The Mianhuasha Project Team is a branch of Beyond the Pivot, an HKU-based NGO registered under the Hong Kong Government. We collaborate with our community partner, the Mianhuasha Charity Libraries to offer summer camps for rural children in Xinning County, Hunan Province. The team was established in 2021 and we recruit our teaching volunteers mostly from HKU.

The backwardness of rural education exacerbated by the imbalance of educational resources in China is a severe issue that reckons serious attention. Children in remote villages and towns generally live with their grandparents and lack the motivation to learn. They often fall short in their access to extracurricular knowledge and academic planning. Therefore, our course materials went beyond the content of school textbooks, as we offered the children with more than forty different courses covering science, arts, mathematics, AI, humanities, and sex education. The courses are designed to build the beneficiaries’ understanding of the world around them, expand their knowledge, and encourage them to think about their future goals and endeavours. We are gratified to see our students exploring different academic fields and appreciating the importance of studying. 

The HKU students involved can furthermore gain pedagogical skills from training lessons and actual practice, which is crucial for their personal development and career pursuits in relevant fields. They obtained deeper understandings of the status quo in rural China, thus widening their scope of knowledge and fulfilling the university’s initiative of “one mainland, one international” framework for undergraduate students.