Keynote Speaker
Featuring Mr. Liu, as the Keynote Speaker, from Peer Education. Hong Liu is the co-founder and executive director of Peer Experience Exchange Rostrum (PEER), a Beijing-based NGO dedicated to promoting liberal arts education to secondary school students from low-income and rural areas in China. Since co-founding the organization in 2007, he has recruited over 800 volunteers from diverse backgrounds to serve more than 4000 students in 6 provinces. Currently, PEER supports 8 county-level and township-level secondary schools in Hunan and Guangxi through in-school learning spaces, summer and winter volunteer programs, long-term fellowship programs, semester-long project-learning courses, and professional development workshops. Hong graduated from Harvard University in 2010 with a bachelor’s degree in Social Studies and a master’s degree in Regional Studies: East Asia. Before working full-time with PEER in 2014, Hong worked with the Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies in Peking University, where he initiated the Cultural China Scholars program and served as the associate director to the Songshan Forum in 2012 and 2013. |
As a culmination of Futures Academy, all Grade 8 students are asked to take on a Capstone Project. This individual experience involves indentifying an issue that exists within China. Students will investigate their topic to create a written rationale for why action is needed. The culminating experience, completed in small groups, is to conduct a student-led conference session to an audience of peers.
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