The issues of inclusion and exclusion have become especially apparent recently at Xa Mẹ. We have always been concerned about trying to build relationships and have a positive impact on all of the children. This has been particularly difficult to do with the older children, most of whom almost always choose not to participate in our lessons or activities. Of course, we can’t blame them, since means doing what the younger kids are doing—something that’s not that appealing to older teenagers. Our plan for dealing with this issue was to have John and Kristine (and now Thuy Linh) take the time to reach out to the older children and talk to them. We also made plans to develop and career/higher education workship that would be especially relevant to the older kids. Recently, however, inclusion has become even more of an issue. About two weeks ago we decided to split the kids into two groups for English lessons—the older kids (somewhat more advanced) and the younger kids (beginners). This plan turned into Thuy Linh and I teaching the more advanced kids, and Kristine and John teaching the beginners on Thursdays, and Kristine and I teaching the more advanced kids, and John teaching the younger kids on Tuesdays, when Thuy Linh can’t join us.
This worked out well the first day. Thuy Linh and I ended up teaching a group of about six boys (several girls did homework at a table in the back of the room), and they had their notebooks out and were relatively attentive and responsive. However, things became more challenging as fewer kids have wanted to participate in the more advanced class. Also, more of the more advanced children have wanted to do English homework rather than participate in the lesson during this time. One day I found myself working one-on-one with one child on the English lesson that was planned for the day, while Thuy Linh helped one or two children with their homework. Obviously, it may not be the best use of our time to plan English lessons if only one or two children are participating each time. This past Tuesday, I found myself struggling to review the English lesson with two kids on my own while Thuy Linh had her hands full with helping multiple kids at once with their English homework (this situation was not helped by the fact that I forgot my dictionaries that day). I would say that I hit my low point at Xa Mẹ on this day. My English lesson didn't go very well (I was having trouble teaching without my dicitonaries or a translator) and I just felt really useless. I should mention that this was totally not any of the other volunteers' fault, and none of these issues were communicated at the time. I plan to bring up these issues when we meet tomorrow morning.
From the perspective of working with the older kids, it now seems that our original plan of teaching planned English lessons is not as effective as we originally hoped, and many of the children are not even included in the teaching that is going on. If less and less children want to participate in one of our main activities—learning English—then we are clearly not having an inclusive enough impact during our time at the orphanage. Since Kristine and I were in Sapa this weekend, we haven't had a real chance to communicate as a group since Thursday, and, as I mentioned, we are meeting tomorrow. It will definitely be important to check in and seriously discuss how we plan to deal with these challenges and adjust our overall plan in the future. It may end up having a more inclusive impact to focus more on games, homework help, meaningful activities, and individually reaching out than on English.
More broadly, I definitely feel that it is important to remember that the kids who are choosing to not participate may be the ones who could benefit the most from our presence. I think that this is a issue that extends beyond Xa Mẹ to classrooms and afterschool programs all over the world. I think it's really important that we set aside time and energy to devote to the kids who could potentially be "slipping through the cracks" during our volunteer time. We can't slack off about really working hard to come up with some creative strategies to effectively help and involve as many children as possible. It's our responsibility as volunteers to try to be inclusive in this way.
I definitely look forward to trying to work through some of these issues when our group meets up tomorrow.
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