Internationalism

DBIS is an international community school that derives strength from its members, immediate locality and the wider area. We value our role at the heart of Discovery Bay and our place in Hong Kong. We reach out from this position of strength to connect with Asia and the global community, build strong networks with other learning communities and prepare our students for life in diverse international environments.

We believe that internationalism begins and develops from a strong sense of self-identity. To this end, we encourage our students to celebrate their individuality and to be proud of who they are as young people.

We want our students to explore, develop and express their values and opinions while listening to, and showing respect for, the ideas of others. In addition, we wish to see DBIS students from different backgrounds interacting, learning from each other and growing together.

Our students need to develop a deep understanding of their place within our host communities of Hong Kong and China and appreciate the diversity of the region’s people, heritage, cultures, beliefs and traditions. Therefore, we encourage our students to connect and engage proactively with these communities as they provide the unique context for their individual and collective development.

From this foundation, we hope to see our students learn to become creative, flexible and proactive young people who think critically, are open minded, understand multiple perspectives, embrace difference and show respect, sensitivity and inclusiveness. We support them in becoming socially minded individuals who are aware of, and concerned for, the issues that confront the world that we share.

Developing a Shared Understanding of Interculturalism

The school community had the privilege of working with Dr Eeqbal Hassim from the Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne during our annual Internationalism Week celebrations in October 2017. During the week, we reevaluated our shared understanding of internationalism and interculturalism as concepts relevant to our school and began to explore ways to modify teaching to achieve more in-depth, sophisticated learning outcomes for students in these areas.

As an outcome of the various parent–teacher collaborative sessions, we were able to define the concept of culture related to DBIS and establish what we hope to achieve through intercultural learning at our school. We described culture as shared patterns – systems of thinking and being – not confined to ethnicity, race, language, nationality or religion. We agreed that intercultural learning is not surface, piecemeal education about a selection of 'cultures' (what 'cultures' do, how and why).

Instead, intercultural learning has constructive and intentional outcomes that focus on what happens when cultural perspectives, experiences and backgrounds meet; it does not consider cultures as discrete entities.

As a school, we have begun to evaluate how we design lessons and broader experiences to develop students' cultural awareness, knowledge and sensitivity and help them understand cultural diversity and what happens in intercultural contexts. In essence, the aim is to challenge students and all school community members to think about what happens when we as individuals interact with people from different backgrounds to our own.

The DBIS Community