For 10 years, Stella began her day before dawn, at 4:00 a.m., to prepare for her two-hour trudge to school through the hilly, tropical jungles of Borneo. After school, she headed home, walking for another two hours in the searing afternoon heat. Despite this, Stella is cheerful and confident; she has a positive outlook toward life. "My life is not a sad story," she said. "I am happy with what I have been through because learning things the hard way makes one a better person."
Stella is now the first child in her family—and in the East Malaysian village of Liposu—to attend the local university. A small village of 12 families who work in the rubber and rice fields, Liposu is a 30-minute drive, on a winding dirt track cut into the hills, from the village town of Pukak and a 90-minute drive from Kota Kinabalu, the capital of Sabah, East Malaysia, and home to the university.
With a grade point average of 3.42 at the end of her second year at the Universiti Malaysia Sabah, Stella has big plans for the future: She wants to complete a master's degree in English literature in the United States. She feels strongly about the people in her rural community and would like to return eventually to help the village people "discover new pearls."
This is one of several remarkable stories we heard about the challenges of rural education in East Malaysia. As professors at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and Xiamen University in China, we were invited by a nongovernmental organization to review its plans for rural education and training in Sabah, a Malaysian state located on the northern portion of the island of Borneo. For the past 10 years, the organization— the Pusat Kebajikan Good Shepherd—has maintained a youth hostel and provided services for women in crisis. For the past two to three years, it has provided a positive presence in Sabah through its youth programs, after-school learning support services for children, and rural community development programs. The thrust of the Good Shepherd mission for the next six years will be rural community development with a focus on education and training. This will involve developing English language programs for children, youth, and parents in rural communities; hostel management programs; and leadership training programs to nurture talented youth who would, in turn, be able to contribute to education, training, and rural outreach efforts.
During our 10-day stay, we conducted group interviews with teachers, parents, teenagers, and children at three different villages and met with village leaders, teachers, and student volunteers at an after-school learning support services program. We also met with and sought out the written reflections of 25 students at a hostel for secondary school girls.
What They're Up Against
The new millennium has brought forth renewed urgency and consensus to alleviate poverty and reduce rural-urban disparities in education (Atchoarena & Gasperini, 2003). With 70 percent of the world's poor living in rural areas, rural development and education are central to reducing poverty. In addition to adult literacy, access to high-quality basic education for children is a priority. In many developing countries worldwide, governments are unable to provide this access in rural communities. In such circumstances, nongovernmental organizations such as UNESCO, UNICEF, and World Vision can play an important, complementary role in reaching out to rural groups to provide adequate infrastructure to develop and maintain schools in remote areas.
Formed in 1963, Malaysia is divided into two regions: West Malaysia, which comprises 11 states on the mainland of Southeast Asia, and East Malaysia, which comprises two states—one of which is Sabah—on the island of Borneo. As the third largest state in Malaysia, Sabah had a population of 3 million in 2006, which represents 11.2 percent of Malaysia's total population of 26.6 million. More than 60 percent of Malaysians arebumiputera or "sons of soil," which include the indigenous Malays, with smaller percentages of Chinese and other groups (Leete, 2005; Ministry of Education, 2006).
Sabah is the poorest state in Malaysia. In 2002, 16 percent of households in Sabah were at poverty levels, more than three times the national average. More than 20 percent of people in Sabah have never attended school. Of these, the majority are indigenous people from rural areas (Leete, 2005). A language survey conducted in the early 1980s identified 54 indigenous languages; the language families of Kadazan and Dusun constituted the largest ethnic majority (Smith, 2003).
In the village town of Pukak in Sabah, one primary and one secondary school serve children like Stella who live in neighboring rural villages. Students walk to school along dirt tracks cut into the hills of Pukak; the trip may take two hours or more each way, depending on the remoteness of the village. In the most interior villages, children have been known to trek up to five hours one way to school, with another mind-numbing five-hour trek home. In school, students very possibly show low attention levels as a result of the sheer exhaustion of the punishing walk; outside school, they have little time for schoolwork. Young children find it nearly impossible to make the long walks to school. Coupled with the intense tropical heat and the torrential downpours during the monsoon season, absenteeism from school is particularly high among rural children.
What Matters in Rural Education
Foremost is the need for an adequate infrastructure to develop and maintain schools in rural locations. Another key area is teacher education programs for rural communities (UNESCO, 2002). In addition, accessibility to schools and services, particularly for families in the most remote areas, would require alternative provisions, such as student housing and mobile teaching team units to conduct onsite teaching for village children.
On the basis of our outreach visits and discussions with the villagers in Sabah, we have several observations to share that can help educators achieve a measure of success in rural education projects.
Parents' aspirations and expectations have a strong influence on students' academic achievement.
Contrary to the view that low-income and ethnic-minority parents have low aspirations for their children, research shows that children from —alized communities who succeed in school often have parents who inspire them and help them stay focused on their goals (Cooper, Chavira, & Mena, 2005; Grolnick & Slowiaczek, 1994). Although such factors as lack of education and low proficiency in the school's language of instruction may impede parents from becoming involved in their children's education, a meta-analysis of research found that parents' aspirations and expectations for their children's education were the strongest predictors of student achievement (Fan & Chen, 2001).
The parents with whom we visited hoped their children would receive an education equivalent to that of city children and would hold professional jobs some day. The parents were keen to learn foundational English to help their children with schoolwork.
There is a need, nonetheless, to further develop both parents' expectations for their children and their commitment to their children's education. The children of Sabah face multiple challenges of poverty, such as inaccessibility to basic education and the need to help their parents make a living in the rubber and rice fields. The exceptional parents of children like Stella hold some of the strongest aspirations for their children. Stella's parents showed tremendous courage and persistence over the years, walking their children the two hours to and from school each day during the elementary school years, tenaciously single-minded in the pursuit of education and a better future for their children. They were adamant about refusing to allow lack of money to impede their children's education.
Understanding the sociocultural context can help educators promote the importance of education.
Contemporary sociocultural scholars (Rogoff, 2003; Tharp & Gallimore, 1988) argue that teaching and learning must be understood as the interactions of the individual with larger social and cultural contexts. There are often mismatches between schools and the goals, values, activities, and styles of communicating of low-income families in particular, which may impede students' development (Cazden, 1988).
For example, Stella identified lack of motivation as the major obstacle for most children in the village. She explained,Most children don't know that education can take them somewhere. Parents are not firm in pushing their children further. This may be because parents in the village have little education. For most parents, it is enough if their children know how to count. It is important for parents to come out of their narrow-minded thinking and know the importance of education.
Celebrating success stories like Stella's serves as a beacon of hope for others in the face of seemingly insurmountable circumstances.
Seeking parents as partners in their children's education is a good way to reach out to families of low-income children.
Capitalizing on families' funds of knowledge (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992) helps teachers learn from families and promotes mutual respect. It has also been shown to have a positive effect on students' school attendance, motivation, and achievement scores. Moreover, community programs that encourage parent-child learning and home visits by teachers have helped build better trust and understanding between teachers and parents (Duran, Duran, Perry-Romero, & Sanchez, 2001; Tam & Heng, 2005).
Family and community ties in rural villages are strong. Educators should seek out parents and respected members of the rural community as partners in their children's education and as collaborators in rural education projects. For example, we met with parents who served as volunteers at an after-school learning support program for children who are unable to afford after-school tuition programs. In our interview with Stella's parents, we learned about the importance of values and religion in the family. We saw these qualities in many of the secondary school girls we spoke with—they were determined to do well in their studies, get good jobs, and return to help others in the villages.
Educators need to understand rural practices and needs and empower local partners as project owners.
As we worked with organization representatives on the rural education project, we learned the importance of respect, sensitivity, and a keen understanding of rural practices and needs. We found out that during the harvest period, schooling was often disrupted because children were required to help their parents in the fields and plantations. The parents of the rural communities we visited communicated the importance of having a hostel located near the village schools so education would be more accessible to their children. Gathering this information required spending time in the villages. The presence of a respected village member who served as a translator and liaison with the villagers was a tremendous asset, both in terms of facilitating communication and establishing trust. It is important to empower local partners as project owners or co-owners who not only are concerned with the sustainability of the project but also oversee management and operational processes.
Rural education projects provide both recipients and service providers with rich, meaningful learning.
Rural education projects open up pathways to rich and meaningful learning for all involved. Education in this context is the equivalent of service learning. A report from the National Commission on Service-Learning (2002) defines service learning asa teaching and learning approach that integrates community service with academic study to enrich learning, teach civic responsibility, and strengthen communities. (p. 3)
Service learning offers excellent opportunities for developing compassionate and altruistic global citizens for an increasingly interconnected world that requires collaboration to solve global problems that flow across national boundaries.
Students in different parts of the world, including those in rural communities, should be encouraged to work together on global education projects of mutual interest. The National Institute of Education, the sole teacher-training institute in Singapore, has added a service learning initiative in its foundation programs for teachers. Projects have included international humanitarian projects with learning opportunities for students in Singapore as well as for those in rural communities outside Singapore. When sufficient funding is available, the Internet can facilitate such collaborations.
New Pearls
The journey ahead calls for a richer, global sharing of ideas, issues, and stories on rural education. Initiatives that bring wider learning to those in the remotest villages and nurture their aptitudes and strengths—that discover in those communities what Stella calls "new pearls"—are testimony to the resilience of the human spirit and to collective efforts to successfully educate the rural child.
