A Systematic Intervention for Equity in Education: “Dream Education” and its Practice in China

• In Event: Cultivating Purpose in Life Among Students in Rural Areas in China

Proposal

Background
Motivation and aspirations have been a significant factor in disadvantaged student
groups' achievement, wellbeing, and identity (National Research Council, 2004; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018; Bailey & Phillips, 2016).
Given the lack of internal goals and purpose for children and adolescents (Jiang, 2013), “Alpha Foundation” (pseudonym）aims at promoting an inclusive style of nonprofit education, which seeks to cultivate disadvantaged students’ motivation and agency via systematic organization, curriculum development, instructional design, and appropriate assessment. This paper is an introduction of the Alpha Foundation's practice for over 14 years.

Solution and Innovation
“Dream education” as a nationwide supplemental program, is core to Alpha Foundation's call for holistic education. It creates a dream bubble where G1-9 students could explore connecting themselves with society and beyond. “Dream education” focuses on the three dimensions necessary to build a child’s core competencies: Truth-seeking: Choosing and Thinking; Love-seeking: Perception and Connection; and Dream-seeking: Exploration and Action.
To implement dream education effectively, Alpha Foundation takes a systematic approach and leaves no stone unturned from course schedules and teaching skills to school management. The competency-based education system the foundation provides includes: “Dream Curricula”, which integrates into local and school-based curricula and focuses on students' social-emotional learning, such as autonomy, agency, and dignity; “Dream Centers”, special classrooms inviting spaces for students' collaboration, experiential, inquiry-based learning; “Peer Coaching”, a training program to prepare local teachers for dream courses and facilitate peer-learning on classroom interaction, curriculum development, instructional design, and classroom assessment.
Besides the educational intervention, Alpha Foundation also emphasizes close cooperation between philanthropic organizations, the public sector, private enterprises, and schools, i.e., the PPPS model. In this way, the public, private and philanthropic sectors could work together to aid underprivileged rural schools. Only when the government, schools, teachers, corporate donors, and volunteers are “dream partners” in collaborative innovation can we see fundamental changes in local school systems and holistic education taking hold on every school campus.

Impact and Achievement
So far, Alpha Foundation has built an education system connecting over 600 counties, constructing 4940 dream centers at local schools, serving over 1.4 million teachers and students annually, and offering 0.73 million course hours annually.
Meanwhile, the Alpha foundation invites third-party evaluation and investigation of the impact of those projects on students and teachers. An independent evaluation by Rural Education Action Program (2017) showed that the curricula could shape students' monetary values, and view of power. It also led to clear gains in students’ awareness of their own rights. Additionally, more than two-thirds of those surveyed had made gains in interpersonal relationships, emotional control, self-awareness and maturity, and their sense of social responsibility.

Significance
With 14 years in education charity, the foundation has accumulated a variety of instruments of change, especially by way of the systematic intervention of dream education and the PPPS model.

Authors

• Shirley Pan, Adream Foundation

• Guoli Li, Adream Academy of Education