We would like to welcome Ms Jane Martuneac Kang as the new Primary Coordinator alongside Ms April Peng. Having been a part of the YCIS Beijing community for 12 years this role was seen as a perfect fit for Ms Kang given her comprehensive knowledge of both the curriculum and core school values.

Ms Martuneac Kang, who is originally from the United States, has had extensive experience working and living abroad since she was a teenager. “Having grown up in many different cities in the US and South Africa, I was naturally inclined to choose to live and work abroad,”  she says. Beijing became the city she settled in after some initial time in Inner Mongolia where she started her overseas career.

“Once I settled in Beijing at YCIS, I felt that I was in a place where I could grow professionally,”  she says, “while enjoying the many wonderful experiences that China has to offer.” The school's bilingual and multicultural aspects also resonated with her.

Her professional development is well chronicled in our school's dynamic Learning Communities where she has applied the knowledge she gained during her M.Ed in Educational Leadership, Organisation and Policy from the University of Illinois.

Adds Ms Kang, “My team and I developed our Learning Community approach that is used across the Primary School now. We believed that we could achieve our best as professionals, and in turn our students could become the best versions of themselves through this collaborative and flexible approach to learning and teaching.”

Several years later and with a YCIS Learning Community Guidebook that she co-authored, Learning Communities have now been introduced to our Secondary School following their success in Primary.

Thrilled at her new role as Primary Coordinator, this former YCIS-BJ Upper Primary Learning and Teaching Coordinator is looking forward to leading the Primary School and reinforcing our school's MPPs, which aim “for each student to become the best possible version of themselves and grow into a kind and productive global citizen.”

To achieve these goals, Ms Martuneac Kang shares some key priorities for the coming year:

• Firstly, it is to enhance parents' sense of connection to our school community but more importantly to their child's learning and development. I highly value our parents' input as I truly believe that a child will ultimately develop best when school and home are working in a partnership.

• Secondly, to enrich our English Language and Literacy learning and teaching to meet the needs of our language learners at all levels. A clear progression of language development as well as providing our students with tools to access the content being taught in English will see our students take more ownership and become more active in their learning.

• Lastly, to ensure that even during this unique time and under certain health and safety regulations, our Learning Community model is at its core maintained and moved forward so that our students can continue to benefit from it. 

On her vision for students, the mother of two children (one in Year 3 and one in K4) says, “Ultimately, no matter our own unique dreams for our children's future, we likely all foundationally want something very similar: for them to become kind, happy, and productive global citizens.”