BEYOND ACADEMICS
Zella Talbot taught History in the early years of her 22year career with HKIS. Below: Nancy Kronnenberg, French Teacher and administrator in the 1980s and 1990s.
Teacher Bill Jordan entertaining students at a local school in China.
agon Tales Source: Dr
, 20 03
So we sat down and started brainstorming for a way to get kids more involved, and came up with the idea Service on Saturdays. Even though, at that time, I was a full-time counselor and Humanities teacher and had my young daughter, we decided to go ahead with this…giving up Saturdays to reach out to the local community. About six organizations became involved that first year, which meant a lot more teachers also became involved. We split Interact away from Service on Saturdays and made them two separate programs. In the 1990s, HKIS started service learning trips to Foshan, a city in the Pearl River Delta area adjacent to Hong Kong in neighboring Guangdong Province. Talbot believes it is important for HKIS students to have contact with children in need. “The kids have
Karen Markin, HKIS Religious Education Facilitator, conducting a devotion at a local (Lutheran) kindergarten.
Dennis Oetting cutting turkey at a street sleeper Christmas party in Kowloon.
“HKIS curriculum is now woven in with service activities, because you don’t want kids to just do service without a basic educational understanding of why poverty exists, why there are slums, why there is such great disparity between the haves and have-nots.”
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