Chinese university students in short-term voluntary teaching programs : motivation and teaching performance

Abstract

As university students are widely engaged in diverse short-term voluntary teaching programs organized by faculties or NGOs, in which university students will become beginner teachers to provide teaching activities in local classroom, mostly in rural schools. The debate surrounds short-term voluntary teaching argued about the achievements and issues made by such kinds of programs in China, with the development of studies on professional training and evaluation for volunteer teachers, researchers identified many disadvantages in volunteer’s teaching performances, and attributed to strong utilitarian motivations of participants, other studies in mainland China claimed that participants in universities seldom seek for physical rewarding in short-term voluntary teaching programs. Likewise, studies in Western countries and in Hong Kong shown opposite results towards altruism and utilitarian, and their relationships between professional performances. This research tried to identify motivations among university participants from mainland China, and grouped by altruism and utilitarian, and estimate individual’s teaching performances from preparation to post-program activities, finally analyse significant performances and correspond factors with possible relations to specific motivations. As participants motivations was widely recognized and reported in many research, this study make a general conclusion from previous studies with mainly 7 altruistic motivations and 8 utilitarian motivations, and built a new framework of volunteer teacher evaluation refers to accepted standards for beginning teachers and inexperienced teachers. The re-built framework in this study closely fulfil the responsibility and practical skills needed in volunteer teaching, aim to assess teaching performances comprehensively and probably provide resources and instruments in establishing professional standards for teachers in short-term voluntary teaching programs. Questionnaires responded from all of the 24 participants who were interviewed in this research, results of questionnaires was regards as supporting evidence to prove the interview data in the way of triangulation. According to the assessment, participants were identified strong desire in altruistic motivations such as ‘to bring knowledge to students’ and ‘to help others’, and utilitarian motivations such as ‘to practice personal skills’ and ‘to enrich personal experience’. Altruistic participants probably identified as professional volunteer teachers and participants showed strong motivation both in altruism and utilitarian usually performed above the average level. On the contrary, participants without obvious motivation reported the most inadequate in teaching preparation and post-class reflections, which significant affect their professional teaching.