CITY GUIDE >Culture and Events
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CITY GUIDE >Culture and Events
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Offering migrants a hand up, not a hand out
By Mike Fuksman (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-06-29 09:21 The CMC's community centers bring migrants together and teach them skills that they will need to make a new life in the city, through after-school programs for the younger children and vocational programs for the older children. CMC has partnerships with Subway, the Ritz Carlton hotel chain, as well as several other businesses. In addition to after-school and vocational programs targeted at younger migrants, CMC also provides classes and training for migrant parents and teachers. Family development workshops focus on marriage and child rearing, whereas teacher training gives migrant teachers new techniques and ideas. "We're seeing a lot of peer learning in the teaching workshops. These private migrant schools saw each other as competition, so the teachers didn't get to engage each other," says Hursh. "At our workshops, 70 teachers from 20 different schools come together and learn from each other." Cao Jinghua, a teacher at the Tenglong migrant school, has seen his classroom improve as a result of the teaching sessions. Cao attended his first session last year, and has been to several of them since then. "When the kids are talking to each other in class, we used to use the stick to keep them quiet. But now we use a different method, a less intense form of discipline that helps the relationship between student and teacher to be better," he says. Cao has also integrated more games and stories into his class after learning that these new methods, and has seen his students improve accordingly. "One of my colleagues really wanted to come after I told him how helpful the sessions were," he says. Hursh is happy to make a difference. "If we can give this generation a foothold in the city, so that they can get a job and improve by their own merit, I think we can have a lot of positive impact in the communities we're in."
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