Bilingual education builds cultural bridges

International education exchanges continue to evolve, with educators increasingly looking to language learning and cross-cultural education from an early age as a way to deepen understanding among younger generations.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, Hiba Academy Bay Area opened a Mandarin-English immersion private school in September for students from pre-kindergarten through fifth grade, becoming the first US campus of Wellington College Education, an international education group rooted in the United Kingdom.

Joy Qiao, founder of Wellington College China and Hiba Academy Bay Area, told China Daily that the new San Francisco campus marks another step in a cross-cultural education journey.

Qiao brought Wellington College's British educational heritage to China in 2009, where she sought to combine its strengths with those of Chinese education. Now, with Hiba's arrival in San Francisco, she is bringing that blended approach to the United States.

"We're combining the best of Eastern and Western education," said Qiao.

"I would see the linguistic skill as a gateway into the culture itself," Qiao said. "Being bilingual is one thing, but being culturally fluent and adaptive and understanding, being able to be open-minded and work and collaborate with people who are very different from ourselves, that's a different skill, a higher-level skill for future global leaders."

Qiao added that her goal is not simply to transplant a Chinese or British educational model to the US, but to create an environment where educators and students from different backgrounds learn from one another.

The broader purpose is "building cultural bridges through education," she said.

The school has now welcomed 36 students from 33 families in its founding cohort. Ten of the 36 students come from households where neither parent speaks Chinese, showing that interest in Mandarin immersion extends beyond Chinese-speaking families, according to the school.

"When parents say to me, 'We don't speak Mandarin, why would we pick Mandarin as a language?' I say 'Why not?'," Colette McWilliams, founding head of school at Hiba Academy Bay Area, who has worked in education for 29 years, told China Daily at the ribbon-cutting ceremony of the school on Sept 18.

McWilliams also echoed that the value of the program is not only linguistic. She said families are looking for strong academics while also wanting their children to become well-rounded global citizens, with "cultural understanding" forming part of that education, she said.

That cross-cultural learning also extends to educators themselves. McWilliams traveled to China after joining Hiba to visit its schools and learn from educators there. She said she expects to return once or twice a year as part of continued collaboration between schools.

The opening took place in San Francisco, an iconic city with longstanding educational, cultural and economic ties with China, especially a sister-city relationship with Shanghai.

Matt Dorsey, San Francisco's District 6 supervisor, also welcomed the school's opening, pointing to the value of introducing language education at an earlier age. He said the school could contribute to San Francisco's global competitiveness in providing international education resources.

"We need to be a real capital of innovation, and this is also an opportunity to educate the next generation, and generations to come, to ensure our global competitiveness," he said. "The city has always been defined by its diversity."

"We need to have that cultural exchange. We need to be able to have that educational exchange," added Anne Taupier, the executive director of the City of San Francisco Office of Economic and Workforce Development, saying that such exchanges "help create the foundation for that talent and for the growth of the city".

"I think the idea of exchanging students is always a valuable proposition," she added. "I think students learn more, grow more, become better human beings when they're actually experiencing other cultures."

Chinese Consul General in San Francisco Zhang Jianmin highlighted the role of direct experience in helping young people understand another culture.

"The young kids, they are the future of the relationship," Zhang said, adding that giving them opportunities to understand and benefit from different cultures can contribute to more constructive ties.

"They would move on to build bridges between the two peoples and two countries, between different cultures. It means a lot, and I hope that everybody will work together," he added.

Zhang also mentioned the initiative announced by Chinese President Xi Jinping during his visit to San Francisco in 2023 to invite 50,000 young Americans to China for exchange and study over five years, saying such visits allow young people to see the country, meet Chinese youth and build friendships, and encourage more American youth to explore the country in the future.

The movement of students across cultures may increasingly become a two-way process, Qiao of Hiba Academy said.

"For decades, the trend is Chinese students going abroad to study," Qiao said. "But now I see very much the start of a new trend, which is the reverse. Overseas students coming to study in China."

Qiao said she hopes students who begin learning another language and culture at a young age will eventually have opportunities to study abroad, including at schools and universities in China, and develop the cultural fluency to navigate an increasingly interconnected world.

Chelsea Ge contributed to this story.