Connecting Students to the World: Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
If you could arrange at your school a convention hosting 175 of the most important thinkers and creators of recent years, including Nobel laureates, top scientists, political leaders and shapers of world policy, and, further, have some of these eminent folk hold breakout sessions with your students, would you so arrange? If all that were required was the push of a button to accomplish this world symposium within the walls of your classroom, would you do it? "Please don't ask what is it./ Let us make our visit."
"Mr. Watson, come here, I want you," can easily, 124 years after, become, "Mr. (Oliver) Stone, come here, we want to question you!" How? That little invention called the internet and the long time efforts and developments of Mr. Harry Kreisler of UC Berkeley's Institute of International Studies have conspired with Urban Dreams to bring important thinkers and doers of our world into classrooms in an intimate, useable way, http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu. A student who seeks perspective on the Viet Nam War, wonders about the relation of Power to Truth, or searches for advice on the work of writing can find ample supply from the wisdom stores of Daniel Ellsberg or John Kenneth Galbraith; Nigeria's Wole Soyinka or South Africa's Albie Sachs; and Japan's Kenzaburo Oe or Brooklyn born Norman Podhoretz. The good news is that the required reading is compelling and authentic! It challenges the student mind and sensibilities.
I took my first step toward "Connecting (my Skyline High School) Students to the World" visiting Harry Kreisler and Nanou Matteson, the "Conversations with History People" at UC Berkeley. Mr. Kreisler has been interviewing distinguished faculty, guest lecturers and important visitors to the Berkeley campus since 1982 "as a way to capture and preserve through conversation and technology the intellectual ferment of our times." The video-taped interviews have been newly codified in ether-space variously as Conversations with History, Globetrotter Research Galleries and Connecting Students to the World, all facets of the transcribed interviews with nearly 175 luminous dignitaries. Kreisler and Matteson fascinated me for two stimulating hours with anecdote and idea from this vast array of thinkers. The prospect of introducing my students to the site, to Kreisler/Matteson, and, very possibly, through cyber-space with current guest faculty excited my own enthusiasm for this experience. The next step was to set the date and prepare the students.
Even though video clips are resident at regular intervals on the Conversations with History web site, Kreisler and Matteson were most helpful in providing video taped interviews for viewing in my portable classroom which awaits fiber optic wiring this summer. The video turned out to be the best approach, I think, because all students experienced the same introduction to the site; we were all together on the same page with journalist Mark Danner.
The Danner interview is representative of many of the interviews in several ways. He shares with Kreisler his educational background, a welcome reinforcement for educative endeavor, proceeds to discuss his professional activities and ideas ( His special interests are insurrections in Haiti, El Salvador and Bosnia and has much to reveal about each), and finishes, under Kreisler's keen questioning with advice to writing students gleaned from his journalistic and storytelling experience. Danner, like all of the interviewees, is highly intellectual and understandable. Unlike many, though, he has remained an observer-commentator rather than an active participant in world drama.
I was able to introduce the doers to my class the very next day when we borrowed a science computer lab to view the Connecting Students site. Two of these were Albie Sachs, former South African political prisoner and antiapartheid activist, now Chief Justice of the South African Supreme Court and framer of the new constitution, and Wole Soyinka, Nobel laureate, novelist and human rights activist. Both have be imprisoned for lengthily stays in politically motivated, antihumanist actions; and both have surprising, moving words which I know touched the mind of many a student in my class. Soyinka's urging to "just look at the work of others" in order to elevate one's own writing was a theme my students identified and discussed. It is an admonition worth repeating throughout the remainder of the year (one more palatable, perhaps, coming from a writer rather than a teacher). Sachs attributes his very survival in a difficult imprisonment to his ability to write, or to plan to write upon release:
Writing in moments of disaster has been extremely important for me, to come to terms with what's happened and to turn the ugliness into beauty. And the idea of communicating with others, sharing with others, has also been very, very important. (http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/Sachs/sachs-con5.html)
The presence of Harry Kreisler made our "writer's convention" even more immediate and fuller for he is always willing to share his intimate impressions, anecdotes and apocryphal knowledge of the interviewee and discussion topics. He was helpful when explaining what we called "the big event" the writers experienced, especially, the psychological event Professor Fred Cruise experienced when he abandoned the Freudian camp early in his career. The students would have otherwise overlooked that significant change in particular after reading of the seminal, overt episodes in the lives of Oe, Soyinka and Sachs. Too, Kreisler's experience interviewing Oliver Stone, also full of personal anecdote, brought Stone palpably into the room first in a comical, then, a serious way showing, certainly, that the creator's involvement, at least at the inception of this high school alliance, is both in keeping with the "Connecting" philosophy itself and enhances student understanding. And remember students are forever grateful for and impressed by outside visitors.
The class involvement culminated in investigation of one of the writer's lives and the preparation of a short report answering the following questions:
Several of the students reported orally, usually rising to the occasion, presented in "c", in a positive, future affirming manner.
The online reading, with commentary in person by the interviewer is one way to connect in a sort of breakout fashion with the students. Another breakout is the Connecting Students with the World component which places students in a limited email interchange with the author or other world figure. Several current interviewees, journalist Mark Danner and Amnesty International Secretary General, Shashi Tharoor, among them, are willing to meet students on-line perhaps in real-time or in an email interchange for a true conference break out session.
The opportunity to meet the celebrated folk of their world intrigued many of my students, gave them a greater feeling of belonging to an academic and world community. The research gallery, Women Role Models for the New Millennium proved particularly compelling to the girls in class. They readily identified with the women, often finding themselves so engrossed that they had read the interview entirely before they realized it.
To set up your own Urban Dreams/Connecting Students with the World, first visit the site, explore the personalities and issues they raise in light of your own curriculum. How do the interviews mesh with what you are presenting already to your students? How can the interviews expand the curriculum and the horizons of the student? The next step is to contact Urban Dreams for contact information. It is as easy as picking up the phone now that Bell has proven its worth.
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