World History Students Collaborate with Students from IbadanAlmost half the world — over three billion people — live on less than $2.50 a day. Poverty is a global issue, affecting people across age, gender, and race on every continent. What if we teamed up high school students from around the world and asked them to come up with ways to alleviate poverty? This is exactly what we did, and students from St. Martin’s and the International School at Ibadan University in Nigeria stepped up.
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To kick off the project, teams at each school researched the causes of poverty in each other’s country, identifying specific issues they would target for proposal development. Tasks for proposal development were divided among team members and lists of questions were developed to present to their partner school for assistance. The student teams collaborated via conference calls and Skype, answering questions, sharing progress reports on research via videos, and soliciting feedback from their partner schools on their ideas. Teams produced and exchanged their final proposals, which they were critiqued via writing and a final Skype session. Among the proposals developed, themes of education, job training, and entrepreneurship emerged, allowing the students teams to bounce ideas back and forth.
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Ibadan International School students’ proposals for alleviating poverty in the United States included revising United States policy on reducing drug abuse, revising educational standards to equip students with the technological skills for 21st century jobs, raising the minimum wage, providing a voice for employees seeking pay and benefit equity, emphasizing character education in schools, providing greater financial support for families at risk for poverty, and creating jobs in the United States for those who are currently unemployed or underemployed. St. Martin’s students’ proposals included specific plans for increasing agricultural productivity in Nigeria (such as mass cultivation of nutritional crops that are relatively unused), providing government and international programs to aid small farmers, developing targeted job creation programs in specific regions of Nigeria, supporting educational programs in engineering fields to build capacity for infrastructure development, creating more opportunities for women entrepreneurship, and providing alternative education for students at risk of dropping out of school.
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