In April 2006, with support from the Asia Society, What Kids Can Do (WKCD) spent two weeks in Beijing, China, working with high school students to create photo essays that captured life in New China, for an international audience made up of their peers and educators. Upon the recommendations of colleagues, WKCD contacted the principal of Beijing No. 12 High School to see whether his school would like to partner with us. The response was an enthusiastic yes. Together we then drafted plans for how the project would unfold, relying on phone and email communication.

Beijing No. 12 High School, to be sure, is not a typical Chinese high school. It is one of a dozen high schools in Beijing called “key” schools, recognized for the academic promise of their students, their strong faculty, and their well-equipped facilities. The academic pressures at key schools are intense, but faculty do their utmost to help every student graduate and pursue post-secondary education. Beijing No. 12 High School is unusual in its encouragement of teaching and learning that goes beyond the sheer preparation of students for China’s rigorous exam system.

Two young faculty at the school, both English language teachers hungry to practice English, volunteered to work with us. They, in turn, recruited ten students, mostly juniors, whose proficiency in English ranged from good to excellent.

We spent our first day together getting to know each other, aided tremendously by WKCD’s administrative assistant who had spent a semester in China during college and spoke Chinese. Given the choice between speaking in Chinese or English, though, all of the students chose English.

For the ensuing six days we met during school lunch breaks, after school, and on Saturday. On their own, students shot photographs in their classes and around school, taking digital cameras everywhere they went. As a group, we traveled out on photo shoots. We chose four locations for the diversity they offered: the migrant neighborhood that borders the school (which few students had ever entered beyond buying snack foods at its entrance); the world-famous Tiananmen Square; Beijing’s shopping “street,” Wangfujing; and the laid-back Houhai Lake near the city center.

Together, the students shot over 2,000 photos. We worked with them—as much as we could in the time available—to select the strongest pictures for inclusion in the slideshows you find on these pages.

When not photographing, we spent time talking about a huge array of topics: the push and pull of China’s rapid ascendancy in the world economy; China’s relations with Taiwan; the importance of family and tradition; friendships in China, especially between boys and girls. The students were articulate, open, passionate, funny, and generous, as were their two teachers.

When we took stock of the hundreds of photos students had snapped around their school, we spontaneously decided that each student would pick a facet of school life, write a short essay about it in English, and then read it aloud into our tape recorder. Amazingly, the students wrote for less than half an hour and then flawlessly read their essays into the recorder. Each also translated, on the spot, his or her essay into Chinese. This winter, WKCD put the students’ words and photographs together to create a collection of audio slideshows about their school. We have posted their Chinese versions, too.

This fall and winter, Beijing No. 12 students also drafted the captions and text that accompany the “Side by Side” and “A Closer Look” series.

During our trip to Beijing, WKCD spent two days at another school, the Shuren School, located about an hour and half by car from the city center. Our student collaborators at Shuren were much younger, mostly ten and eleven years old. With them, we assembled photos taken by the Beijing No. 12 high school students and used them to create an audio-visual Chinese-English dictionary.

For WKCD, this photojournalism project was our second time working with youth outside the United States. A photo-essay book and short documentary videos created with secondary school students in the East African village of Kambi ya Simba, Tanzania was our first (http://www.inourvillage.org). We are currently collaborating with students  in London and New Delhi on photo essays that document the impact of globalization in the lives and places close to them.

What Kids Can Do is a U.S.-based nonprofit (NGO) that brings the freshness of youth voices and work to the widest audience possible. WKCD activities include a website with content that changes every six weeks, a nonprofit publishing arm called Next Generation Press, and small grants to student-teacher research teams.

The Asia Society, whose support gave this project its start, is an international organization dedicated to strengthening relationships and deepening understanding among the peoples of Asia and the United States. Founded in 1956 by John D. Rockefeller III, the Society provides a forum for building awareness of the more than thirty countries broadly defined as the Asia-Pacific region—the area from Japan to Iran, and from Central Asia to New Zealand and the Pacific Islands. Recently, the Asia Society began a major campaign to include international literacy as part of America’s ongoing agenda to improve its schools.