The International Studies Summer Institute is an annual professional development event that provides New York State K-12 teachers with authoritative content, tools, and pedagogical strategies for engaging students in local and global Human Rights issues. It is co-organized by Cornell University’s Southeast Asia Program and the South Asia Consortium, which includes the South Asia Program at Cornell and the South Asia Center at Syracuse.
Thirty teachers from Upstate New York participated in the conference, which focused on Refugees in a Global Context: Teaching Through Historical Lessons & Contemporary Issues. Guest speakers discussed the many factors related to displacements of human populations, and the destabilizing effects that these have on families and especially children.
Using the Words Into Deeds model for designing informed action projects, teachers learned additional ways to help their students learn empathy and cultural sensitivity, and become engaged in community activism. These include classroom discussions of documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), and inviting informed guests into classes to share their experiences. For this topic, guests would likely include refugees who brought first-hand experiences with issues such as cultural isolation, difficulty in adapting their skills to available job opportunities, adapting to local educational expectations, and often being stigmatized by negative stereotype. During workshops, teachers explored ways their classroom exercises could incorporate these issues and inspire students to then develop outreach service projects.
It was encouraging that so many dedicated educators are committed to deepening their understanding of refugee populations, both world-wide and locally, and are willing to find ways in which their schools can acknowledge and address the crisis through student action and empowerment.
In their program reviews, teachers stated,
“It is much easier to approach an issue in the classroom after having examined it through cultural, geographical, historical, political, psychological, sociological and pedagogical lenses.”
“[this] workshop stimulated our minds on refugees around the globe. I feel so prepared to engage students on discussion concerning refugees.”
“I very much appreciate this time for intellectual discourse and looking at curriculum from a global perspective. I like being able to empower my students to be agents of change in the world”
“It was very beneficial to learn how to bring local and global Human Rights issues to the classrooms and communities.”
Additional information is available on the Einaudi Center for International Studies website https://einaudi.cornell.edu/cornell-co-hosts-workshop-refugees-classroom