In & Out Photo Project Background :
In China, college students are encouraged to have public service experience based on their skills and interets in summer. My department at Central China Normal Univeristy usually organize around 20 students going to rural village for one month teaching service every summer.I was fortunately selected to participate in the service team in 1998 and 1999. The village we serviced is called Chen Jia Ba near to the Three Gorges of China. We lived at the local school and slept at two of the classrooms, male and female seperately. At day time, we taught students mathematics, music, dance, calligraphy, photography, mandarin and drawing. It is not serious teaching, no test, no examination and just for fun. We played with kids after school. Our students came from this village and nearby villages. They voluntarily came to the school. At night time, we formed several small groups (usally 4 or 5 peoples each group), dropping by different families to know the life of local people. We were required to report what we found, what solution we suggested and write a final investigation report. Some nights, we just stayed at the school for prepareing tomorrow's plan and class.
My charge of photo project was to record what we did and what we saw by photo langugae. We hope our actions can influence other college students and motivate them to join in this kind of service.
I took thousands of photos during the whole process. Here there are 56 well-chosen photos, which included teaching, playing, living place, kick off and others. Some of them are published in National and Local newspapers. All of them are exhibited publicly at 12 Natioanl Universities.