Part III: America’s Unofficial Ambassadors Use School-2-School Exchange to Facilitate Mutual Understanding
School-2-School: A True Exchange
Part III: America’s Unofficial Ambassadors Use School-2-School Exchange to Faci…
This week, the New Global Citizen is publishing a series of pieces about America’s Unofficial Ambassadors’ School-2-School program, which combines virtual cultural exchange, community-based fundraising, and direct volunteering to advance goals related to education and mutual understanding at the grassroots level in the United States and the Muslim World. Here, Benjamin Orbach, founder and director of AUA, discusses how the School-2-School program benefits volunteers and host organizations alike. You can read Part I and Part II of the serieshere.
School started this week, and Hannah D’Apice and Sam Schindler returned to their classrooms in Dallas, Texas and Lancaster, Pennsylvania. At some point, they’ll look at their students and ask themselves, “How in the world do I explain what I did over the summer?”
Hannah is a 6th grade teacher at T.W. Browne Middle School, and Sam is a high school teacher at Lancaster Country Day School. Through Creative Learning’s School-2-School program, they served as unofficial ambassadors to the Muslim World this summer. While they taught and dispelled stereotypes, they also learned more than they ever could have imagined.
Creative Learning has been running School-2-School for almost a decade. The program brings together an American school with a school in a developing country for a virtual exchange. At the same time, the American school raises money for needed school supplies like books or computers. In 2012, we incorporated an “unofficial ambassador” component to the program where the lead educator from an American school travels to a partner school to volunteer for 2-4 weeks. That first year, Brittney Scott, a middle school teacher in Colorado Springs traveled to Jordan and trained her counterparts at a school comprised mostly of refugees to use the electronic white board that she and her students raised the funds to purchase.
