Yang Mei, Wheaty Cai yangmei_szdaily@163.com On May 5, Shenzhen Foreign Languages GBA Academy (SGA) invited students and parents to its permanent campus in Bantian, Longgang District, to explore the campus and get a feel for what it is like to study at the school. The school’s predecessor is Shenwai Longgang International School (SLIS) which was officially renamed on September 1, 2020 and moved to the new site. The brand new school is committed to distinguishing itself from common public international bilingual schools and aims to build itself into a new type of school that produces excellent talents for the future. The school also stands as a pioneer in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area to innovate in the school-running system, curriculum, staff qualifications and school management. On the open day, school director Liu Jia first gave a brief historical background of the Shenzhen Foreign Languages School (Group), with which the Shenzhen Foreign Languages GBA Academy is affiliated. She also highlighted the school’s unique curriculum system that integrates national courses into its International Baccalaureate (IB) program. “Our school fully implements the national curriculum within the framework of the IB curriculum and adopts inquiry-based, interdisciplinary teaching and learning methods. Instead of simply importing the whole curriculum from abroad, we use an innovative school-based implementation approach while fully meeting the requirements from the national curriculum. The school curriculum covers four major aspects: subject curriculum, comprehensive literacy curriculum, career development curriculum and personality development curriculum,” Liu introduced. The school then showed what the classes are like on a school day via a video presentation, including Chinese class, math class, inquiry-based class, music class, art class, learning celebration, field trips, etc. High-tech devices such as iPads, laptops and smart whiteboards are used in the classes. In terms of the teaching staff structure, Liu mentioned that the teachers are all multilingual and have graduate degrees or higher, with a teacher-student ratio of 1:7.5. According to Liu, 60 percent of the teachers are Chinese and 40 percent are foreign teachers. The school consists of 14 buildings including the library, basketball gym, swimming pool, science and innovation center, labs and shared spaces with beautiful views, overlooking a large lawn. The school also uses intelligent technologies to create the largest and most resourceful environment for teaching. Luo Laijin, chief principal of the Shenzhen Foreign Languages School (Group), said “If we don’t learn from the outside world, we will lag far behind; if we lack cultural confidence, we will lose ourselves. Only by taking the path of diversified integration can we cultivate talents with a deep understanding for Chinese culture, broad global vision and innovative minds. This is the objective that we should pursue.” | 