Hulin Elementary School walks 120 kilometers as day students, finding happiness in the land
Text and photos / Chang Wei-liang, Director of General Affairs, Hulin Elementary School, Hsinchu City, and the Alliance for Quality Off-Campus Education
Walking and reading a piece of farmland lets teachers and students encounter novelty, see the extraordinary in the ordinary, and experience a different style of learning. Students are changing, teachers are changing, and the school atmosphere is changing along with them!
Two years ago, when the teachers at Hulin Elementary School in Hsinchu City began to feel lost and hesitant about how to teach children to be "moved from the heart" and to "willingly do and joyfully accept," a sudden idea for a farming experience course sprouted on campus and officially began a journey of "120 kilometers of walking-and-reading learning each year"...
"If you're going to play, play for real; if you're going to do it, do it completely!" This is the Hulin Elementary teaching team's reflection on and insistence regarding the current educational activities that "emphasize excitement and chase short-term results." Therefore, from growing seedlings as winter vacation homework, making a non-electric water-lifting waterwheel, to patrolling rice paddies, removing cabbage worms, picking up golden apple snails, pulling weeds, watering... there are a great many farming activities, and teachers and students do everything with their own hands.
From standing foolishly at the edge of the field, not knowing where to start, to digging drainage ditches to drain standing water, harvesting A-choy and Chinese chives, stir-frying greens and making chive boxes, harvesting herbs and enjoying a leisurely afternoon tea... all of this happens happily on the Zhuangyuan farm field one kilometer from the school.
↑The harvest encouraged the children and also gave this walking-and-reading deep value and meaning.
An event that loosens teachers' assumption that "teaching is inevitable" is happening; an activity that reorganizes the "subject-object relationship between teachers and students" is unfolding. When students truly become the subjects of learning on their own, and are given the chance to extend their learning and play the leading role in educating others, that is the true meaning of education, isn't it?
Walking and reading this land for 120 kilometers a year lets learning extend from inside the school to outside it; lets challenges shift from simple experience to responding to the changes of the four seasons; lets feelings transform from surface-level cognition into emotional connection. Although this is tiring, it is worth it, worth continuing to walk and read for the children of Hulin, and even more children, so that on the road of learning they encounter happiness, and also walk and read out the meaning of learning and life in their hearts.
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