No matter where they go, children are people with "roots"
Sowing Hometown Lessons
It wasn't until last year that a local class was set up for students that Zhang Chunyan, 37, realized that she didn't know enough about her hometown of Shuangcheng District, Harbin.
She didn't know how famous "Shuangcheng Corn" was, nor did she know that there was a master of folk printmaking in her hometown.
Zhang Chunyan is a head teacher of Shengye Branch of Shengfeng Town Central School, Shuangcheng District, Harbin, and has been teaching for 17 years.
What made her even more emotional was that batches of students seemed to be getting more and more unfamiliar with their hometown.
Zhang Chunyan found that many rural children did not understand simple farming common sense, and did not care how much land was planted and how many livestock were raised at home.
The students with good grades in the class are even more ignorant of this aspect.
"The heels don't stick to the ground." The rural children around Zhang Chunyan like urban culture and have no sense of pride or honor in their hometown.
"In the context of urbanization of education, rural education is increasingly divorced from rural children's experience, local natural ecology and community cultural reality, cutting off the connection between school classrooms and rural communities." According to Wu Zhihui, Dean of the China Rural Education Development Research Institute of Northeast Normal University In order to reverse this situation, it is a feasible strategy to implement localized education related to the soil and water of one party.
Let rural children return to their homeland
What kind of localized education do rural students need?
This is a topic that Wang Haiying, associate professor of the China Rural Education Development Research Institute of Northeast Normal University (hereinafter referred to as "China Rural Education Development Research Institute") has been concerned about and researched.
What makes her happy is that the rural curriculum, as an effective carrier of localized education, allows rural teachers to see opportunities and light.
Today, the country has proposed a comprehensive rural revitalization strategy, and the rural curriculum needs to be changed urgently to respond to the new requirements of social development for rural education.
"The development and implementation of the new rural curriculum should reflect the proximity of experience, the diversity of evaluation, the integration of inquiry and the comprehensiveness of goals." Wang Haiying said, but in the specific teaching practice, it is necessary to "step forward" and gradually internalize it into the rural teacher's style. daily education habits.
In recent years, China Rural Education Development Research Institute has cooperated with Xiangrong Public Welfare Fund to carry out the "Rural Education Future" project.
The project team used the winter and summer vacations to train rural teachers to learn the basic theories and development and design methods of rural courses.
Zhang Chunyan is the first beneficiary and practitioner of this project.
Once I went to a rural school for research, a real case made Wang Haiying feel a lot.
A student with poor grades disrupted classroom discipline and was punished by the teacher to clean the toilet.
But what the teacher did not expect was that the punished students worked very hard, and they took the initiative to find work the next day.
For this student, doing work was much more fun than sitting in class all the time.
"Students who are weak in cultural courses cannot find self-confidence and direction in school." This led the project team to set the most important principle when leading the design of local courses: it should be fun, experiential, and students are willing to participate. .
However, in the practice of the first batch of cooperative rural primary schools, the effect was not satisfactory.
Every week, rural teachers who have received training will share one or two collective online teaching in the WeChat contact group, and scholars such as Wang Haiying will comment.
Wang Haiying found that the rural teaching in the pilot school is not much different from the traditional Chinese class. The teacher stands to speak and the students sit and listen.
Rural teachers are also distressed that the specific teaching design fails to reflect interactivity and experience.
In July last year, the China Rural Education Development Research Institute launched the second rural curriculum pilot training in Xinyu, Jiangxi Province. More than 40 rural teachers from all over the country participated in the training.
This training is more inclined to course research and development practice. With the theme of "My Hometown", it has set up 8 sections including food, products, customs, characters, and territory.
The teachers were divided into 8 groups, each group claimed a board.
Individual brainstorming, each group's suggestions for revisions, experts and scholars' comments, and a set of processes have finally formed an ideal teaching plan that can be directly applied to the classroom.
The local curriculum should be designed based on the natural resources, regional characteristic resources, historical and cultural resources and students' existing life experience in the school's location, integrate local characteristics, and be interdisciplinary.
In Wang Haiying's view, the local curriculum created by experts, scholars and front-line educators is more grounded and easier to implement.
They hope to bring more people to try and work together, so that rural children's learning can be reconnected with the soil and water of their lives, so as to enhance their identity with their hometown and themselves, and to be a person with a rich spiritual world.
root down, grow up
At the beginning, Zhang Chunyan was worried that her knowledge was limited and she would not be able to design local lessons.
But after some advice from the expert team, she suddenly became enlightened.
For example, when designing the historical figures of the hometown, it can be combined with the present, and try to be as close to the life experience and life circle of students as possible.
Or according to the course content, choose a project-based learning method, let students investigate and understand, and show results in class.
Last year, Zhang Chunyan set up a pilot local class in a class in the sixth grade of the school. The first topic was "Hometown Products - Corn".
Before the class, the students asked their parents to learn about the planting and growing process of corn, and also learned how to make corn pasta.
In class, students present what they have learned through their investigations in the form of drawings or videos.
An introverted girl made a video of the process of steaming cornmeal and making cakes, which was praised by her classmates. Zhang Chunyan felt ashamed after watching it.
After 3 classes, Zhang Chunyan and the students re-acquainted with corn in their hometown.
Only then did she know that "Shuangcheng corn" is a national geographical indication of agricultural products, with high starch and lysine content, and it is a high-quality corn for both grain and feed.
In Jinpen Primary School, Gaota Town, Nanjiang County, Sichuan Province, which is more than 2,600 kilometers away from Shuangcheng District, Harbin, local lessons have become the school's teaching characteristics.
There are abundant plant resources around Jinpen Primary School.
After nearly a year of exploration, the local courses of Jinpen Primary School mainly include campus health tea making, crop planting, customs and products, etc.
The seventh class every Wednesday afternoon is the local class time for grades four to six at Jinpen Primary School.
Zhang Bin, the principal, said that small farmers, small engineers and small chefs in daily life are cultivated through local classes.
Golden-leaf trees grow on the campus of Jinpen Elementary School. In spring, the twigs sprout buds.
When the golden leaf is on the market, people will rush to buy it, make soup or steam it, and it is delicious.
But few people know that golden leaf jelly can be made from fresh leaves.
Making golden leaf jelly is an important part of the local class to know the golden leaf tree.
Before the class, Zhang Bin took the students to visit the local experienced elders and found a way to make golden leaf jelly.
In the end, teachers and students made a rare golden leaf jelly together, which made the eyes of the guests and parents who participated in the campus food festival bright.
Jinpen Primary School has formed a complete set of local curriculum development and implementation modes of "teacher training, investigation and understanding, theme selection, design plan, plan implementation, and achievement display".
What makes Zhang Bin happy is that the students with weaker grades in the cultural class are very active in the local class, and their eyes are bright.
In Zhang Bin's view, rural classes not only allow rural schools to find their own advantages and attractiveness, but also allow children to learn to learn spontaneously and consciously, allowing students to have more interaction with teachers, schools and families.
Rural students have mastered daily life skills in the original ecological work, and they also have a deep respect for the richness and beauty of their hometowns.
With the introduction of the national "double reduction" policy, Jinpen Primary School has also developed a series of interesting practical courses that can exercise children's hands-on ability, such as making sour water tofu, understanding farming tools, etc., so that rural children can experience And enjoy the rich local resources around.
Zhang Bin said that when the school implements the local curriculum, it naturally implements the "double reduction" policy.
Waiting for a little bit of starlight to gather into the sea
"The rural curriculum is not only interesting, but also a mediator of the teacher-student relationship." This is the common feeling of many rural teachers.
In traditional classrooms, teachers focus more on whether students' handwriting is neat and whether their answers are correct, and most of them are critical and harsh on students' evaluation perspectives.
In the rural class, the teacher's status as a teacher has changed into a collaborator and an appreciator, and the students who did not perform well in the cultural class also found opportunities to show their skills and gradually gained self-confidence.
Now, from the northeast to the southwest, more than 20 rural primary schools from 7 provinces have joined the "Future in the Countryside" project.
Teachers began to bring rural students to re-acquaint themselves with their hometowns and return to their hometowns.
In Mingde Primary School in Tongyu County, Jilin Province, three teachers participated in the pilot program of rural lessons.
Through participation and observation, Cui Hao, the vice principal of Mingde Primary School, found that in other classes, students are too relaxed and active, which will affect the teaching effect, but in the rural class, the opposite is true.
In a rustic class on pasta making, students rushed to showcase the fruits of their labor.
At the end of the class, a student didn't want to waste the fruits of his labor, so he licked the plate directly, and he was still not satisfied.
The opening of rural courses has also made Ji Tingting, a young teacher of Huili Quanquan Primary School in Huili Town, Yantai, Shandong, have more reflections and thoughts on rural education.
In a local class, Ji Tingting took the students to study "Hometown Architecture I Know - Penglai Pavilion".
In class, she used pictures, audio recordings, videos, and group work, but student engagement was not as good as she expected.
When summarizing and reflecting, she found that students should play the roles of tour guides and tourists in the classroom, and simulate travel scenarios to introduce and understand Penglai Pavilion, so that the students' participation will be higher, and it will also stimulate the children's interest in independent learning after class.
In Wang Haiying's view, there is still a long way to go in the implementation and promotion of local classes.
The traditional test-taking orientation makes some rural teachers think that doing rural education is "not doing a proper job".
At the same time, due to the lack of evaluation and stimulation mechanisms, many teachers are not interested in the practice of rural education curriculum, let alone developing curriculum.
Not only that, many rural schools have large staff mobility, lack of professional talents, and the ability to develop local curriculum needs to be improved.
Scholars in the project team called for the hope that through the participation of rural teachers, a "new rural education" model will be gradually formed, led by experts, independently designed and implemented by rural teachers, promoted by administrative forces and participated by social forces.
The rural teachers who participated in the pilot project also look forward to the fact that their hometown is no longer a place for rural children to flee, but a harbor where they can send their love for a lifetime, a paradise in their memory and a concern in their hearts.
In this way, in the future, wherever these students go, they will be people with "roots".
China Youth Daily, China Youth Daily reporter Wang Peilian Source: China Youth Daily