Theme: Back to Basics

This year we are turning to our community to hear from the students and teachers in our school. We will elevate the voices and the ideas that are incubating within the walls of NIS - and beyond. It is built into our mission and vision for learning that we empower learners and listen to their voices. This is an authentic opportunity to show that we mean what we say. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, access to this event is to NIS community members only (Mask and NIS ID required for campus access).

Nanjing International School - Blackbox Theatre
XueHeng Road 8
Nanjing, Jiangsu, 210023
China

Amanda Lenk

Storyteller

Amanda Lenk (she/her) tells stories and teaches Amanda is a poet and a thinker; her areas of expertise include literary cosmologies and representations of melancholia. In her life she has been many things: a maker of pastry, a sewer of bindings, and a mother, to name a few. She is also a domestic mystic with an extraordinary belief in the goodness and value of people.

Chesna Goel

Journalist

A daughter, a student and most importantly a teenager. Chesna Goel has been living in Nanjing for nearly 3 years now, returning to NIS after spending 5 years in the U.A.E. Ask her to play a game and she would be more than willing, though all friendships are forgotten when the game begins. As she is growing up, she sees the people and things around her constantly change. With change, there are many obstacles that come, physical and mental, and sometimes it becomes too much. She found her way to address this through her writing, through journalism.

Fujia Wang

Coder

Fujia Wang is a sophomore student at NIS. He was born in China and has lived the majority of his life in Canada. Since he was grade three, he would program games in scratch and started robotics in grade 5. However, he found that these experiences although intriguing were not motivating and impactful to an extent. Fast forward to the start of grade 10, he started his Personal Project which aimed to explore the environmental and societal implications of computer vision algorithms; this new discovery became a breaking point and opened his eyes about not only learning to code but learning to code something that can change the community around you. It can be said that computers taught him how to “see”.

Kelly Holmes

Family Architect

Kelly has been an educator for over twenty years and has lived away from her Sydney place of birth and family for just as long. In her travels around Australia and the world, she has taught a diversity of students in far-flung places. She has also found and created new versions of family. In 2020, amid the Covid 19 pandemic, Kelly with her partner and children, relocated from their home of six years in Kuala Lumpur ,Malaysia to Nanjing, China. Against the backdrop of pandemic travel restrictions and the inability to see and reconnect with the family and home of Australia, Kelly considers what family means and where to find it.

Melissa (Yutong) Wang

Change Maker

A student, a transformer, an innovator. Having experienced the pain of transitioning from a Chinese didactic education system to an inquiry-based system in Grade 6, Melissa transformed and discovered her potentials - artist, athlete, award-winner, pianist... but through the hard way. So she started a revolution, to strike for a change in her community. She identified the main obstacle facing most transitioning students and has been holding a club in school to help them adapt to the IB system. The quiet, lost Yutong in Grade 6 could never imagine how she transforms and leads on a revolution in the community she used to escape from. However, her revolution needs more than her transformation, but all of yours. Come and listen to her talk about her revolution and how to get on yours.

Mike Heath

Best Life Liver

Mike is from the North West of England and is the grateful beneficiary of years of support and advice from wonderful teachers and mentors. He has been an athlete, a teacher, a traveler and has enjoyed all the opportunities life has thrown at him. Now as a teacher and father he hopes to share the same motivation and inspiration, which helped him build his own life, and looks forward to seeing others living their best lives.

Rosy Ye

Mathematician

Rosy Ye is an 8th grader at Nanjing International School who is deeply in love with Mathematics. She obtains certainty in the world of numbers and patterns. But like many others, she holds enormous anxiety over traditional Math textbooks as well as doing incredibly unimaginative and repetitive problems. During spare time, Rosy is especially fond of watching random Pokémon videos. Her friends love playing poker and chess with her because she loses all the time.

Ruth Clarke

Truth Teller

You might know Ruth Clarke as the wife of a Scottish athlete, the mother of three wonderful young people, or as a secondary school educator. Spending the last 11 years surrounded by the students at NIS, has given her great optimism for the future as she is endlessly moved by their skills, empathy and passion. Her birth, just a stone’s throw from Henry VIII’s palace in London, could account for her fascination with the past. Now she senses an opportunity for everyone to have a voice in shaping the future, and calls on us all to tell our stories.

Seowoo Hwang

Slam Poet

Student, Daughter, linguist, poet. Born and raised in Korea, Busan. Seowoo spent a tragic yet inspiring 4 years in a Chinese school before transferring to NIS. Seowoo lived almost 8 years in Nanjing. Now she spends most of her time focusing on her studies. A fierce Mid-fielder, a positive uplifting queen. Seowoo has been on her personal journey that she thinks it is worth sharing. Follow her through the journey of finding her creative outlet: Slam poetry and enjoy the performance of “A Seed.”

Summer (Chi) Hsia

Vulnerable Leader

Student council president, Violinist, Music conductor, MUN representative, Football team captain, and award-winning photographer. Summer (Chi) Hsia is a sophomore student at the Nanjing international school. She was born in Taiwan and was raised in Shenzhen, Yantai, to Nanjing. Throughout her journey, her violin follows like a shadow. After years of playing as a violinist in the advanced orchestra, she became a conductor leading the choir. At the age of 14, she won her first election. During her successive tenure as the youngest president of the student council in NIS history, she has succoured her recognition of responsibility - notably, the importance of leadership. In this TEDx talk, she will explore the topic of leadership from a novel perspective!