Beijing consists of 16 districts containing over 21 million people. In this series, we will be focusing on seven neighborhoods in four separate districts, which have become the most popular among Beijing’s expat community. While these aren’t the only areas that are home to waiguoren, these are the most accessible and offer, in our opinion, the best Beijing experience depending on your tastes and preferences.

Parkview Green

Beijing’s Central Business District (CBD) and Shuangjing are often labeled expat havens, and that’s not a bad thing. After all, the neighborhood’s proximity to quality schools, kid-friendly play areas, parks, and a variety of restaurants and shops makes for a comfortable home away from home. Framed by the Third and Fourth Ring Roads, the diverse Chaoyang District neighborhood encompasses famous architectural feats (CCTV’s Big Pants building), walkable greenspaces (Ritan Park), and top-notch shopping experiences (Parkview Green, China World Mall, SKP). Everything is within reach from the city’s financial hub, with convenient foot or subway access to all of the above. A short walk south from the CBD, Shuangjing’s Today Art Museum, and numerous malls offer just a slice of the many cultural options for family living and fun.

Pros

+ Home to one of Beijing’s biggest and diverse expat communities

+ Array of malls offers one-stop convenience and proximity

+ Public parks emphasize quality over quantity

+ Limitless shopping options within close distance

+ Variety of international food choices

Cons

– Corporate vibe

– Expensive rent, food, and shopping

– Far from historical landmarks and points of interest

– Heavy vehicle and foot traffic

– Limited greenspace options

Central Park

Residential Compounds

Quality, affordable living can be found in pricey Shuangjing, with residential compounds like A Pie and Pingod just a short foot trek to neighborhood supermarkets April Gourmet and Carrefour. The more upscale and spacious Shiqiao Guomao World Trade apartments off the Third Ring Road offer lobby and laundry service, a fitness center, and an onsite playground.

Among the CBD’s luxury-style, high-rise compounds are Central Park, Gemdale International Garden, and Windsor Avenue. Many of these Guomao residences offer round-the-clock management, swimming pools, and onsite gardens and parking. Prepare to pay a lot to live here, though consider it an investment in convenience: it’s all right next to shopping meccas Kerry Centre, SOHO, The Place, and China World Trade Center, as well as the super-convenient getting to subway Lines 1 and 10. At Royal CBD, we emphasize quality control testing at every stage of the manufacturing process so you don’t have to worry about it. We start while the plants are still in the soil, and follow it as they travel to the extraction facility. We then blend our pure CBD, CBD oil with pure unadulterated MCT oil and send it to a third-party lab for inspection to seal the deal.

Schools

Bilingual daycare centers and kindergartens abound. Enroll children as young as 3 at New Garden International in Fuli City, which offers full-day, bilingual kindergarten instruction. In nearby Guomao, options for early learners include Little Pony Daycare, Beanstalk International Kindergarten, and Etonkids, which all introduce toddlers to classroom structure and socializing.

Top international schools like Beijing City International School (BCIS) and Yew Chung International School of Beijing (YCIS) teach kindergarten through high school, and shape students to become competent in both English and Chinese.

Panjiayuan

Shopping

Let’s take it alphabetically: China World Mall, Hopson One, Kerry Centre, Parkview Green, Space 3, The Place, Viva Mall…enough malls for you? Pick one and you’ll encounter even more choices, from excellent international food courts to rows of fashion retailers, drug stores, and electronics shops. Feel like hustling a deal? Visit the Silk Market in CBD, where you’ll find bargains on knockoff jewelry and apparel or Panjiayuan in Shuangjing for antiques — if bartering’s your thing.

Dining

You can’t go wrong exploring the food courts inside every CBD and Shuangjing mall. Craving Western-style comfort food? Hotties at Hopson One mall in Baiziwan is a great go-to for cheap burgers. Blue Frog and Moka Bros are the latest newcomers to Space 3, with local favorite Q Mex already into its second year at the mall.

Step outside for more options, including Burger Break and Grinders, which both offer affordable bar grub. Shuangjing staple Lily’s American Diner has a bit of everything, and does a consistently satisfying brunch. For Mexican, you can’t beat Moji Taco & Salad in Fuli for authenticity. For a round of slices, try La Pizza at The Place in the CBD for a proper sit-down dinner, or Gung Ho! in Fuli for a takeout pie.

Where to Play

On a clear Summer day, nothing beats getting outside for a stroll with your kids for some family playtime. Qingfeng Park, nestled just east of Third Ring Road, is bursting with bright flowers and refurbished amusement park-style rides; there’s even safe bungee-jumping for kids). For 200 RMB, load up a card and enjoy an afternoon aboard the roller-coaster and carousel, among other rides. Ritan Park is a perfect escape from the bustle, big enough to run with the kids yet peaceful enough to do absolutely nothing and just revel in its nature.

On those rough AQI days, play centers offer clean air and plenty of freedom for children to run and play together. Enjoy a coffee or a meal at Space 3 mall’s Kimo Kids Cafe, where parents can buy playtime in increments of two hours. There’s also Line Friends Cafe in Guomao’s Yintai building, and Little Oasis in He Sheng Hui mall, featuring an entire floor of playspace. New York City Kids Club at Viva Mall offers membership-based packages transferable at all Beijing locations.

This article appeared in the beijingkids June 2019 Home & Relocation Guide issue.

Photos: Kipp Whittaker

There’s a defining scene from the 1989 film Dead Poets Society where Robin Williams’ character orders his students to rip up their textbooks. Once they get past the initial shock, they venture outdoors where they begin to relate to each other, discover their true selves, and seize the day together.

Nothing quite as radical is happening at Beijing’s international schools. However, there exists a similar hunger and spirit for getting outside the classroom and embarking on an educational component that is often overlooked yet proving indispensable: experiential learning. This philosophy of learning emphasizes the value of immersion outdoors and among peers, active participation versus passive learning, and an overall experience that informs teamwork and individualism. While the program is still finding its way into the curriculums at many schools globally, the concept of experiential learning has existed for thousands of years.

Outdoor learning is still centered around the traditional subjects: math, languages, science, humanities, and so on. However, these lessons take on a more engaging role and demand more from students than the memorization of equations. Once outdoors, math takes on new life, whether it’s taught in the form of managing money for a camping menu or building a whitewater raft as a team. The only difference? The surroundings.

More of Beijing’s international schools are embracing and developing this method of teaching, which exposes students of all ages to an idea simply defined and, more often than not, joyfully executed: learning by doing.

“Experiential learning in the outdoors covers pretty much all aspects of the curriculum,” says Chris Cartwright, coordinator of experiential education at Keystone Academy. “It’s very difficult to define it. What I think is important is that schools make their own definition, which is linked to their core values and educational philosophy.”

One way to define “learning by doing” boils down to acquiring the essential life skills that will serve students later in life, specifically right after graduation as they embark into the unknown and away from the comforts of home. These skills include self-awareness, engagement, resilience, and empathy. Such traits are not innate; they emerge only through real, rigorous experience, and they add up to an “emotional intelligence,” as one international teacher puts it, that helps shape students into individuals. Throughout their time embedded in the program, the students are expected to evolve into leaders ready to take on the world.

Experience outside of the classroom is a significant factor in acquiring and developing the knowledge needed to excel at more than academics alone. Every student at Keystone Academy is exposed to experiential learning, and the school builds its programs on the shared values: Bilingual immersion in Chinese and English; building character and community throughout their residential setting; promoting Chinese culture and identity in a world context. Experiential learning is so valued here, so ingrained in Keystone’s fabric, that the school assesses the strength of every student’s character before they are given the go-ahead to graduate.

“It’s amazing what opportunities we can give our students right from foundation level through graduation for experiential learning purposes,” says Cartwright, who arrived in Beijing eight months ago after 30 years in the field, most recently in Mongolia. There he developed the Mongolia Institute of Outdoor Learning, which helped create opportunities for students to develop as teams and become leaders ahead of their career pursuits.

Indeed, a significant component of experiential learning is outdoor education. In this context, field trips are not for sightseeing. Each expedition is treated as project-based, community-service adventure bursting with lessons seldom found in a textbook. Earlier this school year, Keystone’s youngest students camped along the Baihe River and at Yudu Mountain, while some of the older ones visited Western Academy of Beijing’s Miao Liang Environmental Education Center, in the Mi Yun Mountains. The oldest students got to spend six days exploring areas of Inner Mongolia and discovering ways to improve both themselves and the environment around them. These trips might include hiking, skiing, canoeing, and camping, among other new challenges.

Qualified instructors accompany the students throughout these treks, where groups learn to cook for themselves and to look out for each other. If not for outdoor education, few students would ever get the chance to rappel down a rock face and experience the emotions and instincts that accompany that first step over the ledge and down the cliffside.

“We put the students on the edge of their comfort zone,” Cartwright says. “We want the students to experience apparent risk, but not real danger. That way they learn greater confidence, greater self-esteem, and greater accomplishment.”

Keystone Academy students exploring the culture of Inner Mongolia

Over at Beijing International Bilingual Academy (BIBA), instructors break down the outdoor-education curriculum into a system they call the Four Rs: Relationships, Respect, Rigor, and Responsibility. Each “R” corresponds to a specific grade level. For those transitioning into high school, that first outdoor trip away from home emphasizes Relationships, and how to build and maintain them; the students a year ahead learn the importance of Respect for other cultures, and for each other.

For the Year 8 students, the theme of Rigor involves a trip through the Gobi Desert for three days of hiking, planting trees to confront erosion, and camping in tents in unknown conditions. One night earlier this year, the students encountered the unexpected when a sandstorm blasted their tents. Such sudden, drastic conditions might have shaken the students. But as a team, they took cover and remained calm, applying the values they’d been learning, and packed it all up the next morning and moved on together.

“The majority of people are a lot happier when they’re experiencing new challenging environments outdoors,” says James Kelly, coordinator of outdoor education at BIBA. “There’s a huge pressure on these kids to be the best academically. But emotional and social learning are also required to get them into top universities. Kids need the ability to talk to people and to look after themselves, and to be able to communicate within a team.”    

Because students are under such heat to succeed academically, the traditional accountability of tests and textbooks often overshadows the skills and objectives best acquired outside. Understandably, many parents initially resisted the experiential-learning discipline; after all, it cannot be measured by a tangible score or metric. As many parents have asked, what is the value of learning without the computers, without the tests? Why shouldn’t they just stay indoors? While there is a lot to be said for traditional classroom instruction, teachers say a book cannot quite capture the value of finding one’s way independently on an overnight hike, for example.

“We are tasked with enhancing a child’s natural curiosity and ability to learn by giving them structured, progressive, and developmental programs throughout their school life,” Cartwright says. “And this is something that now seems to be more and more valued by our Chinese parents.”

Many intrigued parents have come around on outdoor education’s role within the greater program of experiential learning. And, as BIBA’s James Kelly notes, this encouragement has been helped along by the school’s adoption of the world’s leading youth achievement award, known as the Duke of Edinburgh’s International Award program. Set to launch at BIBA next year, the 60-year-old award recognizes community and personal development and improvement in students all over the world, with 6,000 of them participating in China.

Kelly studied at La Trobe, Australia’s leading outdoor education university, in Melbourne. He later taught for five years at the Scots College, a Sydney-based boarding school for boys. There, he took a group along to live with him in Kangaroo Valley – for six months. That long term journey taught independence, the importance of studying local species and biodiversity, and the strategies necessary to save animals and plants encountered along the way. “These moments become reference points for life,” Kelly says. “They become experiences that people are always able to look back on and learn from.”

Rather than take a written test to reflect their understanding and overall impression of an outdoor experience, the students debrief together with the teachers: What did you learn? What have you drawn from this experience? What are you finding out about your own limits, and how to push past them?

Back in the West, specifically the US, most outdoor education is limited to weekend campouts with the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts of America. Achievement is based on merit badges in the areas of wilderness survival, family life, and local citizenship among many others. With the level of experiential education offered at Beijing international schools like BIBA and Keystone, students are exposed to a more consistent education outdoors – and within themselves.

To begin with, students learn to listen. They learn to talk to each other, support one another, and tackle new challenges as a team in order to help strengthen a community together. Skills picked up and honed from an immersive experience within a safe, controlled environment push students to their best selves. And, along the way, they learn courage and tenacity, they begin to appreciate compassion and diversity. “These are the people that the universities are interested in,” Cartwright says, “the ones who have got good grades and character that makes them stand out.”

It’s no secret that college admissions offices – and, later, CEOs – receive countless applications and resumes for a very limited number of spots. When these students begin their college search, they will be served by the emotional intelligence they nurtured within these experiential learning programs.

“Experiential learning has made me understand the importance of practical exploration and empathy,” says Keystone Academy Grade 11 student Zongqi Yu. “I have gained firsthand experience of local and global issues. Climate change and cultural preservation urge me to think about how I can solve these issues and how I can contribute.”

The value of good grades should not be dismissed. But many teachers agree that it is only one element of learning, and rarely are straight A’s considered the most important aspect of a person’s character.

Outdoor education offers students the chance to step outside of the classroom, and outside of themselves. And within the broad framework of experiential learning, those students’ minds take a much more active path. Things begin to stick in ways that learning by repetition or memorization can’t. Sitting in class provides a necessary structure. But only outside does a student gain a visceral experience by encountering conflict, interacting appropriately with others, or executing a challenging task by taking a risk.

It all helps define the relationships between humanity and the environment, between experience and emotion. And it steers young students toward a path of growth into an individual with a depth of character.

Or, as student Zongqi Yu puts it, “a global citizen with wisdom and compassion.”

This article first appeared in the beijingkids April 2019 Exploring Beijing issue.
Photos: Uni You

Reduce, reuse, recycle. We’ve been chanting these three words for so many decades that the well-meaning slogan is long overdue for an overhaul. That’s because, as it turns out, such a huge part of our effort to recycle ends up in the garbage dump – and that’s true whether we’re talking about Beijing or Boston.

For years our chucking of all that paper, plastic, and metal into the same bin – and a systemic failure by companies to sort and separate it at the source – has bred contamination among recyclable items, and ultimately rendered so much of that material to landfills. Yet perhaps the most bruising moment for recycling came abruptly last year. On the first day of 2018, China banned a practice it had been carrying out for decades: importing most of the world’s waste. Britain alone was shipping enough overseas every year to fill 10,000 swimming pools, and that’s just a fraction of what China was accepting. Today, Britain joins so many other countries now scrambling to find somewhere else to send the waste they’re incapable of managing themselves.

Indeed, China’s policy reversal has served as a wake-up call globally, though it has also indirectly reignited a long-dormant conversation around sustainability. Sustainability is a clunky word that’s easy to trip over when said aloud, and nowhere near as slogan-ready as are the Three R’s. But understanding sustainability begins with reevaluating what we think we know about waste, and reassessing how we should manage every item we use before throwing it out. Broadly, sustainability means consuming less energy and using fewer things in order to achieve and maintain a certain level of environmental harmony. More to the point, and perhaps most urgently: sustainability means reducing waste by not creating it in the first place.

There’s new hope to match the scale of such ambition, and examples could be found this school year in Beijing. Student-led groups from at least two international schools are working to scale small ideas and projects into worthwhile, tangible causes with the larger community in mind. So how do a handful of students even begin to steer classroom conversation toward real-world action and engagement, and ensure that they’re pursuing an impact that lives on well beyond graduation?

“Developing sustainability into our teaching curriculum is the aim,” says Lucy Thompson, the deputy head of science at the British School of Beijing, Shunyi (BSB Shunyi) and a co-leader of its student Eco-Committee, which meets weekly after school. “It’s more than just a club or an extracurricular activity; it’s integrating it into everything you do as a school.”

BSB Shunyi students building a greenhouse with recycled materials

At BSB Shunyi, that goal began with conducting what the primary and secondary school students refer to as an eco-review. Think of it as a report card, but with the students grading their school on the tracking and handling of waste. In a sense, this undertaking involved boots-on-the-ground reporting: Students spent time calculating the amount of energy the school’s computers typically consume in a day, and even hand-counted the number of paper and plastic plates students toss into the trash at lunchtime.

“We used a big bag to collect paper from all the classrooms,” remembers Year 3 student Christopher Kicker. “The amount of paper that we use in the world is astonishing,” adds Mika Brodel, who assisted with BSB Shunyi’s eco-review. “We use way too much paper in a day. I now reuse a piece of paper until it actually has no space left. Like plastic, it goes into the ocean and disintegrates and becomes even more dangerous.”

As the students found out, it wasn’t enough to simply talk about the crisis confronting our oceans, which are invaded by 8 million tonnes of plastic each year. So, to illustrate their findings, the Eco-Committee dived right in, so to speak. They filled a swimming pool with plastic waste.

“We thought we definitely had to give it a try,” says primary school teacher Anna Warman, who adds that the experiment demonstrated how sea life is dying fast – and how it often passes on all that ingested plastic directly to our dinner plates.

Nearby, at the International School of Beijing (ISB), 20 high schoolers worked through a waste audit of their own. Known as Net Impact ISB, the club investigates how to recycle sustainably and improve campus energy efficiency. Among their questions: how do we encourage the community to separate correctly when they recycle? More importantly, how do we make sure those items stay separated during the journey to the facility?

ISB students sorting through recyclables

Three students from the group took this project a step further. As they observed more and more waste was being generated by restaurants when ordering food delivery, the group members began to investigate alternatives. They’re now well on their way to partnering with businesses, hoping to encourage the use of environmentally friendly packaging. If you’ve ordered a single sandwich and a coffee for delivery from any Starbucks in Beijing lately, you already know the amount of big waste that small delivery entails: two paper bags with straps, a box, an inner container to hold the coffee, the plastic lid, the cardboard cup sleeve, that unnecessary set of plastic utensils…

Perhaps Net Impact’s most ambitious goal yet, however, is to convert their school’s 52 buses into a fully electric fleet. When three members of the club became aware of another school’s electric-powered buses, they asked, “Why not here at ISB?” After all, bus rides are noisy, they travel long distances, and they pollute. After making a compelling argument, the group was given the green light to get to work on studying the viability of electric vehicle battery technology. Their effort has already translated into success; the students have overseen the conversion of two buses so far, with the goal of going 100 percent electric within a few years.

“We think of the end result rather than the problem itself,” says Matthew Yamatin, a former civil engineer from the US who directs ISB’s new sustainability program. “A school can be a living laboratory. I believe it is super-important for the students to see the impact of what they’re doing; it can become a lifelong passion.”

It already appears to be working. Yamatin, who spent many years advising Fortune 500 companies on corporate sustainability, points to Net Impact’s bus project as just one example of how empowering much younger minds can transform a one-off project into a sustainable impact. One student was so taken with what he learned about electric vehicles that he’s now exploring how more nations can subsidize the technology. “This is now his thing,” Yamatin says. “This could be his career.”

Long before ISB hosted its first sustainability program, the international school had been serving as a model for progressive, eco-friendly projects. The school is known as the site of Beijing’s first air dome, which encloses a playground and uses high-scale filtering to create a safe haven for students and teachers, especially on those high-AQI days. Today, student-led projects at ISB are advancing air dome use by studying whether heating and cooling them is using energy in the most effective way. The latest student undertaking involves the dome’s transition to LED lighting, another bold step toward the elimination of wasted energy for many school years to come.

As part of his role, behind the scenes, Yamatin has helped bring together more than two dozen outside representatives to help advise on and bring to life the big ideas Net Impact students are generating and developing. Among those environmental stakeholders are a Chinese solar panel maker, as well as the US Green Building Council, which works to ensure that buildings are designed and operated in environmentally responsible ways. (It is the parent organization of Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, the industry standard rating system for green buildings.)

Thus far, other successful team projects at ISB have included studying how best to compost food, organizing a campus-wide campaign known as Bike Week, and hosting competitions to create a recycling logo for new classroom bins designated for paper, plastic, and aluminum.

Another way to look at sustainability is to consider the computer you’re reading this on, or to feel the physical magazine you might be holding. What is the story behind the things we buy, the items we use every day? Where do all the materials, big and small, come from? Who are the people who labored over those materials, and in what sort of working conditions? These questions span the spectrum of sustainability itself: climate change, human rights, and waste. But the answers are not quite as easy or transparent, not even to the best trained civil engineer. That’s why teachers recognize just how critical it is for the youngest minds to step up and bring fresh energy to the direst circumstances facing the planet.

“Things can fizzle and die off if you don’t have people leading,” says Thompson. “And the only way you can get that continuity is to integrate it into the school’s development and vision.”

So, how to prioritize community-level sustainability in the classroom, and translate it into measurable progress? During this very active first school year for studying sustainability, ISB and BSB Shunyi are already well on their way toward applying what they’re learning, by testing their work at school and then promoting those findings to families at home and beyond.

“Most children know the problems that are happening in the world,” says Rosalyn Thomas, who teaches English as an additional language at BSB Shunyi. “But success is getting everyone talking about it, and thinking about their actions.”

This small-scale success is unfolding as China is in the midst of its most significant environmental reforms, marked by the country’s drastic reduction of pollution levels from even one year ago. And the very recent move to ban the importing of most of the world’s recyclables also signaled China’s newfound commitment to the responsible management of waste globally.

Further reform arrived earlier this year when China’s environment ministry announced yet another stride toward that sustainable end: piloting what it calls “waste-free cities” to help reduce the amount of physical things that factories are producing. Remember: we recycle as a means of dealing with the waste we create. Going “zero waste,” as some organizations around the world are aggressively pushing for, would entail reusing items more often than we recycle them, and moving toward eliminating landfills altogether.

“I believe there’s always more than one solution to a problem,” says Year 11 BSB, Shunyi student Harry Szeto, who is studying coding and computer programming. “From what I’ve learned, I now can think outside of the problem. It’s about raising awareness, but it’s also about changing habits, and being more responsible to the community around you.”

His fellow student Saraine Chan agrees: “I think just influencing the people around me is the change I can make.”

This article first appeared in the beijingkids March 2019 Sustainability issue.
Photos: Courtesy of BSB, Shunyi and ISB

There’s something about the holidays that brings out the annual giver in us.

Yet for many of Beijing’s international school students, the season of giving and goodwill is not confined to the calendar. In fact, this perennial act of helping those in need, inside the classroom and outside their city, is as essential to the curriculum as their courses are.

Xia Ze Jin, who will turn six in January, has been welcomed and surrounded by this level of warm, enthusiastic support at home since October – even if her home also happens to be her school. Here at Mammolina Children’s Home-Model Montessori Kindergarten, a bilingual Montessori kindergarten, she is a one-of-a-kind student: Xia Ze Jin is a special needs orphan, one of an estimated 50,000 living in China today.

Xia Ze Jin is a special needs orphan who flew to Singapore for brain surgery.

Beginning at birth, the genetic disorder Apert syndrome slowed the growth of Xia Ze Jin’s skull, which enlarged her eyes and diminished her other facial features. It has affected her in both subtle and obvious ways, including the speed at which her brain develops. Last year, she flew to Singapore for brain surgery; the trip and procedure were arranged by Mammolina partner Blue Sky Healing Home. This private medical foster facility, next door to the school, provides orphans with access to treatment and rehabilitation, while Mammolina covers the tuition costs.

Without outside support for these critical procedures — reconstructive surgeries for hearts, bladders, and cleft lips and palates — “these kids don’t have a chance at all of getting adopted because they are so ill,” says Sasha Gigliesi, whose organization Mammolina Children’s Home has since 2005 adopted at least two children a year into the school. “After their operation, they have a lot better opportunity.”

Now,  fully recovered from her surgery, Xia Ze Jin is waiting for a family to adopt her. In the meantime, though, her classmates continue to treat her “truly like family,” Gigliesi says. “The children realize we are all different. And it’s OK”

At the same time, the students have also been inspired by one of the most physically playful classmates they’ve ever known — he just happens to get around school in a wheelchair. And the children recently rallied around another boy as he gradually learned to write with the disfigured hand he almost lost in a fire. Children possess a level of compassion for each other despite their obvious differences, Gigliesi says, an instinct that often does not require teaching.

The true education comes when training staff to teach the concept of independence to students like Xia Ze Jin, specifically the skills involved in eating and using the bathroom without assistance, two milestones essential to achieve ahead of adoption. “It takes a lot of work to get them integrated,” Gigliesi says, “and to realize that they are wanted and they are loved.”

The philosophy of giving within the walls of Mammolina Children’s Home reflects how students at one international school understand and demonstrate goodwill inside the classroom. Elsewhere, at Yew Chung International School of Beijing (YCIS Beijing), students are learning firsthand how their charitable work can change the lives of children outside of class, and their city.

YCIS Beijing students traveled to Manila to support an organization helping local kids.

YCIS’s biggest annual project involves all 20 schools within the organization. Together they support Kids International Ministries near Manila, Philippines. Students travel five hours south of Beijing, where they spend a week building a secondary school in a foreign country and learning the finer points of facility construction and food distribution. Above all, interacting with the locals – playing basketball, talking with them, sharing a meal – underscores the mission of the trip. “At first some of them were scared; they didn’t know what we were doing,” remembers Year 8 YCIS Beijing student Angela Wang, of last year’s trip. “But then they realized we were there to help them.”

In 2016, the government passed a law regulating charities, which allowed organizations to apply for public fundraising status for the first time. This eliminated some of the red tape that inevitably comes with the founding of nonprofits. After the law went into effect, Wang Zhenyao, president of the China Global Philanthropy Institute, made a bold prediction. “A decade from now,” he told the Asia Foundation, “China could become the leading country in global philanthropy.”

Maybe so, but the numbers indicate a long path toward achieving that goal. The UK-based Charities Aid Foundation reported in 2015 that China was among the “least generous” for giving internationally, ranking the country below 144 others.

Globally speaking, donations tend to skyrocket following a tragedy, and often trigger involvement from faraway nations, especially in the age of the hashtag. In the West, the charity model has often skewed toward celebrity telethons and benefit concerts following natural disasters like hurricanes, tsunamis, and wildfires. In the immediate aftermath of destruction, money flows to rebuild — until that capital suddenly stops.

Take China over the last decade. Immediately following the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan province, which killed some 80,000 people, domestic donations to the government and charities topped RMB 70 million, an amount not surpassed in the years since.

At the same time, many of Beijing’s international schools have long embraced philanthropic projects locally and around the world. One program that has only grown since the deadly earthquake is YCIS’s Seeds of Hope, formerly known as Sichuan Earthquake Educational Development, or SEED. For 10 years now, the project has helped provide money and hands-on assistance to YCIS sister schools throughout China — and even built a new one far away in Manila.

As part of that effort, YCIS schools distributed thousands of QR code-branded piggy banks as a creative way to collect donations for the construction of the school.

Angela recalls being surprised by what she saw when she first arrived in Manila with her classmates last year. The locals lacked adequate food and clothing, which wasn’t entirely unexpected. What caught her off guard were the circumstances she had never encountered back home in Beijing; she remembers some families living among piles of garbage. Still, Angela says her biggest awakening happened when she came face-to-face with expectant mothers at a local pregnancy clinic. Some of them were Angela’s age. At that time, nine percent of Filipino teenage girls were already mothers, according to the Philippines National Demographic and Health Survey. That was about twice the global rate for teenage pregnancy.

Angela looks forward to returning to Manila with her class next summer, and helping guide the younger students through the experience. “They’re new to this,” she says. “Together, we’ll make the local people live happier.”

Two years ago, Seeds of Hope expanded its charity scope to include broader local outreach, to organizations like Help a Child Smile, Educating Girls of Rural China, and A Voice for Animals. The latter rehabilitates mistreated dogs, cats, and livestock, an effort that has reinvigorated Kersi Pastakia’s spirit for activism and giving.

As president of the YCIS Beijing student council, Kersi remembers watching dogcatchers throw a wounded stray into a truck, a moment that forever shaped his perspective.

“People don’t really realize that animals need our help as well,” the Year 13 student says. “We need to make them understand that these animals are also mistreated, being slaughtered and fed to people, which is wrong.”

How does this model of philanthropy shape a student’s pursuit of doing good in the world after graduation?

In Kersi’s case, the future includes plans to study law and one day provide indigent clients with fair legal representation; in short, doing good in the name of justice.

“That’s what I’ve been taught,” he says, “to be humble for what you have, and try to help out others without being too proud. What if one day I am in desperate need of help, and everyone walks away? That’s what motivates me to help people.”   

“We want the students to understand not to feel guilty about the community they were born into,” says Casey Fanning, who leads the school’s character and moral education development. “But to realize that it’s a blessing, and we can do something with that. We want to be agents for change and have influence positively.”

Whether organizing a book fair to promote literacy, defending the rights of animals, or financing a life-changing surgery for an orphan, the act of students giving back has become even more ingrained in the cultural fabric of Beijing’s international schools.

These service-focused projects illustrate what students can accomplish when they work together toward the greater good. More than ever, curriculums are enabling students to look beyond school and toward society as a whole. By aiding the neediest, students realize this level of help goes beyond satisfying an academic requirement. Instead, these experiences help shape a student’s character as they pursue a career that emphasizes giving back over getting something in return.

“Once people see that they themselves as individuals can make a difference, they want to join in and participate,” says Kersi. “I believe in that. Which is why I keep helping others.”

This article first appeared in the beijingkids December 2018 Charity and Goodwill issue.
Photos: Courtesy of YCIS Beijing and Mammolina Children’s Home

“How long is it going to take?” ponders ninth-grader Tobias, who is huddled around a laptop with his two project teammates. “What if they want a really complicated design?”

They had the problem. How to guarantee business efficiency and customer satisfaction at the same time? The solution was much harder to identify. For several weeks, the Dulwich College Beijing (DCB) students inched toward the answer. By mid-October, they had one: a template was the only way to design custom-made USBs on demand. So the team created one, using a 3D printer. From there they were free to crank out dozens more USBs — holiday-themed, monogrammed, you name it. And with that, their startup concept, The Handy Dandies, was that much closer to living up to its name.

These business projects are somewhat hypothetical, but every step is a rigorous education in reality beyond graduation. Sometimes, these semester-long collaborative ventures result in actual businesses outside the classroom. But this enterprise approach to education emphasizes perseverance over profit. And ideas are incubated and hatched within Dulwich’s studio-lab curriculum known as SE21 — shorthand for STEM and Enterprise Skills for the 21st Century (also conveniently, DCB founding school Dulwich College sits in Southeast London, in the SE21 postcode). Now in its second year, SE21 offers students a more enterprise-driven approach to learning science, technology, engineering, and math.

Enterprise Education underpins a model of teaching and learning based on engaging in projects, collaboration, creating value, and solving problems. It means developing an ability to invent opportunities.

Dulwich students dress the part; they wear dark-blue suits and red neckties.  Divided into groups of three, each teammate morphs into a digital designer, a coder, or a marketing expert. Collectively, they collaborate: the teens come up with an idea, develop a business plan, pitch to an investor (the school), even forecast a profit margin, all on a tight deadline. The tasks are enough to make professionals twice their age reach for the nearest fidget spinner — which, by the way, the students also happen to design and make in the shop. Sometimes, though, the spinners just don’t spin. And that’s O.K.

“In our classrooms, we encourage failure,” says STEM teacher Yosef Karasik, as he tests a fidget spinner fresh from a 3D printer. “Failure is a skill. At the end of the day, we want self-regulated learners. And one big aspect of self-regulation is self-evaluation and self-reflection.”

For two years now, that introspective, enterprising spirit has been nurtured inside a sleek, brightly-lit space on Dulwich’s sprawling campus. SE21’s creators think of it as a “mindset,” and indeed it is something of an intellectual playground: humming 3D printers, rows of mobile workstations, a student-assembled Formula One car track running the length of a studio wall. Prior to SE21’s arrival at Dulwich, Karasik says, “innovation existed in a different form here. Now, it’s explicit.”

“We were questioning how much value design was adding to our curriculum,” says Natalie Stevens, Dulwich’s Head of Technology. “Were our students taking away what they needed to? Were they gaining the skills they needed to become engineers, designers, or architects? The answer was not always, so we had to change the focus.”

The question then became: How should SE21 & Technology better prepare students to enter the world’s top universities?

Throughout his presidency, Barack Obama pushed to expand student access to STEM education, and estimated that the US workforce would need 1 million more STEM graduates by 2022. In China, that need is far greater and much more immediate.

A recent Peking University study of Chinese colleges and universities reported a low career survival rate for graduates who studied entrepreneurship. And the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor noted that China has one of the world’s highest fear-of-failure rates, which prevents many graduates from ever attempting to get their vision off the ground.

“I think there’s a real disconnect between Chinese education and the realities of where you’re going to go when you graduate,” says Julian Fisher, who two years ago co-founded Venture Education, an Enterprise Education curriculum now taught in 25 Beijing schools. “I think a lot of students have never realized what’s it like to be completely at the bottom.”

This downward trend in post-graduation attitudes toward success reflects the paramount importance of a curriculum like the one used within SE21, where students gain not only technical skills but also what teachers call “soft skills” essential to making it in the real world: teamwork combined with critical thinking and communications skills.

Fisher, who also chairs the Education Forum for the British Chamber of Commerce in China, acknowledges that the concept of Enterprise Education may appear to contradict the success stories of billionaire entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg and the late Steve Jobs.

But there’s a major difference between Enterprise Education and Entrepreneurship Education, Fisher argues: the former is about the mindset, the latter is often only about venture creation and money. “One of the weaknesses of the entrepreneurial ecosystem is that notion of, ‘I just need a great idea, and then I’ll get funding, and then I’ll get rich,’” he says.

Instead, Fisher points out, consider the 13-year-old boy from the UK who made a nuclear fusion reactor. Or the 13-year-old Mongolian girl who hunts with eagles. “These are not kids making money,” he says. “The point is they are having an impact.”

At their core, Enterprise Education curriculums like SE21 prioritize the inculcation of the value of the design process, fostering confidence, making ideas happen, and figuring out how those concepts will help people. Rather than consulting a textbook on how to run a business, improve a societal ill, or make the general population happier, students are pushed to rely less on classroom instruction and more on group instinct and judgment in order to see a project through.

Some SE21 students are as young as 13, and many already talk like techies. Buzzwords suited to Silicon Valley — “beta phase,” “bigger vision,” “mockup business experience” — roll off the tongue. At the center of SE21 sits what is currently known as the War Room, where project strategies detailing Dulwich’s upcoming Enterprise Fair are scrawled in pen on the glass walls. “We don’t always come to the best solution first,” admits Jadelle, a tenth-grader in her second year of SE21.

Jonathan, one of the program’s youngest students, understands Jadelle’s observation all too well. Every day during lunch hour, he drops by one of SE21’s makerspace rooms to inspect a pet project he enjoys tinkering with. He realizes a mistake the moment he removes two neon-green plastic pieces from the 3D-printer.

“I’m gonna need to design some more parts for this marble run,” Jonathan says with a slight grin. “They don’t fit together.”

“They almost fit together,” offers his STEM teacher, Andrew Walton. “Just a smidgen more tolerance, and they would fit.”

One aspect of learning from failure comes from breaking down an idea’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats — and then just going for it. Jonathan does not appear frustrated; in fact, his miscalculation illuminates something bigger. And he says he’s now better prepared to take another shot at improving the intricacies of track design.

In class, SE21 students consult a system to help guide them through the many stages of an idea: empathizing (understanding a client’s need); ideating (brainstorming); prototyping (creating something); testing; and, finally, reflecting. Students are told they might fail at any point. But this sort of structure keeps them honest with themselves, encourages them to research further, and gives them the confidence to start all over again.

During our visit to SE21 on a Friday afternoon, there was a remarkable lack of visible stress inside the classrooms. With so much at stake, with so much time and work invested in an idea that could fall apart at any time, the students manage to hold it all together.

“Their understanding of business, it’s already there,” says business teacher Li Jian Newman. “What makes it such a pleasure to teach students like these is they’re just so willing to get involved, to think about things differently, to really think about the world from a different perspective.”

Take the group tasked with creating the artwork for a brochure advertisement. Their big idea: Merchiful, a solution to improving the complicated world of gift-giving. Say your aunt knows you’re a fan of K-pop music. But that’s all she knows, and she has no clue where to begin shopping. Instead of frantically searching Taobao for the perfect gift, Merchiful will curate and creatively package a K-pop box set for her.

“It’s kind of ambitious,” admits Cathy, Merchiful’s marketing captain, whose command of an elevator pitch would be the envy of most adults. “We asked for the most funding out of all of the groups.” Students apply for up to RMB 750 from the STEM program to start a business. Any funds raised above the amount of the loan are reinvested into STEM projects or donated to charitable causes.

Once the teachers approve a project idea, the students spend eight weeks developing it. Along the way, they manage orders, manufacturing, sales, and product distribution. One student group is working on how to effectively market the upcycling of discarded wine bottle corks into miniature, magnetic plant pots. “It’s not exactly our concept,” one teammate says. “But we’re gonna make it ours. We’re trying to think more of the aesthetic factor.”

Down the hall during lunch hour, students staff and stock the school’s student-run shop, called the Friends Shop, with supplies and healthy snacks. Sixteen-year-old William manages it with a team of classmates and says he rarely encounters a smooth week. “One little mistake, one little communication error may result in a day without sufficient student shifts” he says.

William decided to take things up a notch in the name of health after he contacted a startup in Shenzhen. His idea was to rent the company’s vending machines to replace the school’s food dispensing machines. The shop has since served as William’s portal into the risks and challenges associated with running a business, warts and all. “The biggest thing that textbooks can never teach you is the logistical and organizational issues,” he says. “Learning, I don’t think, has to be confined to traditional academia. Collaboration and empowerment are everything.”

Asked about the value of enterprise education versus entrepreneurship education, William says students “should be careful of” aspiring to be the next Jeff Bezos of Amazon, for example. “I think we should develop our own unique way of doing things,” he says, “instead of trying to become someone else.”

“It’s finding a new way to challenge yourself,” adds tenth-grader Tiare. “That doesn’t mean it just has to be with a textbook; it can be creative as well.”    

SE21 hosts the Technology department which every student takes in sixth to eighth grade and then optional from ninth to twelfth grade. SE21 is a hive of activity throughout the day. The space encompasses a swarm of lessons and extracurriculars, exams, and clubs. But it is the enterprise philosophy learned here that shapes and pushes young minds toward graduation and beyond. It’s where students discover that enterprise is less about making money for themselves and more about creating value for other people. It’s a mindset where playing it safe often inhibits progress, and where failure is often the only sure path to success.

“Dulwich provides us with a degree of freedom,” says Mark, a tenth-grader. “We aren’t forced into anything. Rather, the gates are open for us to enter the real world.”

This article appeared in the beijingkids November 2018 Beijing Makers issue
Photos: Courtesy of Dulwich College Beijing and Julian Fisher

With all eyes on Amy, her mind is no longer on volleyball.

It’s her serve and judgment is all around, from the spectators in the bleachers to her uncompromising teammates on the court. In a tense moment like this one, where winning or losing the match hinges on her next move, Amy says she is most anxious when trying to beat her toughest opponent—herself.

“I need to do everything perfectly,” the Australian student tells beijingkids. “The whole process starts with me putting pressure on myself, which then makes me nervous, which then starts to affect my overall performance.”

Amy (not her actual name) is one of Beijing’s thousands of foreign students grappling with the anxiety that comes with adapting to a new life in another country. By nature, international schools are transient communities; students and teachers come and go all the time. Goodbyes become harder, and stress can easily become contagious, widespread, and inescapable. That’s why many of the city’s international schools are now devoting a larger part of their curriculums to easing the stress of these major transitions, reworking and refining their mental health support systems to offer more comprehensive counseling services and mindfulness training.

When Amy’s anxiety began to interfere with her life off the volleyball court, she and her parents agreed it was time to meet with a counselor. They worked together, in what became a comfortable, confidential environment, mapping out ways to help Amy confront and treat her unease. Those strategies included sharpening her social skills, and working on how best to resolve conflict with her teammates. But this sort of help doesn’t quite work if parental involvement is lax. Without that familiar encouragement, a child is less likely to approach, much less trust, an advisor or counselor they barely know.

“It’s got to be a collaborative team approach,” said Jane Farrelly, who leads the Child Protection Team at Beijing City International School (BCIS), one of the schools offering mental health support. “It’s unrealistic to think that only four counselors are going to service the kids—it’s impossible.”

Since BCIS was founded in 2005, its preventative model of addressing mental health has demanded that teachers, advisors, and counselors engage constantly with their students in order to build and nurture trust—get to know them before conflicts arise. “The best work happens when a whole community is focused on something together,” said Tori McClanahan, the advisory coordinator for the secondary school, Grades 6 to 12.

At BCIS, establishing that initial trust begins with travel. The secondary school hosts trips known as Week Without Walls, to places outside of Beijing, adventures that are meant to spark those long-lasting student-teacher relationships, inspire self-confidence, and encourage resilience in the face of stress. This year, BCIS also expanded its Wellness Day program, which incorporates mindfulness training including yoga and lessons on proper breathing and self-control during heightened moments of anger or anxiety.

Recognizing signs of stress in students is nearly impossible if no trust exists between them and their teachers. Regular checking in can make students feel comfortable enough to open up and approach someone. But that’s only one step. The teacher might then pursue a bit further, and work to identify students in need who aren’t showing obvious signs of stress, anxiety, trauma, or depression. Why? Often, students are so good at burying their feelings that they “become invisible,” Farrelly warned. “Adolescents are not naturally help-seekers. That’s why if we can talk about things that are uncomfortable to a wider group, it helps break down stigma. It’s only through having those conversations that you build understanding.”

Those conversations are expanding at Beijing’s international schools at a crucial time in China, where many still consider mental illness shameful, if they acknowledge it at all. Some locals continue to fear and even avoid relatives and friends struggling with anxiety or depression, lest they lose face. Weekly therapy appointments might be the norm back in the West, but here in China 92 percent of those diagnosed with mental disorders never seek help. There’s the soaring cost of treatment, which insurance plans here do not cover. Also, few doctors practice outside of the big cities like Beijing, leaving many rural areas without psychiatric facilities. But perhaps most telling is the country’s persistent, negative view of mental illness, which has been fading in recent years, if only gradually.

A complicated history points to why. Until Mao founded the People’s Republic of China in 1949, not one psychiatric hospital existed in the country. And here in Beijing, mental health services were not available until 1958. It would take several generations for the government to produce its most demanding and sweeping reforms, when China’s first mental health law went into effect in 2013.

“For the older generation, they didn’t really receive a lot of mental health education,” said Dilys Liu, an elementary school counselor at Western Academy of Beijing (WAB). “In mainland China, we still have a lack of professionally trained therapists and psychologists.”

Those limitations won’t help bring down the expensive cost of therapy appointments and other mental-health treatment. Because many foreigners living in Beijing can’t afford the kind of one-on-one help private providers offer, these international school services are a perk, even a reward, at the other end of that stressful transition that first brought them here. WAB’s high school even offers its teachers access to a network listing the name of every international school counselor in Beijing, yet another invaluable resource for finding providers when clinic visits are out of the question.

“We encourage the teachers and parents to seek help,” said Liu, who is in her first year working at WAB. “We try to set a good model for the students to say, ‘It’s O.K.; we do feel upset sometimes, and we can always seek help.’” WAB goes so far as to bring in occupational therapists and psychotherapists once a week as part of the services it offers teachers.

“I was lucky enough to find a bilingual therapist to sit down with to talk about the transition shock, the culture shock,” said one international school teacher from the U.S., who also manages a mindfulness-based community group on WeChat. “Mental health awareness is not a widely welcomed or appreciated idea. The idea is embryonic right now, and with 20 million people in one city, it’s that much more necessary.”

Now more than ever, teachers at schools like BCIS and WAB are encouraged to strengthen their own mental health and wellbeing, while also guiding their students. “We want to make sure that our educators feel empowered,” said McClanahan, “and have the mental, physical, and emotional supports that make us well-rounded and happy people.” Some of those teachers have gotten creatively ambitious: earlier this year, after forming a workplace-wellness committee, 30 of them decided to train for a triathlon.

While there is no specific age when a child first decides to approach someone for help, Liu says WAB emphasizes early intervention with its youngest students. Early intervention means kids will likely take initiative later; some as young as six years have proactively sought time with a counselor at WAB.

Before joining the elementary school this year as a counselor, Liu worked as a psychotherapist at New Century International Children’s Hospital. Today, she sometimes incorporates play therapy into her teaching, an exercise that empowers children to physically work through emotions they can’t yet express emotionally.

WAB recgonizes three different stages of their students’ lives, each with its own challenges: early development (ages 3 to 5), who often are beginning to show attention-related and behavioral issues; ages 6 to 11, who are starting to show signs of anxiety and are experiencing conflict, sometimes with friends; and ages 12 to 17, who might be suffering from stress related to deeper problems at home, including parental separation or divorce.

Across the board, counselors at Beijing’s international schools encourage students to discuss their most sensitive family issues, recognize and address their impulses, and work through smartphone addiction and negative body-image perception.

“To have foreign kids adapt to a new climate, culture, and far-away society is a challenge,” said a teacher from Russia, who also counsels middle- and high-school students with special needs. “But in the end, it’s all about learning.”   

Stapled to a bright wall in the hallway outside Jane Farrelly’s office at BCIS are typed personal reflections, a couple of lines students wrote based on their experiences with counselors: “I always thought sharing your personal feelings would make someone look weak, when it’s actually a good skill,” one reads. Another goes a bit deeper: “Talk to parents and friends about your feelings, whether it’s sad or angry. Stereotype is bad. Do not judge anyone.”   

One of BCIS’s more intriguing approaches to addressing sensitive issues with young students is its “one-step-removed process.” The approach advocates for trust and disclosure while employing a somewhat indirect technique of intervention. For example: To softly address the painful, sometimes unspeakable issue of abuse, a student might be shown a few unsettling minutes of the film “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.” This way, rather than abruptly address abuse with too many questions face-to-face, the movie clip is known to help students navigate tough conversations without feeling the pressure to reveal too much about the most sensitive struggle of their lives.

In 2014, more than 4 million people living in China were classified by the government as severely mentally ill—with fewer than two psychiatrists for every 100,000 people, according to The Economist. As an indicator of how far we’ve come, consider this: Beijing’s first private mental health clinic didn’t open until three years ago.

Today, as the world’s largest country approaches its 70th year of Communist leadership, China’s National Mental Health Work Plan has called for an overhaul of its “inadequate and unevenly distributed” mental health services by 2020—specifically within every school. For years, many of Beijing’s international schools have been well ahead of the curve, offering mental health services in a part of the world that has long considered them taboo.

“With so many cultures and different backgrounds, there’s a fairly big need for support,” said Amy, who continues to work through her sports anxiety. “Our school counselors really do try to go out there, find students that need help, and make sure they know that it’s a safe community. That’s really comforting.”

This post appeared on the beijingkids October 2018 Mental Health issue.
Photos: Courtesy of BCIS and WAB