DukeEngage | Duke Center for Civic Engagement

In the three years since its establishment at the university, DukeEngage, the volunteer service program for undergraduates, has proven highly appealing among students, attracting more than 1500 applications since its full launch year in 07-08.  More than 800 students have participated in service around the world since DukeEngage began.

Increasingly, DukeEngage is also attracting faculty into its program leaders ranks, whether inspired by a connection to one’s research, an opportunity to work more collaboratively with students, or a chance to enhance one’s teaching back at Duke.

Ralph Litzinger, associate professor of cultural anthropology, has written extensively on ethnic minority politics, nationalism and the state in China. Since the Summer of 2008, and in collaboration with J.P. Morgan, Litzinger has led the DukeEngage in Beijing program which places student volunteers at the Dandelion Middle School (Pugongying Zhongxue), located in Daxing District in Beijing to work with children of migrant workers—rural residents who have moved to China’s largest cities in the last 20 years.  Often underpaid, with no health or employment benefits, and subjected to a range of discriminatory practices, China’s migrant workers have built the new global cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou, among other places, and increasingly provide service labor to China’s emerging urban middle class.  The children of these migrant workers are at the center of the DukeEngage program’s work.  Because migrant families lack the residential permit that grants access to the state education system, as well as the financial resources necessary to pay the steep tuition of private schools, more and more migrant youth now attend the “unofficial” schools that have sprung up in the last 10 years through the extraordinary efforts of Chinese and international education and social activists. 

Below, Professor Litzinger responds to questions about the evolution of his DukeEngage program in Beijing and how it has emboldened his academic research.

1.  In what way does The DukeEngage in Beijing program you lead connect to your ongoing research? 

For the last 20 years, my research in China has almost consistently focused on questions of power, inequality, and social and economic forms of discrimination and marginalization.  The first phase of my career explored these issues in the context of state policies of development and modernization in regions of China inhabited predominantly by ethnic minorities.  The second phase of my research and publishing career has focused on issues of economic change and environmental and ecological justice on the Tibetan plateau, particularly in the Himalayan regions of northwest Yunnan Province. The third phase of my career is returning me to Beijing, where my studies in China began as a graduate student in the early 1990s.  The Dandelion Middle School, the site of our Duke Engage Beijing project, has enabled a long term research project on migrant workers, and in particular on the families and children who began to come to Beijing in the late 1990s from all over rural China to build and service the astonishing local city that we see today.  But this is not just a project about labor, and education, and migrant kids.  It is also about globalization and its relationship to the Chinese government, as it eagerly attempts to address the astonishing degrees of economic disparity that today characterize China. Through our partnership and collaboration with a number of different non-governmental organizations and corporate social responsibility projects, I have been able to begin to map the complex ways in which both Chinese and international capital is pushing particular kinds of development and attempting to work with different sectors of Chinese society and government to address the many social and economic problems in China today.  The migrant labor issue is obviously one of the largest and one of the most politically charged, in large part because it is always about issues of power, inequality and marginalization—the core focus of my research agenda in China.

2.  Given the other demands you face as an engaged member of the faculty, how do your responsibilities related to DukeEngage fit into a very busy schedule, and why do you feel it's an important element of your professional experience? 

For me, as with many of my colleagues, the Duke Engage Beijing project is a massive amount of work, in large part because of the amount of time, energy and labor it takes to set up and maintain this kind of project in China. I do this because of my commitment to make this kind of pedagogical project part of a larger process of reflecting on issues of advocacy, activism, and politics of intervention, historically and in our present moment.  At the same time, I am in a constant battle to convince many of my colleagues at Duke that this kind of pedagogy is not divorced from larger theoretical debates—about power, knowledge, capitalism, globalization, the nature of oppression, the possibilities for resistance that are so much at the center of discussion in the social sciences and humanities at Duke.  Admittedly, it is sometimes a hard sell.

3.  Your particular DukeEngage program has proven to be one of the most successful and is being offered again in 2010.  How would you characterize the success of the program thus far and what are you planning to do differently—if anything—in 2010?

One way to measure “success” is the enormous interest our project generates each year among Duke students—over the first two years we have had about 60 applicants a year for six spots each summer.  But for me a better measure of success is that all 12 students who have volunteered at the school and in Beijing over the last two summers have come away from the program feeling like they have had to personally and collectively struggle to finds ways to work productively with the staff, teachers, and students at the school.  If struggle and small measure of accomplishment occur each summer, then we are experiencing some kind of success.  For me, working at the school is not supposed to be easy; nor is something called “engagement” always guaranteed.  We have all had to work hard to adjust to living in an area of the city that sees few if any foreign tourists and has none of the usual amenities found in the more ritzy and international sections of the Beijing.  We’ve had to learn to follow the everyday schedule of the school, which is highly structured and organized and disciplinarily rigorous.  And we’ve had to learn to first listen to what the school needs, and then figure how to act in a meaningful and effectively away.  That our students over the last two summers have been able to meet these challenges, and come up with projects that the school, and the staff and the students greatly appreciated, is what has made our program a “success.”  For the school, success is measured differently.  It is measured in terms of how many kids it can keep in school, and how well those who remain in school do.  But it is also measured in terms of economic and political survival.  As long as the school remains open, enrollment numbers stay high, and innovation is part of the curriculum, then the school will be a success.  If the Duke presence there can play even a small role in the survival and growth of the school, then I think we can continue to say our own program is a success. 

4.  What do you hope DukeEngage students come away with after completing the Beijing program?

My first desire is for them to come away with a greater appreciation of how a middle that must depend on constant fund raising and volunteerism works in China.  More importantly, I want them to learn about the political, economic, and social conditions of migrant life, what it means for individuals and families from all across the Chinese countryside to live in a city such as Beijing, to live without the social support system that was once assured under socialism, and to now struggle with everyday forms of discrimination, the privatization of health care and education, and how these people’s lives are so precariously linked to global capitalism and China’s place in the world system.

5.  What personally have you come away with through your participation with DukeEngage?  

What I have come away with is obviously a greater understanding of migrant labor and education issues in China, which was part of the goal from the very start.  More practically, I have come away with a massively expanded social network in Beijing, not just in the academy, but in sectors of contemporary society I previously had limited access to – in the international and domestic non-governmental scene, in the world of Chinese and international journalism (because of the intense interest in the school), and in the corporate social responsibility scene.

 

photo by Eric Van Danen

Senior Duke student Ying-Ying Lu pursued an independent project in Beijing which drew upon her academic interests and background.  Below, she explains what inspired her to pursue this particular project and how she will be channeling her experience back into her life at Duke.

 

1.  What drew you to this particular project?

The summer after my freshman year, when I volunteered with Dream Corps International in Beijing, was the first time I stepped foot in a migrant worker community in China. That experience opened up a whole new world to me, and I returned to the same community during the summer of 2008 to complete an oral history research project with local children and their parents. The families' stories fascinated me. This year, I knew I wanted to pursue a project that would benefit an organization that supports migrant workers in China, an issue that I have come to care deeply about.

2.  What excited you about working with your community partner?

They are doing some incredible work in Beijing. In partnering with the Cultural Development Center, I worked specifically with the Migrant Women's Club, a branch of the organization that supports women close to my own age who have left their rural hometowns to travel to Beijing in search of work. Oftentimes, these women find themselves caught in cycle of low-paying jobs and a harsh reality that is far divorced from their idealized images of the city. They lack the technical skills, resources, and legal protections to address these challenges. The Migrant Women's Club offers legal aid, a domestic workers support network, a writing workshop, and psychological consultations. The group's programming is run entirely by migrant women themselves! I think this final characteristic bodes well for the organization's potential for sustained, deep impact.

3.  What benefit ultimately do you hope your service will have for your community partner and your host community?

The Center has hosted only a few foreign volunteers in the past.  Going in, I hoped that my language and documentary skills would prove beneficial where needed, and that I would be able to use my outsider's perspective to find creative ways to revise or expand programming. On a personal level, I hoped to forge deep, genuine, and lasting connections with at least a few of the women who are being served by my organization, and to influence them in a positive direction.

4.  How do you hope to put into action what you learned through your DukeEngage experience now back again at Duke? 

I co-teach a house course at Duke entitled "Understanding China," through which I can share my experiences and reflections with a group of peers in an academic setting. Additionally, I plan to continue taking classes related to China and to further explore the topic of migrant labor through independent research with faculty. After graduation, I hope to either attend graduate school in China or spend some time working with an organization in China that deals with migrant issues.
 

DukeEngage is featuring students this year who have participated in both group programs and independent projects.  Check back regularly to view the latest student profile.  

Temperature report in DaXing, Beijing, China:
Thurs and Fri: 38 degrees Celsius = 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit.
Last Thurs: 39 degrees Celsius = 102.2 degrees Fahrenheit.

With no AC at the Dandelion school, we find little reprieve from the intense, dry heat of July in China that is only beginning. I have found some ways of coping, however.

1) I hide in Dandelion’s library, one of the coolest rooms in the school.
2) I buy and eat one of China’s wonders: a popsicle.

Even though it sounds pretty commonplace, you have to understand what a popsicle in China means. They are exotic as they are numerous in variety. There are icy ones and creamy ones, and some that are both. They vary in flavor from peach, to grape, honeydew and cantaloupe, hawfruit, taro and chocolate, coffee, yogurt, green (mung) bean, sweet red bean, chocolate, strawberry, to blueberry. And, they’re 1 RMB each, which equates about 15 US cents.

The students at Dandelion have to cope with the heat as well. There are fans in the classrooms, which help a little. However, when the sweltering afternoon strikes at its peak, they seem to drop off one by one into a stupor. Our whole DukeEngage group tends to take little naps in the afternoon along with the rest of the school because the heat just seems to sap out all our energy.

Despite the temperatures, however, we manage to maintain pretty busy schedules. I’ll outline a typical day here:

8:00 a.m. – 9:40 a.m. My class that I’m assigned to usually has Chinese language and Math classes. Inbetween, they have 5 minute breaks, eye massage exercises, and morning school meeting.

*note: everyone in our group has been assigned to a class in the 7th grade, so we have gotten to know the 7th graders very well!

10:05 a.m. – 10:50 a.m. English class. I help out with the English class by usually pronouncing English words for the class, reading out English passages and having them read after me, or asking questions in English – all to help improve their oral proficiency.

11:00 – 11:50 a.m. Usually I go back to the school’s volunteer office and do some work until lunch. This includes data-entry, such as the grades of the quizzes our healthteam gave during our health and hygiene classes that we taught to the 7th grade classes. Sometimes I spend time working with Kim and Alice on designing the next week’s healthy living course. Other times we talk to administrators and teachers to get their opinions on our lesson plans, our projects, or to get permission to give out awards for an art contest on health topics. These include oral hygiene, general hygiene (handwashing, showering), smoking, drinking, hydration, and exercise.

11:50 a.m. – 1:30 p.m. Lunch and break time. I usually eat with the students in my class in their classroom. 2 or 3 students are assigned to go to the school kitchen/cafeteria and bring back large pots with food for the rest of the class, and everyone ladles food into their personal lunchboxes and eats at their desks, or outside. Usually all the food is vegetarian, from tofu, eggplant, zucchini, cabbage, tomatoes and egg, although sometimes they have some meat, and once a week they have a chicken leg for lunch.

After eating, all the kids have different tasks to clean up the classroom, from sweeping the floor to cleaning the tables and taking out the trash. Then the students either nap, study, or go to the library and read.

This is when I usually hide in the library.

The English section in the Dandelion school library actually has some interesting selections, such as the full set of Anne Rice vampire novels I’ve begun, old classic Nancy Drew and Hardy boys books, the Baby-sitters clubs, other novels such as Memoirs of a Geisha, Angels and Demons, and even some Chinese classics translated into English!

Then I get a popsicle, because this is when it really gets bad.

1:30 – 1:40 p.m. Afternoon News. The school broadcasts the radio news station, which all the students are supposed to listen to.

1:40 – 2:25 p.m. Self-study class, which is a period during which the class does homework. Usually I help with their English homework or with their oral english project that Alice, Anna, and I set up; They write a play and act it out, all in English.

Often during these periods, which vary each day and for each class, we teach the hygiene courses.
I have also used these times to interview and film each student in my class in English, to gauge their current proficiency level.

During the week the kids take other classes too, such as history, biology, geography, art, music, library time, and phys.ed. There are EIGHT total periods in their day!

5:15 p.m. Classes end. I hang out with the kids!

6:00 p.m. Dinner. I eat with the class, just like during lunch.

7:00 – 9:00 p.m. 2 nightly self-study sessions, with a break in-between. Sometimes they are structured so a teacher comes to help with their homework (usually math). Occasionally I stay for a while to help tutor English, or to help out with the English play project. But I have to make sure I leave around 9 because the last bus home leaves at 9:20p.m!

9:00 p.m. onwards.

I retire at our hotel and work some more on data-entry, lesson-planning, and research on toilet solutions for the school. I usually send emails because the internet works slowly and unreliably at the school.

Finally, I hang out with the others and watch a Korean drama on TV, or have bookclub time in which we talk about the plot of a Chinese romance novel.

SLEEP! (and dream of popsicles…)

 

If you looked out at the Dandelion schoolyard two days ago, you would have seen: a long row of ping-pong tables adjacent to the 7th grade boys dorm, the kitchen, and the student restroom; the mosaics made of jewel-toned tiles and pieces of mirror, lining the gates and some of the walls, the administrative building with a façade of colorfully painted flowers and a large rainbow; murals depicting more scenes of flowers and trees; 2 rows of 3 basketball hoops each, and 4 fully-grown, 20 year-old college women flailing around on the court, trying to steal the basketball from at least 10 young, energetic Chinese boys – students of Dandelion Middle school. Those women were Alex, Meng, Kim, and me. 

The boys showed us girls up, but I should say that we didn’t intend on playing a full-out game. The afternoon began innocently enough; Right before the last class ended at 5:15 p.m., Meng and I decided to shoot some hoops. So we walked onto the schoolyard, where some class was still in their 体育 (physical education) class either practicing flips, or playing games such as ping-pong, badminton, and basketball. There were still some empty hoops left, so Meng and I started shooting (terribly). Soon, class let out and students poured into the schoolyard. A few 7th grade boys, some of whom we knew, stood on the edge of the court and stared at our ball, which we took to mean that they wanted to play. We asked if they wanted to play. They said yes. A whirlwind of action ensued – Kim and Alex joined in, and the boys started expertly dividing us into teams of four by random selection. Before I knew it, I was running around and trying to intercept passes and catch rebounds, playing against students who were all shorter than me. And better than me.

Dandelion Middle School is a dynamic place. The same afternoon, I also observed students playing donated violins and brass instruments in the open space between the music room and some student dorms. Later, a 7th grade student took me to a classroom where students could read English picture books for fun and explain them to each other. I helped this student read through The Little Cricket.

The murals and mosaics that I mentioned earlier are a project initiated by Ms. Lily Yeh (www.barefootartists.org), who has done art projects in different schools back in the states. She collaborates with the art teachers and students, who all contribute to making these amazing works. Kim, Alice and I wanted to help out, so they had us outline a new design on the wall in chalk - so the students and teachers could begin attaching the tiling and mirror pieces on the design. Also, there are multiple different kinds of flowers in these designs, so many that Meng was inspired to use these as icons in the layout she is designing for the new Dandelion English website.

The second day we arrived at Dandelion last week, there was a ceremony for the return of a past volunteer who taught English at the school. She came back from Britain with English awards for the students. This event was held in the back of the school, in a large building used as an auditorium. It was quite an experience for us – all the students brought their chairs from their classrooms in order to sit down in the auditorium. That very same day, a professor from Bei Da (Peking University), came to Dandelion to give a lecture on neo-Confucianism and how it can apply to modern pedagogy.

The third day at Dandelion, the 7th and 9th graders went on a field trip to two different places: the Old Summer palace (Yuan Ming Yuan圆明园), and the botanical gardens (Beijing Zhi Wu yuan 北京植物圆). Highlights of the day included the students dragging me to climb up a hill, only to laugh at me when I slipped on the downwards slope and fell, and our students “adopting” our cameras for a few hours, taking pictures of everything from their teachers to their classmates, to the little fish they caught in the ponds.

Alex and Anna have been working hard on the volunteerism project. I’ve seen them sort through the volunteer guestbook and struggle with reading cursive Chinese – which is really difficult to read if you didn’t grow up writing it – I know I can’t. (Anna: “It’s like scribble-scratch!!”). They’re putting a database of information about the volunteers over the past few years, and they will be working on designing a more user-friendly volunteer information card for the future, among other things. Kim, Alice, and I have been working on health matters concerning the school. We have compiled a database of dental information from the dental examinations we helped with on last Sunday, the first day we arrived at Dandelion. Hopefully we can help some dental hygiene experts with identifying the dental needs of the students and in developing programs to improve their oral hygiene. We’re also researching information on alternative toilets, as opposed to the current pit latrine system, and working on developing health education curriculum for the school. Meng is devoted to her website layout, and now she has direct access to the school server and the website! In addition to using the flowers as icons, she’s focusing on streamlining the website to make it look elegant and user-friendly.

Last notes: Some of us started teaching English to our classes this week because one of the English teachers needed time off to take care his sick child. It was all pretty much improvisation because none of us expected it, and it was also a little intimidating because our 7th grade classes are on average about 40 students each. (We will begin proper teaching next week.) But if Alex hasn’t mentioned it already, the students are extremely generous, polite, and adorable. They’re all very eager to practice their English on us. One of my students turned to me and said in one sentence without pausing:

“Hello how are you, I'm fine thank you!”
 

    Ni Hao! We have been in Beijing for almost 2 weeks now and so far it has been filled  with great speakers, great food, and 600 energetic middle schoolers. We got to the migrant school (called Dandelion) on Sunday after spending a week orienting ourselves in Beijing and being quarantined because of swine flu. In Beijing we had  a series of speakers about issues concerning migrant labor as well as various other topics on China. On Sunday we came to the school along with 10 dentists to do dental screenings for the kids. They were tested for cavities, plaque and missing teeth. It took about 6 hours to get through everyone but it was a great baseline for the dentists to assess the needs of the school.

    The school is really amazing. First you walk in through a gate tiled with all sorts of different colored tiles, which extend all the way around the main courtyard. In the center are four basketball courts (which is basically just cracked cement and some hoops). The classrooms border the courts on the left and the bathroom and kitchen are on the right. Facing you is a two story building of more classrooms and offices. The dorms, the library, the multimedia center and various other rooms are in the back, behind the offices. It is a fairly small space for 600 students but  even so it really creates a sense of community. You can tell by the way the students interact with each other and their teachers that they love being at school and love to be around each other.

   On Monday we met with Zheng Hong the principal and were assigned our homeroom classes, where we will teach English. I thought they were putting me with someone who spoke fairly good English since I am still beginning Chinese but I think they messed up  because my teacher speaks no English. When I went into the room I was greeted by 32 thirteen year olds screaming Hello! and Welcome! It was overwhelming how nice and adorable they were. We spent the rest of Monday as well as Tuesday in the classroom. On Tuesday we were also assigned our main projects for the summer besides teaching English. Alice, Kim, and  Linda will be working on bringing better health care and hygeine to the school. This includes analyzing  the dental screenings, fixing sanitation issues in the bathrooms and handwashing, as well as looking at the daily practices of the students. Meng will be working on coding for improvement of the school's website in both Chinese and English as  well as a study to work component that  the school needs help with. Anna and I will be working to organize the volunteer aspect of the school, which  will involve sorting through data and analyzing  what parts of volunteerism are valuable and which parts they can do without. These projects will undoubtedly keep us occupied for the next 8 weeks.

   Today we went on a field trip with the 7th and 9th graders. It was a great time to bond with the kids and our teachers. We went the Summer Palace and the Botanical Gardens. The kids loved it but we were all exhausted after waking up at 6 am and staying until 3pm. They have tommorrow and Friday off for the Dragon Boat Festival and we are heading into the city for a long weekend.

More to come soon!

   Alex