In 2021, Daystar Academy embarked on a bold experiment within the Mainland China context: to embed a cohesive Social Innovation Framework across its entire K-12 journey. This was not merely an educational initiative. It was an act of balancing—juggling multiple national and international standards while intentionally running against the grain of transactional educational trends. Grounded in three interconnected pillars and expressed through nine developmental competencies, this was an attempt to reclaim and reimagine our school’s core ethos.

Five years later, we pause to share insights from this complex journey. While we anticipated growth in student projects, the most profound outcome was unexpected: this framework didn’t just supplement our curriculum; it began to quietly transform our school’s very identity. It became the engine for a new, unifying culture, aligning leadership, teaching, and the parent community around a shared language of care and agency that transcends external pressures.

This session is a story of emergent coherence against a complex backdrop. We’ll share our framework, our navigational strategies, and tangible examples of how a focused, human-centric vision can, over time, cultivate a resilient and purposeful school community.

You will leave with:

• Practical lessons on implementing a unifying K-12 framework within a bilingual IB school in China, including strategies for meeting diverse standards without compromising core values.
• Actionable stories of how specific competencies fostered unexpected alignment between stakeholders, creating a powerful counter-narrative to prevailing trends.
• Reflective questions to consider how a core vision can cultivate cohesion and identity in your own setting, even within challenging landscapes.