Peddie welcomed teachers Jian Wang and Jing Jin from its sister school, EFZ, as both schools are in the process of getting ready for the celebration of their tenth anniversary together.

The system started when Yuan Gao, a teacher of the language department and Asian Studies coordinator at Peddie, decided to go on a sabbatical to Shanghai in 2007. There, he spoke with the principal of EFZ to create a sister relationship with Peddie that would focus on three goals.

“I designed the program with three points in mind. Most importantly, the student exchange, and then faculty exchange, and school leadership exchange,” Gao said.

Wang and Jin are at Peddie as part of the faculty exchange, and in the next few months, 12 Peddie students will go to EFZ to complete the student exchange.

“Every year, one institution sends their students, and the other institution sends their teachers. Since we are going to EFZ this school year, their teachers came,” Gao explained.

He hopes that through these interactions, both schools and the students will be able to have a real life experience of how American boarding schools can differ from Chinese schools. One of the projects that Gao developed as part of the Peddie-EFZ program helps students at Peddie learn things about China that they cannot learn from a textbook or from classrooms. He picks a broad overall theme in which the students picked a topic that they are interested in. This year’s theme is fitness, health and sports.

“What is unique about these projects is that they cannot be completed just by doing research online or in class. The project cannot be completed without the component of a real person and a real place. They need to have a collaboration with a partner at EFZ,” Gao said.

In the past years, Peddie students have picked topics ranging from how capitalism works in China to how Chinese traditional medicine works in the modern health system.

“The projects we each complete are over a day to day-and-a-half span where we, with our EFZ partners, interview someone in the profession of our research project. For my project, I’m planning…[on] learning about and hopefully helping to develop therapies for people with special needs, specifically Autism,” Bianca Swidler ’17, one of the students involved in the program, said.

“My hope is that through these projects and real travel experiences, [the students] will gain a real life sense of China that they will be able to share with the rest of the community,” Gao said.

Similarly, the teachers visit either country to gain a better sense of how academics, athletics, and overall atmosphere differ.

“I would like to understand the system of the curriculum at Peddie. We would like to see how you overcome the problem of having the students entering different buildings with different classmates,” Wang said.

He expressed his surprise when he found out that athletics have an integral part in Peddie’s system.

“Back in China, we have a system of PE lessons. At EFZ, we have three periods of PE lessons per week each lasting for about 40 minutes. Here, we have 2 hours every day,” Wang said.

Despite some differences, both Peddie and EFZ hope to show the things that they have learned from each other to the rest of their communities. In celebration of their tenth anniversary together, there are tentative plans to set up screens in their respective schools so the communities can communicate with each other via video.

“We have a lot of exchanges and documented photos to share. But what is more important, is to take a retrospective look at our past history. To be more specific, what we have learned from each other. There are tentative plans to place huge screens in Annenberg and Caspersen, so we can talk to each other through screens,” Wang said.

The schools also hope to mark a tree as a memento of their past experiences together and as a symbol of the things to come out of their relationship.

“Mr. Quinn will meet with EFZ on March 15 to plan [for]…a tree to mark the occasion of our past decade of relationship,” Gao said.

In addition, EFZ hopes to have a forum with Peddie representatives as a celebration of their 10th anniversary.

Although the plans are not yet confirmed, both Gao and the teachers at EFZ hope to broaden their relationship together, so the entire community at each school can be involved.