A Falk teacher's transformative experience volunteer teaching at a small independent school in Thailand

While many Falk Lab School students and faculty were relaxing over the school’s spring break in March, third-grade teacher Becka Wright traveled to Thailand, where she spent two weeks as a volunteer teacher at a school for undocumented Cambodian immigrants. 

The school, Cambodian Kids Care (CKC), is on the Thai island of Koh Chang and serves the children of Cambodian migrant workers. Kru Uan, a former civil servant, has worked to address this need by offering CKC, an independent and under-resourced school that he runs on a volunteer basis. 

Wright describes a transformative experience teaching at the school. She returned to Falk energized and refreshed (despite a long flight and serious jet lag), moved by the connections she made on Koh Chang and looking for ways to help ensure CKC’s future. (Wright started a GoFundMe fundraising campaign for the school.) 

“These kids, they are all so bright, so determined to learn,” Wright says of her students. “There is a real sense of family there.” 

Like the students, Wright got to school by riding in Kru Uan’s songthaew, a 20-year-old Mitsubishi pick-up truck modified to carry up to 10 passengers. Kru Uan drove through the island’s “Little Phnom Penh” neighborhood, named for the large number of Cambodian immigrants living there, picking up CKC students, who are not entitled to attend Thai schools because their parents are undocumented immigrants. 

The school is a two-room concrete structure with no air conditioning or running water and no glass in the windows. Wright says that Kru Uan runs CKC on only about $10,000 a year, all from donations. 

“The openings have wooden shutters that they bungee close when it’s bad out,” Wright says. “The kids were so excited because right before I came they had gotten a donation of paper fans from one of the resorts* on the island, and they were so excited to be able to paint. Sometimes the kids use acrylic paint and sometimes they use leftover latex house paint that’s been donated.” 

(*Koh Chang is home to a number of resorts, which employ many of the children’s parents.) 

One of Kru Uan’s goals is for the children in the school to learn both Thai and English, and so teaching English became a focus for Wright. 

“Something that surprised me was that a lot of the kids have a fairly good amount of English vocabulary words that they can produce when presented with an image,” says Wright, describing the flashcards the students used, which pictured things like scarves, skirts, and trousers. 

When asked questions, however, the students were often unable to produce the correct word. 

“I realized I needed to get them to elicit,” says Wright, “and that’s where you really need the trust. Because they are shy and they are embarrassed. A lot of them would just put their head down and shake their head like No and I'd be like OK and then hopefully later, after hearing other classmates produce the word, they might try it again. 

“Some of them I'd hear practice on the playground while playing, but then I’d begin to drift over and they'd clam up,” Wright adds. “So they are incredibly attuned, but that to me was a sign of that determination and pride in learning.” 

Kru Uan prepares meals for all the children, often with help from one of the older students. Wright enjoyed lunchtime talks with the schoolmaster while the children played. 

“In the U.S., we talk a lot about child-centered, holistic, whole-child, child-driven education,” she says. “I think we really do make a best effort to do that in a lot of ways, but what Kru Uan is doing absolutely blows it out of the water. 

“At the end of the day,” she continues, “what is the goal? It’s about engagement. It is about them connecting with you and them connecting with literacy. That connection is what will drive them to learn more and more and more.” 

In the afternoons, Wright would sit back and the students would teach her their language, Khmer. She recalls in particular a 9-year-old girl named Mit, whom she describes as “a tough banana.” 

“That was Mit’s time to shine,” Wright says. “She checks all the kids’ papers and will correct letter formation.” 

“She burst out laughing at some of my Thai letter formations,” she adds. “She was like, ‘This is terrible!’” 

Although Wright doesn’t rely heavily on technology in her classroom at Falk, adjusting to using nothing more than a whiteboard was a challenge that she quickly came to enjoy. 

“I loved teaching without technology,” she says. “To have no hot spot or anything like that was so freeing. After about two, two and a half days, even the language barrier was kind of freeing because you really have to distill everything down to the basics. 

“It was incredibly empowering to teach there,” Wright says. “It made me feel good about myself as a teacher.” 

Even before traveling to Thailand, Wright expected the experience to have an enormous impact. 

“But I was really unprepared for how I felt after those conversations with Kru Uan,” she says. “For such a short amount of time I spent at the school, the impact was far, far greater than I had even prepared myself for.”