By Yu Zhang | Project Leader
Dear Friends and Supporters,
Starting from a teacher training program followed by a workshop in 2017 Summer, the Footprint project came to an end in early 2019, culminating in a workshop to exchange and iterate the approach in Guilin, Oct. 2018, and a student portfolio contest in which 16 students won the award (Please see the attachment for the detailed contest result announcement).
Despite the unfavorable conditions caused by score-oriented education in secondary schools in rural China, teachers, students, family members, our program staff and volunteers, and YOU, our generous donors, joined efforts to pull this together. Family members helped locate the interviewee and arrange the logistics of the visit/interviews. Teachers actively sought ways to help students follow and immerse themselves in the learning process, such as accompanying a student to the initial interview to send him/her onto the track, providing office PCs for student use, using teachers’ own spare time and whichever form feasible and effective, including ad-hoc meetings, one-on-one tutoring, QQ group messages to guide students.Students each spent more than 40 hours on the project, contributing a lot of their own spare time, many as novice computer users having to quickly improving their computer and information skills, and keeping encouraging and helping each other during the inquiry process. We hold dear to our heart the passionate devotion from our staff and volunteers, esp. our long-term specialist advisors Liyun and Wailing. And, to make all these beautiful things move along as it is of today, we know it all along that it is the support from you, practically and spiritually, fueled us, the program team, to continue push it forward.
By interviewing our past and current participating students, we were encouraged by the finding that our actively engaged students cherished the oral history as a door open, not only towards the academic knowledge and skills, but also towards the understandings that can help them to meet challenges of current and future life. The questions they have raised and pondered over along the oral history inquiry, will come back again, requesting their answers, and their youthful quests now contain the key to break through these future challenges. Listening attentively, the sound of footfalls of our forefathers is never far away.
We feel greatly honored to have been accompanying the teachers and students to listen to the footfalls of our forefathers, together with you. Though with the 2018 Footprint program coming to an end, we will say goodbye for now, please be well and sound till we meet again on GlobalGiving. Meanwhile, please tune in our umbrella project https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/empower-rural-china-students-21st-century-skills/ for future developments of Evergreen initiatives to empower the rural teachers and students in China.
Wish you all the best.
Footprint Program Team
Sept. 24, 2019
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