countryside like them, changed his fate by studying hard and getting into a prestigious university. “I told them that America is not so far away, and if they work hard, they can get there too,” Gu explained.
During the next art class, she received a special piece of artwork: a drawing with a bridge where on one side was the American flag and on the other side the Chinese flag. “I felt as if I saw their yearning for the future,” said Gu.
On the morning of the last day of the teaching program, the volunteers began jamming candies and handmade souvenirs received from the children into their luggage. The children blocked the door of the volunteers’ resting room, clinging to their legs and begging them not to leave.
Kids clinging to the volunteers’ legs, as the program came to an end.
It was 12 o’clock – time to go. Finally, the children let go of the volunteers’ legs. Before leaving, Yuan had printed out individual photos taken with all the children, inscribing them with her telephone number before gifting them to the kids. “If they need me, I will always be by their side,” she said.
The gift Yuan prepared for the kids, with her phone number on the back.
Ziting Jiang
Ziting Jiang is an undergraduate student of the Class of 2027 from Jiangsu, China. She always believes in the power of human connection and is on a journey to reach broader realities through her writing.
Tianyi Ma
Tianyi Ma is an undergraduate student of the Class of 2027 from Zhejiang, China. She believes in the transformative power of communication, dedicating herself to crafting words that resonate with readers and awaken the soul.
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