Beijing City International School (BCIS) not only enriches the minds of their students, but they also offer opportunities for the development of their teachers. Faculty members become eligible after five years at the school and demonstration of the school’s values and mission. BCIS fourth grade teacher Jane Farrelly used her sabbatical leave to do something she had always wanted to do: write a book. The article below is excerpted and condensed (with permission) from the article posted on the BCIS website.
Farrelly’s completed work is titled Arrows and Moonbeams – A Mid-Autumn Tale and is adaptation of a popular story that celebrates the up-coming Moon Festival. Farrelly says, “It’s a romantic story between an archer and a goddess.” The story is also about the Jade Emperor, a god who rules the Heaven and Earth but who has ten wayward sons. The emperor turns them into suns but they wreak havoc on Earth, so he calls on the archer to try to lure these suns from the sky.
This idea came about a couple of years ago when Farrelly had made a contribution to the school by writing a play. “I’d written a production for the elementary school called The Four Dragons, based on the four Chinese characters in our school philosophy, to help the children understand the meaning of those characters and what the school endeavored to be. That was brought together in a traditional Chinese legend called The Four Dragons.”
The four characters that Farrelly is referring to here are Wén (文), Xíng (行), Zhōng (忠), and Xìn (信) which together form a core part of the BCIS philosophy, informing the community of the school’s values as learners. When the chance came to take some sabbatical leave, Farrelly seized her chance to write something culturally significant that would help students make sense of the world in which they were living.
To make the book truly her own, Farrelly illustrated it herself, but she is keen to stress that they are based on traditional images. Farrelly’s work will benefit the BCIS community not just by improving cultural knowledge, but through the funds from books sales themselves. The proceeds of the first edition will be going to the charity organization Yearn to Learn. Yearn to Learn was established in 2009 by a group of Beijing volunteers, who strongly believe in supporting each child’s right to access an education so they can lead more fulfilled lives.
Read the full article on the BCIS website.
Image courtesy of BCIS
