Teaching International Relations Program

Dear Katherine,

Thank you for participating in TIRP outreach! This folder is for your four session reports. This is a public forum and we encourage your professors and teachers to review your journal entries for feedback. Make sure your report of classroom activity is appropriate for public viewing.

Remember:
1. Each entry must be submitted within a week or before the next session, whichever comes first.
2. Entries need to be at least 500 words. It is your responsibility to save a copy of your report.
3. Your reports should focus on the content of the TIRP session. Spend no more than one paragraph discussing logistics. Include the key IR concepts and specific student responses.
4. Select "Post Reply" not "New Topic" when submitting each entry. This will ensure that all your
reports are posted in a way that will be easy for CALIS staff, professors and teachers to read.


A CALIS staff member will review your entry each week and leave a posted message approving it toward your extra credit. Thank you for your participation in TIRP!
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Report 1 -- APPROVED -- 11/06/2009 -- Scarlett
Thank you for your feedback, I am glad that the human right squares went well! That is always an enjoyable activity.

Report 2 -- APPROVED -- 11/06/2009 -- Scarlett
It is difficult sometimes to allocate your time with these sessions, but you must remember to only plan enough for 50 minutes total because you need time at the beginning and end for settling and cleaning up. The activities your team did seem good, just try to heighten the level on enthusiasm! Have a great next session!

Report 3 -- LATE/ CONTENT APPROVED -- 11/19/2009 -- Scarlett
Sometimes a class's attention is just not all there, but good job of plowing through it anyway. Did you relate the Code of Dinotopian activity to the case you did last time? This generally is a more effective activity if it is connected to a Case Study. Good luck with your next session!

Report 4 -- LATE/ CONTENT APPROVED -- 12/07/2009 -- Scarlett
Thank you for your participation in TIRP!

As we entered the classroom for our first TIRP session at South East High School last week, I was a little nervous about what we had in store for us. While I had done TIRP once before, the class I had had previously consisted of 40 honors students who were only one grade younger than me so in my mind, the class greatly intimidated me. Our first session at this school, however, proved to be much more successful than the last one.
Upon our arrival we began with a few brief introductions then immediately started on our first activity, an interactive warm-up called Human Rights Squares. While we explained the activity, we passed out the activity sheets to each of the students so they were able to begin immediately following our brief introduction. This activity served as a great way to start off the class because the students were able to get up and talk amongst each other as well as with us. It also served as the perfect opening into the topic of human rights because after our discussion, we were able to get a sense of what they already knew about human rights and ethics. Most of the boxes they were able to fill in with ease. They were already familiar with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which made out job for the class a little bit easier. We discussed a couple of the answers such as “a human right”, “a country where human rights are violated”, and “a person who is a champion of human rights” then, after making sure there were no more questions, we proceeded on to the next activity.
The next activity was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Pursuing Freedom & Dignity. This activity did not require that much explaining since the students were already familiar with some of the vocabulary from their own knowledge as well as from the Human Rights Squares activity. They each received a list of Human Rights as well as U.S. Constitutional Rights. After reading a brief, formal definition of what constitutes a human right, we split them up into groups to let them complete the activity together discussing which category they believed each human right fit best – freedom from fear, freedom from want and/or dignity. While the students were completing this activity, we walked around and checked in with each of the groups, answering any questions they had or helping them with the activity if they were confused. Most of the time, their questions related to the fact that many of the rights, they believed, could fit in all three of the categories. We later explained how this related back to our previous discussion about human rights and how they all relate back to each other in one way or another. After regrouping, Maddy, Jordan and I chose a few of the human rights that were listed to discuss with the rest of the class. When the topic of marriage came up, it was interesting to hear what they thought about gay marriage. They all seemed to agree that it shouldn’t be made illegal and were then able to point out the other rights that making gay marriage illegal would violate such as the freedom of belief and religion. We asked them what they thought about the right to vote at age 18 and surprisingly, many of them thought that 18 was too young primarily due to lack of maturity and education. One student suggested that people should take some sort of test to test their intelligence level before they are allowed to vote, while a couple argued that they should be able to vote right now (as 11th graders). With that, we concluded our first session and told them that we would be back in a week for more fun.

For our second session, we chose to so an NPR case study called “A Victim Treats His Mugger Right”. In this story, a social worker, Julio Diaz, is mugged by a teenager and instead of getting angry, he offers him the rest of his possessions and even takes him out to dinner. Overall, I think this week’s session wasn’t bad but it didn’t run quite as smoothly as the previous week’s. Throughout the session, the students’ level of enthusiasm was rather low as we discussed each of the topics.
Rather than playing the audiotape of the NPR story, we had a couple of the students read through the story aloud before proceeding to our discussion. We began by asking about their reactions to the story. As we had expected, all of the students seemed shocked by Julio Diaz’s response to his attacker and expressed that most of them would not have done the same, they would have been too fearful. One student, however, shared to the class a story about how a group of guys had attempted to take his cell phone when he was on his way home one day but he talked to them peacefully and in the end, was able to keep his phone.
After asking them a few more questions about the story, we moved on to discuss the Six Pillars of Character as specified by the Josephson Institute. These virtues – trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring and citizenship – were all virtues that the students had learned before from Mrs. Watanabe so little explanation was needed before beginning our discussion. For this, we had the students come up with examples from Julio Diaz’s story of ways in which he demonstrated each of these virtues. In the handouts each of the students received, there was a list of criteria needed for each of the virtues and the students were asked to name the ones that Julio showed in story. The students completed this pretty easily so we proceeded to ask them which one or two of the virtues they felt made a difference to how Julio responded to the teenager as opposed to how someone else would respond. Ultimately, there seemed to be a general consensus that respect was the main virtue that made the difference and that it was Julio’s respect for the teenager that also affected the teenager’s reaction.
After the Six Pillars of Character, we moved on to explain and discuss the “four worlds”. We began by giving a brief description of the components of each of the worlds – political, social, economic, and cultural – before asking them to identify which worlds are affected by certain circumstances. Perhaps we didn’t explain well enough, but this portion of our discussion proved to be the most difficult. Few of the students seemed to truly comprehend what we were asking, but after giving a few examples, things began to run a little bit smoother. When they were asked to identify which world was affected when parents are undocumented, for example, they quickly acknowledged that this affects the political world as a result of immigration laws but also the economic world because it is more difficult to get jobs to support families. This, I believe, is when they started to grasp the notion that each of the worlds are interconnected and anything that happens in one of the worlds also affects the others.
We ended the discussion by briefly going over some of the quotes at the end of the packet. They were able to relate the quotes back to Julio Diaz’s story and were able to understand that perhaps if more people thought the way Julio did, the community might become a little more peaceful.
Ultimately, I think the students understood everything we talked about but I think we might have tried to squeeze too much in to the hour we are allotted. The discussion wasn’t quite as fun as the Human Rights Squares activity we had done the previous week but hopefully this coming session will prove to be more successful.

For our third TIRP session, we did the “Code of Dinotopia” lesson. For this activity, we decided to number the students off into ten different groups, which we thought might help encourage more participation. After splitting them all up, we explained the activity and emphasized that we would be calling on each of the groups randomly afterwards to provide their definitions for each of the different codes. We gave the students about 10 minutes to translate each of the codes as we circled around and provided help to those who didn’t quite understand. Our technique of splitting up the different friend groups to get the students to work harder, however, proved to be somewhat unsuccessful. Their teacher, Ms. Watanabe was absent for the beginning of the class, which might have affected their behavior a little bit as well. Regardless, there were a few students who participated and provided different translations for each of the Codes of Dinotopia, which enabled our discussion. The different groups’ translations varied greatly for each of the different codes, but the students were able to justify each of their translations and made it clear that they understood what was at the heart of each of the codes.
After this, we moved on to identifying which key concepts fit with each of the different codes. We decided to have this discussion as one group instead of splitting them off again since the last time wasn’t tremendously successful. The students were easily able to identify which virtues and values went with each code and were also able to justify their reasoning.
For the final part of the class, the students were each given a sheet entitled “Code of Conduct: Practice Makes…”. In this activity, they were given a list of 15 different values which they had to place into the sentence “If you value ______ you must practice the virtue of ______”. For the second part of the sentence they were asked to choose virtues from a given word bank that they believed went with each of the given values. We did this part of the activity as a big group as well and the students seemed to have been able to grasp these concepts quite well. After completing this activity, we discussed how this applies to our society as a whole, in terms of how they felt they should act and/or be treated by friends, family, neighbors, co-workers, etc. The students pointed out that if they valued their education, it required responsibility and self-discipline. One student in particular also pointed out, however, that while it was the students’ responsibility to respect they teachers and to value their education, it was also the teacher’s responsibility to make the lesson interesting and to try to make it easier for the students to pay attention and to participate. They also noted that it was important to respect their neighbors, as well as to be tolerant of them if they didn’t like them. One of the students also noted that his manager at work was respectful of him and treated him as an equal which made him a good boss. Overall, despite most of the students’ high energy levels and lack of participation, it was an okay session. Hopefully during our last session they will be a little bit calmer, but I do think that they managed to learn a little bit from our last class.

Our last TIRP session, in my point of view, proved to be the most successful one. We wanted to do something a little more fun and interactive for the last session so that we could try to end on a good note so we did the Nation of Shenzi role play (simulation?). This proved to be a good move since not only was it related to our topic of human rights and ethics, but it encouraged more students to participate and more of them seemed to be more interested than they had been during our previous sessions.
We began by dividing the class into groups of around five students then passed out the handouts as we began to describe to them what they were going to be doing. They were told that there was a made-up nation of Shenzi that was a corrupt and non-democratic state with a history of human rights abuses. They were informed that each group was to take on the role of foreign policy advisors to the newly elected President of the United States who needed to decide the United States’ policy towards the nation of Shenzi.
Everyone then congregated in their groups and were given about fifteen minutes to come up with their group’s policy before presenting it to the rest of the class. During this time, Jordan, Maddy and I walked around, making sure the students all understood their task and that everyone was contributing to the discussion. They had to make decisions on what their general strategy would be: whether they would publicly condemn the state’s practices and try to exert pressure on it to change, try to change the practices through quiet negotiations, or to do nothing because this is an internal matter and the government should not interfere in the domestic affairs of another state. Once they chose their general strategy, they then had to decide which specific strategies they would choose to implement in terms of military assistance to the Shenzi government, nonmilitary assistance to government, international US investment and trade, cultural exchanges, relationships with opposition groups and the intergovernmental arena.
After their fifteen minutes had elapsed, one or two representatives from each group then came up to present their group’s chosen policy. Most of the groups opted for more aggressive policies, but when it came to the specific strategies, they sometimes did not correlate with their general strategy. When this happened, we pointed it out and were able to get them to understand the implications of each of their chosen strategies. One of the groups, I believe, chose to do nothing because this is an internal matter, which led us to a discussion on why this is often difficult because governments are often extremely interconnected not only economically, but in many other different ways. I believe that this resulted in them really understanding that these were current issues that the US government has to face.
In the end, we wrapped it up by having the class vote of which strategy they believed to be the best one. Most of the groups voted for their own group (which we had failed to consider at the beginning), but in the end each group was rewarded with Diddy Riese cookies, with the group with the most votes getting to pick their flavors first. Ultimately, I think this was a really good final session, the students were enthusiastic and they truly seemed interested in what we were discussing. Hopefully they remember everything they learned!