Timely Arrival of Innovative Seat of Learning

A new international school opens in central Beijing this autumn under the "baton" of headmaster Chris Edmunds, a former musician.

One thing that pleases Chris Edmunds as the recently appointed headmaster of Beijing City International School (BCIS), which opens downtown in August this year, is the opportunity to use his experience as a trained musician in a new and exciting cultural environment.

BCIS is planned as a co-educational "international" day school. It is currently under construction on a 40,000-square-meter cutting-edge campus on Baiziwan Naner Lu, one kilometer from Beijing's business district and the China World Trade Center, and close to the popular SOHO New Town housing development.

Edmunds, who trained as a violinist at the University of Warwick in England, leaves his position as Upper School Principal of the Frankfurt International School in Germany to take up the top post at BCIS.

He talks animatedly about ICEBOX, a focus for international cultural exchange at his new school. A kind of language-corner for culture, ICEBOX (International Cultural Exchange) will bring together, for the purpose of effective and strategic exchange, the many forms of art, music, language and ideas brought to an international school by a multicultural student population.

Says Edmunds: "One of the ways to ease student transition from national to international education is to teach them to think cross-culturally."

In its first year, BCIS will offer Kindergarten to Grade 6, providing the International Baccalaureate Primary Years Program (IBPYP) as a prospective member of the European Council of International Schools (ECIS) and the Council of International Schools (CIS). The following year, BCIS hopes to increase school capacity to incorporate higher level students up to K12.

BCIS is also determined to earn the high respect accorded other international schools around the word for educating students who are often entrapped in personally demanding educational circumstances.

International students are usually transitory and move from country to country with parents who work with diplomatic missions and expanding business interests abroad. International schools such as BCIS, and educators like Edmunds, are expert in smoothing out the inevitable educational ripples caused by constant changes that affect students.

In a career that has taken him from Germany to Malaysia via West Africa, Edmunds has also worked as a music teacher and in international school administration. A family man with a love for extra-curricular cooking, Edmunds shares his new life in Beijing with a wife, also a teacher, and two daughters.

"When friends and former colleagues told me that Beijing is a 'happening' place, I knew it was an opportunity I didn't want to miss," says Edmunds.

Himself a "third culture kid", a term often used to describe children growing up in an international environment, Edmunds strongly identifies with the difficulties faced by such students when living outside the usual nationally-engendered school environments. "I understand the struggle to know where you belong," he discloses, having grown up moving through the international school circuit in places such as Cyprus while his father served in the British Army.

The international school environment itself tends to mirror the changes that students themselves experience, and it is not unusual for an international school to shift 25 percent of its student and teacher population in one year. The school environment thus becomes extremely dynamic and requires that students are taught to think internationally.

"Internationalism takes account of thinking across cultures and dealing with the challenges brought about by change," Edmund says.

While BCIS will support students in facing the many challenges of being in a demanding and stimulating educational environment, it will also help them to mature normally to allow them to make friends, learn new languages and acquire knowledge of the cultural customs of China, their host country. 

BCIS differs from other international schools in Beijing by being open to the Chinese student population. The school curriculum will include subjects from the Chinese educational curricula, including mathematics, Chinese language and Chinese cultural studies.

BCIS has developed links with Experimental No. 2 Primary School to instruct its use of the Chinese curricula.

BCIS's mission "to foster in our students life-long learning" and to encourage intellectual curiosity, as well as "creative thinkers and balanced citizens", looks likely to be accomplished if Chris Edmunds' enthusiasm for the project of international education rubs off on those around him.

"As experienced educators in unique circumstances, we hope to blend the best of Eastern and Western teaching philosophy," he says. And, if they are extra lucky, they might also get him to tune his instrument and play, perhaps, Max Bruch's violin concerto.

For further BCIS admission information, contact:

Tel: +86 10 8771 7171

Email: admissions@bcis.cn

Fax: +86 10 8771 7778

Visit the BCIS Web site: http://www.bcis.cn