Weekly Message from Head of School 2022/10/23-2022/10/29
Dear Keystone Community,
I hope that this finds you enjoying the end of another beautiful fall week.
As we learn from previous comprehensive parent surveys (and our third one is planned for later this year), Keystone’s mission and vision has been the most compelling draw for families who choose to send their students here. Families are looking for an experience for their children that prepares them for a rich and meaningful life in a globally connected world while remaining rooted in China.
In the Keystone Academy Publication, Local Culture in a World School: The Chinese Thread at Keystone Academy, the goal of the founding vision for our Chinese Thread is as follows:
We want all Keystone Students, Chinese and international, to know and feel pride in the powerful past and the promising future of China. To achieve our Mission, Keystone’s Chinese Thread brings out the pattern, in every grade of the school of the language, history, culture and identity of China. This focus on China and its contribution to the world helps teachers and students achieve a richer, more nuanced understanding of the world and their place in it. It generates a sense of cultural identity and conveys respect for local traditions and diversity. It imparts on students the critical thinking skills that will help them become leaders in the world of global society, economics, politics and culture. It inspires in them a love for learning and a passion for high-level scholarship.
It is interesting to read about the conversations of the founding team as they came up with the bold and important vision for the Chinese Thread. They knew that being rooted in China was going to be an essential ethos of the school and that this was not going be another “international” school in China; Keystone would be a Chinese school with a global purpose. In this forming of Keystone’s vision, they considered calling the Chinese Thread the Chinese “spine”, or “backbone”, terms that were strong and unifying enough, but ultimately rejected because they were too anatomical and rigid. Thread, on the other, can bind things together and as Founding Board President Ed Shanahan reflected, it “connotes continuity, stitches that hold together the fabric, like the very influence that China hopes to have in the world today, moving forward into the future as a world leader.”
The vision for the Chinese Thread is filled with metaphor and deep meaning. At this point in Keystone’s history, it remains as useful as a guiding idea as it was at our founding. A “thread” --as opposed to a “program” or a structural “spine” -- reminds us of the essential value of integration. Integration is the complex and critical task of stitching things together. Before a beautiful textile comes to be, it is a collection of raw materials— thread, fabrics and ideas. In our school context, the thread is stitched and woven with other materials: the international curricular frameworks that we use across the school and the learning outcomes described in the Chinese National Curriculum. With those raw materials, our school-wide definition of learning serves as a needle, and our ideas guide how we stitch and weave it all together. Our keystones are the form upon which we craft and embellish.
This year we have two all-school committees that need to work hand in hand related to the Chinese Thread. One is the Chinese Thread Committee, a standing group that examines this foundational vision, assesses our fidelity to these ideas across the school and proposes opportunity for improvement. This year that group will explore how the Chinese Thread might guide our efforts in the integration of the learning outcomes described in the Chinese National Curriculum.
We will also have a Global Perspectives Committee. This group is charged with another important textile in our vision: global diversity. The pandemic context has resulted in a lower population of international students at Keystone. Our international students and their families, many of whom (particularly at this point) are faculty members, are an essential part of the tapestry of our learning environment. In addition to exploring strategies to increase the size of our global community, this committee will be looking closely at the current experience of our international students and see how we can continue to honor their important contributions to the fabric of our school.
I am looking forward to learning from the inquiry of these committees as we continue to reflect and realize our mission through our unique and meaningful educational model.
Warmly,
Emily McCarren
