Full Circle

By KATHRYN CLARKE BLACK on May 1, 2013

After working an entire semester towards the Geographies of Power conference held on April 26-27 I feel like my time at the Center for Global Studies has shown me why I chose this field of International Relations. We have spent the semester working at outreach events within the local community and schools to broaden the view of international cultures and it seemed that the conference was somewhat unrelated to the rest of our experience.  While listening to the first keynote speaker, Dr. John Esposito, he emphasized the necessity of speaking out and increasing cultural awareness to decrease the amount of islamophobia in America. I have seen how teaching children about diversity and to understand foreign cultures will allow for less xenophobia in the future after my time at the Young Scholars of Pennsylvania Charter School.  I have been leading the French/Francophone cultures club and it has been great teaching the third, fourth, and fifth graders to have a more open worldview.  We have gone through French history and culture by doing skits, simulations, and games.  It has been a very fun and rewarding experience and when the director of the Center, Dr. Sophia McClennen, spoke at the conference she tied it all together for me.  She spoke about how she has hope in our generation, “the millennials,” to make a change and improve the issues that were spoken about during the weekend. As she was saying that it was great to hear that someone had faith in my generation, but I also thought about how much the children at YSCP will be able to do after getting such a well rounded globally aware education. They are the generation who are really going to solve our problems we are just the generation who are giving them the tools to do so.

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