Migrant Children And Community Education: Approach To Research

With the development of market economic system and the quickening urbanization, there occurred that a great number of rural excessive labors — called migrant people — flowed into cities in 1980s in our society. In 1990s, the structure of migrant people changed greatly as well as the size increased. One of the most prominent changes is that more and more people migrate in families gradually while they usually migrate alone before, and it shows the tendency that they are living in cities for a longer time. Therefore, a lot of migrant children are taken into cities. They have to face many difficulties: poverty of living life, limited schooling resources, still not easy to melt into cities and not high quality of family education.Since the World Conference on Education for All was held in Thailand in 1990, our country has been boosting the education equity for vulnerable people actively, and community education is a perfectly important way to promote education for all. Migrant children, who are vulnerable both in physiology and social position, are important target group of community education, to make up the deficiency of their family education and school education and to boost them melting into city communities and even the society. The migrant children community education which is held by Migrant Workers Education and Action Research Center (MWEARC) is just such a kind of community education.Because migrant children don't live in vacuum and have a close relationship with their parents and other community members, the participating model of migrant children community education targets on migrant children while migrant children, their parents and other community members are all covered in practice. The model is a relatively stable pattern of non-formal education, which is directed by the theory of participation, developing activities flexibly in the process of identifying the topic and making a survey, devising and preparing for it, organizing it and the subsequent activity, and evaluating and reflecting it, according to the realities of community members. The model has broke the previous models — being organized by thegovernment and carrying out from top to bottom, and has created a new one under a new idea. It embodies the characteristic and spirit of participating sufficiently. In details, the characteristics are as following: 1. multiple participatory groups; 2. pertinency in content; 3. patterns in accord with objectives and participatory groups' learning characteristics; 4. making advantages of local knowledge; 5. to enhance self-confidence, to intensify connection and to melt into community; 6. participating through the whole process.The thesis has been done by the author both as a practitioner and an observer, by the ways of document, action in practice, interview, observation, making records, and citing abundant cases to analyze and articulate, to explore a community education model that is developed by NGO taking WMEARC as an representative, from bottom to top, to focus on migrant children and encourage them, their parents and other community members to participate in activities and melt into community in the end. Therefore, the thesis has somewhat meaningful both in theory and practice.