Plum Pickers in the Teaching Volunteering
Harris
Five history majors and their team leader Dan Huang, a history professor at JinanUniversity, explored a new way of life: becoming plum pickers.
Gathering plums was the unexpected part of their Nan Xiong volunteering. Li Jiade, one of the students, said their prime mission was to teach history to students of ShuiKou Middle School in Huicheng District, Huizhou City, a one-hour drive from Guangzhou.
This school collaborates with Jinan University as a pilot educational site for offering experimental teaching opportunities. For students like Li, who is determined to become a rural history teacher, it paves the way for their possible careers.
Li said the volunteering is beneficial and instructive, giving him a picture of what he is going to do in the future. “It’s like a blueprint, and I felt confident when I was teaching,” he said.
All of the students in the class are from a 2 kilometer away small village called Ruoguo. Many farmers there make a living by planting plum trees. In the previous year, plums have sold well, but sales diminished greatly this year. According to Li, helping gather plums was just a whim out of compassion.
“I felt sympathetic to those farmers, so we decided to help them.” Li said, “Picking plums was amazing because the ghats around the plum orchard were rather thick, and the black plums were juicy and tasty.”
The team also bought 200 kilograms of plums before they left. Li said the farmers appreciated what they did and they were all happy.
P1: Li is teaching history knowledge of Nan Xiong to Shui Kou Middle School's students
P2: Dan Huang and students are shouldering the bag of plums