Students Learn a Valuable Lesson About Education
April 23, 2008 - This morning Mercy Corps played a small part in breaking the world record for the World’s Biggest Lesson, and we did it by connecting two classrooms over 7,000 miles away from each other, via live video conferencing.
The Global Campaign for Education promotes education as a basic human right, and mobilizes public pressure on governments and the international community to fulfill their promises to provide free, compulsory, public basic education for all. On Wednesday, April 23, the Global Campaign for Education sponsored the World’s Biggest Lesson event to engage students from around the globe in discussion of access to quality education. Aspiring for a position in the Guinness Book of World Records, the Global Campaign for Education invited schools and youth groups worldwide to simultaneously implement the Biggest Lesson Plan in their individual classrooms. So we did, but we did it connecting students in Ramallah, West Bank and Portland, Oregon as part of the Mercy Corps’ Why Not? Youth Internet Exchange Program.
Very early in the morning in Portland, Oregon and, simultaneously, in the early evening in Ramallah, West Bank, students gathered to join in a video conference implementing the World’s Biggest Lesson Plan. In a real time global connection, students compared access to quality education in their respective countries and cultures.
The students were well prepared for their face to face encounter. All had researched the effects of poverty, gender, ethnicity, conflict and internal displacement on access to quality education. They had prepared banners and posters to present to each other. As each Palestinian student introduced themselves they stated a letter of the Roman alphabet. The Trillium students unscrambled the puzzle: Better Together. The World’s Biggest Lesson Plan truly was “better together” as U.S. and Palestinian students compared their ideas about what constitutes a quality education and the challenges both groups face in that pursuit.
Trillium Charter School in Portland, a progressive school actively promoting global engagement, has been a partner with Mercy Corps’ Why Not? Program since its inception. This school year Trillium students have participated in the Why Not? Program as an ongoing, experiential component of Middle Eastern studies and conflict resolution courses. Through posting of writing and multi-media projects, students have reflected about themselves, their families and the issues in their communities, fulfilling the aspiration of the Why Not? Program to build insight, empathy and engagement between participating youth.
Trillium students have chosen the school because of its student-centered focus. They are passionate about the academic safety in the community of learners they have found there. They support each other in taking risks in their learning, exploring their strengths and pushing their boundaries. While the Palestinian students also aspire to an education responsive to their passions, they expressed a need for a different sort of safety. A young woman from Jenin described a time when tanks filled the streets and she saw a fellow student whose school uniform was covered with blood. To the horror of the American students, they slowly began to understand that the girl had been killed in street fighting. The Palestinian students went on to describe the restraints of checkpoints, the separation wall, curfews and other intrusions of the occupation into their daily lives. The American students listened with awe and compassion, all moved by the unimaginable challenges their counterparts face simply traveling from home to school.
Trillium students unfurled a banner they had created for a recent peace rally in Portland. The center panel featured a Palestinian flag with a hand postured in the peace symbol. One end of the banner said, “Why not peace?” and the other, the same in Arabic. As the students unrolled the banner, the West Bank students exploded in applause. At the close of the conference the students were reluctant to say goodbye and to close the connection even though the Palestinian students still needed to travel over difficult roads through multiple checkpoints to get back to their homes in Nablus, Jenin and Hebron. The Trillium teacher, Ken Gadbow, observed, “one of the hardest things about this is that we don’t get to have this conversation for hours and hours. …I am touched by the things that you are sharing. I’m very grateful … we appreciate the honesty of the things that you are sharing and we are really affected by them.”
Jana Potter
Program Manager
Youth Internet Exchange
Mercy Corps
Read the transcript of the video conference here»
