Summary

LIFT will conduct its operations and its curriculum in accordance with Taiwanese and French education systems laws. The content of the school programs will be in line with the syllabuses of the French Ministry of Education and will respect the legal framework defined by the Taiwanese authorities concerning international schools. The support of the AEFE (The Agency for French Education Abroad), as set out today by a support agreement and in the future by certification, guarantees the long term excellence of our teaching.

A new school must assert a strong identity which any member of the educational community can easily identify with. The following axes are above all the framework, which is intended to shape the main lines of our educational project that will be set in motion during the first quarter of the 2022-2023 school year. We want our school project to be refined with all the actors in the LIFT educational community, teaching teams and as well as parents from the first quarter of the 2022-2023 school year. One of the strong principles underlying our educational philosophy is the promotion of collaborative practices between students, teachers, parents and external partners for the success of students and ultimately their well-being.

Thus, the educational plan of LIFT is organized around four axes.

AXIS 1: Build a strong and unique identity, based on dialogue between French and Taiwanese cultures

A French education, bearer of values for the world of tomorrow.

We want our students to share the values of the French Republic. Our ambition is to educate independent, committed and enlightened citizens, critically thinking, who defend the ideals of a democratic society, respectful of its environment and in a peaceful world. LIFT aims to become one of France’s showcases in Taiwan by promoting its educational system, its culture and its art of living. Openness to French-speaking and European culture is also a key point of our project.

A deep link to the host country and to Taiwanese culture.

LIFT is part of a spirit of openness and active educational collaboration with its host country. Our school is located within a Taiwanese public school campus, with which an ambition for academic cooperation goes beyond the simple relationship of landlord to tenant. Building on this partnership, we want our students to benefit from the expertise and wealth of local resources to make the teaching of Chinese language and culture one of the priorities of our educational project. Based on commonly shared humanist values such as respect, tolerance and mutual aid, we also wish to promote good manners and civility principles that characterize the society of our host country.

AXIS 2: Creating the conditions for student success

Teachers’ commitment to student success.

At the time of its creation and throughout the life of LIFT, it is important that our teaching teams have a capacity for outreach and involvement in the life of the school that goes beyond their classrooms. Our school’s mission is to encourage initiative, creativity and innovation within the framework of the school’s collectively defined project and the AEFE’s accreditation framework.

Therefore, we encourage their personal and professional development, by giving priority to consultation times, exchange of practices, and collaborative work around unifying projects. Our future membership in the AEFE network will allow us to benefit from the richness of its continuing education offer.

A measured use of digital tools.

We are fortunate to live in a country that has made the manufacturing and equipment of new technologies its trademark. These tools offer significant advantages by allowing the implementation of a differentiated pedagogy or innovative approaches that support students’ learning and motivation. However we want to exploit all these possibilities intelligently. These new ways of learning with digital technology are not easy solutions, but on the contrary they demand new requirements, especially from our teachers who must keep in mind that pedagogy is always more important than the medium. A delicate equilibrium will be found between the regular learning of written skills and a moderated time of exposure to screens.

Collaborative learning spaces.

Thanks to the quality of its infrastructure and its pleasant and spacious surroundings, the LIFT campus offers a unique environment for LIFT students to flourish. We will pay particular attention to the design of the school spaces, which must be conceived as places of cooperative work, exchange and sharing in order to stimulate creativity and allow the development of projects where students can move freely according to their learning. To do this, it is necessary to consider opening up spaces by not limiting them to the classroom alone, but by creating third places for creation and imagination in the corridors and halls, which will be complemented by specialized learning spaces.

AXIS 3: An international school open to the world

LIFT wishes to contribute to the French education influence abroad in Taiwan. To do this, we must demonstrate our ability to teach foreign languages and to teach in foreign languages. Thus, the creation of multilingual curricula will allow us to respond to the linguistic and cultural diversity of our future Francophone and Francophile families.

Plurilingual education centered on mastering three languages.

The French language, as the communication language within the school, will have a central place. Therefore, we encourage the widest possible exposure to the French language. LIFT is a French school, and all its students can expect to be exposed to and to master French in line with what a French school can offer.

In accordance with the principle of linguistic and cultural reciprocity, Chinese, being our host country language and often an essential language in the families of our students, will receive special attention. Our ambition is to ensure a “successful blending of the two languages and two cultures” by fully assuming the dual heritage dimension of our Taiwanese students, binationals and “expatriates” fully enriched by their stay in Taiwan. The goal here is to allow families, who wish to do so, to offer their children sufficient exposure to the Chinese language so they can master it orally and in writing, opening up a student and professional opportunities in the Chinese world, without having to supplement school time with evening classes.

As the international language for trade and commerce, and increasingly the international language of science, the teaching of English is fundamental for any school that claims to be international.
Our policy of remediation, support and reinforcement in languages, based on a common trilingual curriculum in French, English and Chinese, allows each family to tailor the teaching time of the three languages and in the three languages, in order to make the best adapted linguistic pathway to the family’s linguistic environment and to its projects.

LIFT’s strong ambition is to allow, over the course of a complete schooling and according to the profile and choices of the pupils, the acquisition of two languages at a fluent level (level C1 of the CEFR or Common European Framework of Reference for language) and a third at a university level (level B2).

Reasoned, progressive and coherent language pathways.

We want all pupils to have equal access to a multilingual education by offering teaching in at least one foreign language from nursery school onwards. We propose two bilingual pathways, French/Chinese and French/English, in which the number of hours for each language progressively evolves to reach parity at the beginning of cycle 3. We are also careful to ensure that there is an alternation of subjects taught in a foreign language during the same cycle. This teaching will be complemented by remedial and supportive measures, as well as extra-curricular activities which will be offered in the three languages.

We wish to give priority to a plurilingual teaching which emphasizes on the complementarity of the languages by putting forward modes of alternation which encourage daily exposure to two or three languages, and by focusing our teaching on plurilingual and interdisciplinary projects so that the mother tongue is treated as a mirror of the foreign language and vice versa. We also believe in developing practices such as co-teaching between our French teachers and those in charge of teaching in English or Chinese.

We offer a constructive and in-depth dialogue with the families who join us in order to define the best possible linguistic profile of the pupil, and then to propose the most appropriate pathway for their needs. Particular attention is paid to the degree of commitment of the students and non-French speaking parents to this choice of schooling.

See also “Language learning at LIFT“

AXIS 4: Promote individual development in order to live well together

Although it seems obvious to promote the well-being of pupils at school, it is nevertheless very difficult to define it. However, our mission is that our pupils learn to be happy.

A safe and friendly environment.

Through attention and encouragement, the engaging attitude of our teachers creates a trusting relationship with the students that strengthens their ability to learn. Each student is approached in its globality, with her life’s complexity and richness as the starting point. One of our missions is to help our students in their relationships with others by working on empathy and caring, skills that are as fundamental as the acquisition of knowledge. We will work on emotional skills by teaching our students how to behave. The organisation of the school schedule, saving time for deceleration or specific activities linked to well-being, will help our students to flourish in a peaceful environment based on trust.

Families’ involvement, a guarantee of success.

Our school aims to create a genuine relationship of mutual trust and “parity of esteem” between families and teachers. LIFT is committed to respecting the information and expression rights of parents with a threefold objective: the success of the students, adherence to the school project and the opening of the school to parents.

The LIFT parents’ community is rich in diversity and our school works on an inclusive approach by paying attention to the representation of all parents in the educational bodies. In a constructive spirit of solidarity, the school must create the conditions for our families to embrace our project and feel involved in the undertaken educational actions. We encourage their sense of initiative because it is through the realisation of projects that they will get to know each other better and embody in their own way the ambition to make LIFT a place for exchange and multicultural cooperation.