International School Connection

Report from Shenzhen, China:
Nanshan School District Global Partnership Project

Ever since the Global Partnership Project (GPP) was launched in January 2009, the leaders from Nanshan School District have attached great importance to this first-ever project and appointed Mr. Huangdong Pan as head of Nanshan school team and Mark Xing as District Coordinator. Eleven schools are fortunately enough to be selected as the first group of schools from Nanshan to participate in the Three-Continent Partnership Project under the leadership of the International School Connection.    

In order to coordinate and facilitate the Cross-Cultural Partnership Project, the leaders from Nanshan school team arranged for all the participants to meet regularly (twice in school district office building and 4 times in four different project schools) to learn, talk about and share their experiences with each other as well as discuss and work out their common communication challenges. They also organized participant schools to translate the Pasco Participant Manual of “Leadership for Sustainable School Development 2009” into Chinese for district leaders and principals who know little English to read. In addition, they built up an intra-network specifically for GPP Nanshan school team whose website is http://blog.nsjy.com/group.asp?gid=6 for Nanshan project schools to communicate and share.  

Each Nanshan project school has shown its strong interest in and great enthusiasm towards this project. Some schools created their school English websites; some set up their intra-networks among participants; others invested greatly on facilities and equipments for communication with their overseas partners. All the Nanshan schools have registered with the ISC, established their contact with their partners from Pasco and Stockholm and have met each other using combinations of e-mail, Moodle, Skype or Oovoo. Some schools have engaged their students in dialogues with their peers in Pasco and Stockholm and posting their documents and video clips on the Moodle site. The connections in each partnership team have been carried on between principals, teachers and students. So far so good. 

The conversations the principals, teachers and students have been involved in for the last few months are focused on getting acquainted with each other, familiarization with the technology for communication and preparation for the student learning projects in Fall 2009. The projects cover a wide range of subjects but mainly center on global issues such as energy conservation, global warming, H1N1 and healthy living habits, protection of water resources, recycling, computers and network, freedom and equality, world hunger and poverty, etc.  

It is self-evident that this project took much of the teachers’ time and energy apart from their regular teaching stuff, but all the teachers involved in this project felt no regrets at all for their commitment to the international cooperation. There is a general consensus among the principals and teachers about the need for stronger global school partnership. All the teachers felt very happy when they found that their students’ curiosity was satisfied and that their interested and excited look appeared on their faces when they saw their peers from America and Sweden. The teachers unanimously agree that it is their responsibility to raise the students’ consciousness of the world’s pressing challenges to sustainability of the humanity and to prepare their students to be competent and caring global citizens.  

All Nanshan schools are looking forward with great confidence and eagerness to the substantial dialogues and communications with their American and Swedish partner schools pertaining to a wide range of subjects in the new school semester.  

 Mark XingCoordinator of Nanshan GPP Project