Students in Pittsburgh will devise a series of questions for students from one of our focus regions and will conduct interviews with these students via Skype or email. A book or zine will be produced that presents and compares responses from all the interviews. The book could contain illustrations. This small publication would be given to each student and could be distributed at Conflict Kitchen. Please see One Day an Elephant Stepped on an Ant House as an example of a book that we created from interviews with Afghan children.

Subject Areas: Technology, Social Studies, English, Journalism, Visual and Performing Arts, International Relations, and Psychology

Learning Objectives: Intercultural Understanding, Critical Reflection, Descriptive Writing, Communication, Research Skills, Decision Making, and Creative Expression

One of our international network of chefs will lead students through a cooking lesson live via Skype while leading a discussion about the culture and politics of their country. Currently, we are working with Laila El-Haddad (author of The Gaza Kitchen, featured on “Parts Unknown” with Anthony Bourdain and interviewed in Bon Appetit). Your school will need classroom kitchen facilities or access to the school cafeteria kitchen.

Subject Areas: Social Studies, Cooking, Technology, International Relations, and Sociology

Learning Objectives: Intercultural Understanding, Critical Reflection, Communication, Research Skills, Decision Making, and Creative Expression

Students will be asked to research various media sources in order to write a one-page paper about life in our focus region. Then Conflict Kitchen will bring a representative from our focus region to the classroom to be interviewed personally by the students, giving the students the opportunity to write a new paper based upon the interview. The two papers are analyzed and comparisons are made between the media-sourced paper and the paper created through direct interview. Students could submit their second interview to the school’s newspaper or for distribution at Conflict Kitchen.

Subject Areas: Social Studies, English, Journalism, International Relations, and Psychology

Learning Objectives: Media Literacy, Intercultural Understanding, Critical Reflection, Descriptive Writing, Communication, Research Skills, Decision Making, and Creative Expression

Students from Pittsburgh will be paired with students from our focus region to conduct a five-minute interview with their international partner in which they tell their life story through their most significant experiences. Students in both Pittsburgh and also the international country will use the interviews to create and present short first-person monologues for their respective classrooms.

Subject Areas: Social Studies, English, Journalism, Performing Arts, International Relations, and Psychology

Learning Objectives: Intercultural Understanding, Critical Reflection, Communication, Research Skills, Decision Making, and Creative Expression

One or more student(s) in your classroom will be chosen to be a human avatar for a citizen in our focus country. Through a simple mobile technology, the remaining students in your classroom will converse with the citizen in our focus country through the chosen student avatar. Check out documentation of previous incarnations of the project here.

Subject Areas: Performing Arts, Technology, Social Studies, English, Journalism, International Relations, and Psychology

Learning Objectives: Intercultural Understanding, Critical Reflection, Decision Making, and Creative Expression

Your class will share twenty jokes via email or Skype with a partner class from our focus country. In return, the class in our focus country will share twenty jokes with your class. The students in each class will pick ten jokes that they think are the funniest and then will present the jokes via Skype or video to the other class. This exercise looks at the folkloric quality of jokes and how humor can convey cultures as well as cross them.

Subject Areas: Social Studies, English, Journalism, Technology, Performing Arts, International Relations, and Psychology

Learning Objectives: Intercultural Understanding, Critical Reflection, Communication, Research Skills, Decision Making, and Creative Expression

Students in Pittsburgh and in our focus country will live in one another’s shoes for a day. All students will keep a journal and detail everything that they do in one day: what they eat, wear, how they play sports, when they watch TV, what music they listen to, etc. The students from Pittsburgh will share their journal with the students from our focus country and vice versa. The students will then take a week to research and prepare to live one day as their counterpart. After students in both countries live out that day, they will share and reflect upon their experience through Skype.

Subject Areas: Social Studies, English Journalism, Technology, Performing Arts, International Relations, and Psychology

Learning Objectives: Intercultural Understanding, Critical Reflection, Communication, Research Skills, Decision Making, and Creative Expression

Students in Pittsburgh and our focus country will curate YouTube videos that reflect on the daily life of their own city and culture. The video curation will occur via a call and response: students in one city choosing a video shot in their respective city that has been posted to YouTube, while students in the other city responding with a similar themed video from their city. This back and forth conversation through video sharing will culminate in a joint screening at both locations and will be followed by a Skype group discussion about the similarities and differences of their respective cities and cultures.

Subject Areas: Social Studies, Technology, Visual and Performing Arts, International Relations, and Psychology

Learning Objectives: Media Literacy, Intercultural Understanding, Critical Reflection, Communication, Research Skills, Decision Making, and Creative Expression

Playing upon the action of following recipes and the history of instruction-based art, this project will allow students to create instructions/recipes for actions to be carried out by their counterparts in our focus country and in Pittsburgh. Students will perform a recipe/instruction written for them and document the result using writing and various media (i.e. photography, video, realtime video feed). To assist in stimulating ideas, we will present past actions produced/performed by artists.

Subject Areas: Social Studies, English, Technology, Performing Arts, International Relations, and Psychology

Learning Objectives: Intercultural Understanding, Critical Reflection, Communication, Decision Making, and Creative Expression