Harvard Volunteer Teaching Trip to Beijing

We are a team of passionate Harvard students volunteering through the Harvard College Social Enterprise Association (HCSEA) to teach at the Dandelion School in Beijing, China next spring. The Dandelion School, founded in 2005, is the only middle school in Beijing which serves the children of migrant workers. Tragically, due to China’s strict ID system, migrant workers who have moved to Beijing from rural areas cannot enjoy any governmental services, including education for their own children. Every year, HCSEA sends a group of dedicated volunteers to the Dandelion School to teach 8th graders through a collaboration with undergraduates from Peking University. This trip provides Harvard University, Peking University, and Dandelion School students with a transformative experience which is so much more than just a cultural exchange.




Our trip this year has three goals:

First, our group of volunteers will teach an engaging, useful, and inspiring week-long curriculum to the 8th graders at the Dandelion School which will foster hope and bring the students joy. We strive to design our curriculum to be impactful and sustainable. Our curriculum includes academic lessons and extracurricular activities which teach communication, teamwork, and creativity, skills not often taught through the rigid test-oriented national curriculum.

Secondly, our group aims to train our volunteers to be effective teachers. We all have an immense for education and believe in education's transformative power to change lives. The weeklong trip is only the culmination of a semester-long effort to improve ourselves as teachers. We will be creating our own lesson plans, refining them with our volunteer team, and evaluating each other’s teaching styles through mock classes.

Finally, we seek to create communities by nurturing long-lasting relationships within the volunteer group at Harvard, with our collaborators at Peking University, and with our students at the Dandelion School. We will immerse ourselves in the world we serve by living at the Dandelion School for one week. By teaching, eating, and living all together, we hope to be not just teachers, but also mentors and friends.
 
We can only accomplish all this with your help, though. We're asking you to consider donating to our cause to help our 15 volunteers with various expenses, including travel. If any part of our trip resonates with you, we hope you’ll be able to support our mission. Every donation, in any amount, helps us support the children of migrant workers at the Beijing Dandelion School.

If you’d like to learn more about the migrant worker issue in China, these articles from the New York Times  and NPR  explain how and why Beijing is cracking down on schools serving the children of migrant workers. You can also read more about the migrant worker issue in China in this CNN article  If you’d like to learn more about the Beijing Dandelion School, you can visit their website,  Facebook, or read about some of the difficulties the school faces (in this article from US China Daily).

Thanks so so much for your support!

Best,
The HCSEA Team
Lily Gao, co-president
Allison Pao and Alan Dai, co-chairs
Aaron Hai, Anna Mazur, Austin Shin, Cunhonghu Ding, Eli Su, Jess Kim, Rosan Bishwakarma, Vanessa Chambers, and Victoria Oldemburgo de Mello, volunteers