"Winning minds with the mind is the highest accomplishment of education." This is the motto of Chen Ping, director of the Rural College-student Training Office at Yiyang Radio and TV University (RTVU) in Hunan Province.

She loves the cause of education, has excellent professional skills, and has not been held back from teaching even by a serious illness.

She has been teaching for 27 years, including 12 years in the “One College Student Per Village” Programme. She has been awarded a “Third-class Merit”, and named an “Excellent Teacher of Yiyang City”, “Furong Star in One-hundred Job Positions in Yiyang City”, “Excellent Member of the Yiyang City Committee of the CPPCC”, “Excellent Party Member of Yiyang City”, and “Excellent Teacher and Open-education Guide in Hunan”. She has also been honoured by the university as “Excellent Worker”, “Excellent Teacher”, “Excellent Party Member” and “Model of Teacher Ethics” multiple times

I. Fighting illness bravely, and an exemplary Party member

In 2016, Chen Ping was diagnosed with cancer. During the half year of treatment, she remained committed to her work, and over the past four years has remained positive and optimistic despite the illness, continuing to train rural college students and never slacking from her duties.
As a senior Party member, she is ideologically virtuous and rigorous in her scholarship, and believes in “self-cultivation through morality, cultivation of others through moral education, and being exemplary in both precept and practice”.

II. Dedicated to contributing and innovating

1. Implementation of the “four-step teaching method”

In 2008, the “One College Student Per Village” Programme was officially launched in Yiyang City, and Yiyang RTVU entrusted the new task to Chen Ping. More than 400 rural students took part in the first enrollment, most in their forties or fifties, with little education. They had difficulty paying attention, and their responsibilities in terms of farming and village affairs forced them often to ask for leave. Chen Ping realised that it was essential to cater to what they wanted to learn, and therefore developed questionnaire related to their needs in terms of learning and entrepreneurship, and conducted investigations at county RTVU stations and study centres. She often drove 300 kilometers on rural roads to discuss these issues with grassroots teachers and students. From these investigations, Chen Ping developed her popular and successful “four-step teaching method”, on the basis of which students were able to use what they learned and give practical service to agriculture, rural areas, and farmers. Her method was given an “Award of Excellence” at the “Fourth Teaching-innovation Achievements of Hunan RTVU”.

2. Launch of the “situational method”

Each new semester gives Chen Ping a new challenge in terms of finding materials relevant to the needs of her students; her training is not only practical, but adapted to regional differences. For example, she will cover symbiotic cultivation of rice and shrimp, rice cultivation, edible-fungus cultivation, black-tea production and tea art, cultivation of vegetables and fruit, cultivation and processing of traditional Chinese medicinal herbs, or peacock raising, depending on the specific needs of the students in front of her. She also invites experts from Hunan RTVU and Hunan Agricultural University to conduct on-site technical guidance and discussion, and help students maximize their specific potential as entrepreneurs.

3. Innovations in teaching approaches

Over her time teaching rural college students, Chen Ping has learned the importance of meeting their interests, enhancing their confidence, strengthening class management, and above all taking a people-oriented approach of caring about and respecting them, helping them gain correct views of life, values, ideology and morality.

In order to enhance the cohesion, demeanour and verbal skills of rural college students, she has organized several competitions, including the First Yiyang-city Knowledge Contest “Graceful-bearing Cup of Village Officials”, the First Yiyang-city Rural College-student Speech Contest “To Be Contemporary Rural College Students and Build New Rural Areas through Harmonious Development”, and the speech contest “Innovation and Entrepreneurship of Rural College Students”.

III. Teaching supported by scientific research

Chen Ping insists on closely combining scientific research with the training of rural college students. She has presided over or participated in more than a dozen research projects at the province, city and university levels and published nearly 20 papers. The paper Creation of Practical Teaching Situations in Modern Open and Distance Education came first in the “Fifth National Awards for Papers by RTVU Business-management Teachers”; the research project Teaching-management Innovation in the “One College Student Per Village” Programme came third for scientific research in the Hunan RTVU system at the Third Chinese Distance-education Teacher Forum; and Dilemmas and Paths of Rural College-student Cultivation for Rural Revitalisation and Research on the Entrepreneurship and Training of New Rural College Students gained the first and third prizes respectively for scientific research from the of Yiyang Federation of Social Sciences.

The training of rural college students has become a major initiative of the university, and Yiyang RTVU has been named a provincial "Advanced Unit” of the “One College Student Per Village” Programme. Ten years of hard work have had fruitful results, with farmers using their training to thrive in their rural homes and help bring about rural revitalisation. The Yiyang RTVU system has recruited more than 7,000 students to take part in the Programme, with about 5,000 having graduated as of October 2020 in all the administrative villages of Yiyang City. More than 3,000 trainees now serve as village cadres, and over 1,000 have become leaders of local poverty-alleviation efforts. The key to rural revitalisation in the new era lies in these trainees, and the RTVU system has taken on the responsibility of bringing them to understand agriculture and love their home areas. For Chen Ping, one of the outstanding teachers, this has been a consistent pursuit for more than ten years, and she has been making dreams come true.

By OUC Voice