DUKEENGAGE IN CHINA - BEIJING

This program is organized by Duke faculty/staff in collaboration with DukeEngage. 

Service Focus:

Teaching in a school for migrant children who have moved from rural areas throughout China to Beijing, and working on other service projects related to migrant issues in and around Beijing.

Program Leaders:

, Associate Professor, Department of Cultural Anthropology, Duke University  

Program Scope:

This DukeEngage program takes students into the everyday life and struggles of migrant workers—the millions of 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 our 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. Our program works with one of the more successful of these schools, the Dandelion Middle School (Pugongying Zhongxue), located in Daxing District, Beijing. 

Students selected for this program will undertake a wide range of tasks, from teaching English and other subjects, to working with school staff in health, nutrition, life skills, counseling, and study-to-work programs.  You will work daily with teachers and staff at the school, and find yourself surrounded by the high energy of over 600 middle school students.  You will also have the opportunity to do home visits to migrant labor families, visit other schools, and learn about corporate social responsibility and non-governmental programs addressing the social and economic struggles of migrant families and youth in Beijing. This program is for the student passionately interested in issues of education for socially and economically marginalized populations.  You must be able to adjust to the disciplinary structure of everyday school life in China, work well in small group settings, and be both critical and open-minded about issues of social inequality, health disparities, and forms of educational and employment discrimination in contemporary China.

All students selected into this program must agree to enroll in a House Course on Migrant Education in the spring of 2012, organized by former DukeEngage Beijing students and advised by Professor Ralph Litzinger.

Service Opportunities:

This program is devoted to learning from and working with the students, staff and teachers at the Dandelion School.

In addition to regular teaching duties, DukeEngage students at the Dandelion School will be expected to work on some combination of the following kinds of projects:

-Work with partners in Beijing to raise funds, design, and install solar panels to provide hot water to the school.

-Collect data and make recommendations on how best to organize volunteers at the school.

-Take charge of summer sessions for newly enrolled Dandelion students, which requires organizing and working in a leadership role with high-school and college-age volunteers.

-Carry out research on nutrition-related issues and work with partners outside of the school to raise money for more high protein meals.

-Work with the school nurse to develop health and hygiene course materials.

-Work with students on issues of self-esteem, confidence building, and teenage gender issues.

-Students will likely have the opportunity to assist the school in home visits to collect social and economic data on the families of enrolled students.

Additionally, our students, through lectures, guest seminars, and on-site investigations, will be introduced to a wide range of non-governmental, corporate, and university social responsibility programs working with migrant workers and on labor, education, and health issues.  There will be opportunities to meet and interface with other volunteer groups from around Beijing; with leading Chinese and international experts in government, academic, corporate, and non-government sectors; and with Duke alumni working in Beijing.

Program Requirements & Environmentals

Language/Other Prerequisites: Applicants to this program must have strong spoken skills in Mandarin Chinese, as some courses will be taught partially in Chinese, and many of the service projects require interfacing in spoken Chinese.  Reading competency is also a plus, though not strictly necessary.  Students who make the final interview short list will have to have their Chinese language level verified by a Chinese language teacher at Duke.

Reflection Sessions:  Your site coordinator will lead a weekly reflection session.  All students are required to participate in the reflection component of the program.  When appropriate, students will be asked to read and reflect upon news items, written reports, scholarly essays, and other forms of media on migrant labor issues and corporate social responsibility.  Students will also be asked to think critically about the photographic and video images they take, and to occasionally post images and reflections on the program blog. 

Neighborhood:  The Daxing District of Beijing, in the far south of the city, is not nearly as developed, glitzy, and visually attractive as others parts of Beijing.  It is unlikely you will see another foreigner in this part of the city, unless they are visiting the school.  Putonghua will be the everyday language you hear on the streets and in the shops, but you will hear it spoken in multiple dialects, as the neighborhood around the school is now populated with people from Anhui, Hubei, Henan, Sichuan – people from all over China.  You will gain access to a part of Beijing that few foreign students and tourists ever see and experience.

The amazing, fascinating, and complex global city of Beijing proper is also a part of this program, as we reflect on the social divisions between rich and poor; urban and rural; the northern, Olympic side of the city; and the southern region where many migrants reside.  While we typically do not travel to the city during the week, unless we are attending an event as part of the program, you will have the opportunity to spend many of your weekends at a hostel in the city center.  Beijing proper is reached by a combination of local buses and the Beijing subway system. Travel time can be anywhere from 40 minutes to an hour and a half depending on the time of day.  Last summer we spent most of our weekends in the Nanluoguxiang part of the city, within walking distance of some of Beijing’s most interesting hutong neighborhoods, Houhai and the Gulou.  Once the students mastered the subways and taxis, they explored just about every section of the city, from the university district in Haidian to the art scene at 798 to the side streets around Tiananmen and Qianmen.

Housing and Accommodations: Students involved in the program reside in shared (two students per room) dormitory style rooms on the Dandelion grounds. The dorm rooms are in the vicinity of the Chinese teachers residing at the school, providing opportunities to get to know the teachers and staff, have early morning and evening access to the Dandelion students, and experience the day-to-day life of the school.  Each room has a single bed, desk, and wardrobe.  Bathrooms are shared.  Many Duke students frequently shower in a public house directly across from the front gate of the school.  You must be willing to live in cramped, hot, and sometimes messy living quarters.  Living at the school is not for the faint of heart.  

Meals: While in Daxing, most meals are taken either at the school (lunch, for example) or in the neighborhood restaurants around the school or hotel.  Most meals at the school consist of rice and a hot vegetable medley served family style in the classrooms. All menus in Daxing and around the school are in Chinese.  Increasingly, some restaurants in Beijing offer Chinese and English menus.

Communication: Students will have wireless access to Internet at the school, most typically in a shared volunteer work space.  In Beijing proper, wireless access is readily available (comparable to Starbucks or any small café).  All of our students in the past have traveled with laptops.  It is advisable to load a VPN onto your computer before travel to China, or be familiar with the VPN service available through OIT.  Additionally, participating students will be provided with a simple China-based cell phone and will be responsible for purchasing cell minutes for the phone. If you already own a GMS-unlocked cell phone that will take a China Mobile SIM card you may bring this will you.

Transportation: Local buses, subway, and taxis.

Volunteer Placement Logistics:  Students will spend a good part of their day working with teachers and students in the classroom. Time will also be dedicated to lesson planning with teachers and other DukeEngage students. Pairs of students will also be responsible for a project related to the Dandelion school; past projects have focused on health, nutrition, and economic development. To work on these projects, students will likely engage in internet research, interviews, and drafting reports in order to fully investigate their topics of choice to assist the school.  If the summer session ends early, as happened in the summer of 2011, students must be willing to work in other areas in and around Beijing on migrant issues.  Last summer, the students spent 10 days interviewing migrant and non-migrant workers in a luxury five-star hotel and producing a demographic and qualitative report on worker attitudes toward the hotel and employment in the service industry.  

Opportunities for Autonomy / Private Space: Each of our students will share a double room with another DukeEngage student of the same gender while in the hotel near the school. Students will also work in teams at the school.  During the weekends while in Beijing proper students will also share rooms with program participants of the same gender. Dinners are usually taken with your colleagues, teachers, or students at the school.  Private time is primarily found in the evenings, and on the weekends.  Because this is an intensive collective endeavor, students who need a lot of private time, personal and private space might want to explore another program.

Miscellaneous:  The weekend trips to the city proper give students time to explore the larger world of Beijing, though work weeks at the school often last six days.  Some free time is available on the occasional weekend for travel to other cities or nearby locations, or to visit family members, but permission must be granted in advance from the site-coordinator/ faculty advisor, and contacts at the school.  This is a group project, and Duke students are not allowed to live on their own in Beijing or close by with family members.