You may find it odd that the most satisfying words a VSO volunteer ever hopes to hear are 'thank you for your help, and goodbye'. The essence of our work is to create an environment in which our skills have successfully been passed on, so that we are no longer needed. This idea is at the centre of VSO’s work around the world.
I have worked in two colleges – Zunyi Teachers Institute in humid, rainy Guizhou province, and Qingyang Teachers College in arid, dry Gansu province. Both colleges were very supportive of our work, appreciated the opportunity that we represented, and tried to work alongside us through a challenging, transitional period in Chinese education.
VSO emphasises the importance of ‘building the capacities’ of your local colleagues. So when we arrived, our first responsibility was to look at the situation and decide exactly which 'capacities' needed building. For us, it related to the quality of our colleagues’ teaching, which varied enormously, from the excellent to the quite worrying. Traditional methods hold sway, with the teacher required simply to provide 'knowledge' for the students to digest and repeat at exam time. We felt that the “capacity” which needed to be built was for the Chinese teachers to be able to teach in a more communicative fashion.
Our method was to form a number of workgroups, both formal and informal, to discuss communicative methodology. We hoped that by making these concepts better known, the teachers became comfortable with them. We hoped to create a group of teachers who were routinely talking to their students, encouraging pair work activities, and who had removed the teacher from the centre of the lesson. Something we call 'Student-Centred Teaching'.
In Gansu, I was particularly anxious to train up three Chinese teachers in how to teach methodology itself. We met every week to discuss our teaching, the structure of our course, and student responses to the lesson content and style. The American Peace Corps volunteers left in April due to the SARS crisis, which meant that teachers who had never taught speaking before were thrown into the breach, and relied on my help. I encouraged them away from exclusively using the textbook, and to concentrate instead on the discussion points and pair work activities. When I returned from Britain after the evacuation, I found that they had generally followed my advice, and that their lessons had gone smoothly in my absence.
Perhaps the most important work I did was to build up the English department’s own ability to make it’s own decisions and generate new ideas. The Dean clearly wanted to make changes and I worked alongside him to address the shortcomings of the department from a fresh angle. I gave advice to teachers seeking to gain a Masters’ degree, improved communications between the department and the international volunteers, and set up an Alumni Association to provide feedback from our graduates. I also wrote numerous discussion documents presenting new ideas, policy suggestions and statistics gathered from research among my students. In Guizhou I also had the opportunity to hold monthly, informal 'Department Chats', during which teachers could exchange views, design solutions and reach a consensus on such matters as 'What is a teacher?' and 'What do our students really need?'
As I return to Guizhou for another year, I hope to build on the very positive relations that we have with our department. So that when I leave, it is with the knowledge that I have enjoyably contributed lasting change.