Tuesday Aug 7th @ Education Commons 233 South 33rd

Tuesday Aug 7th @ Education Commons 233 South 33rd
The Education Commons is located in Weiss Pavilion and attached to Penn's stadium on 33rd street between Walnut and Spruce. The entrance to the Commons is through the Fox Fitness Center. Take the elevator or stairs up one floor to level 3, and enter through the glass doors.

9:30 Breakout Workshops (Choose either A or B)

A.1) Think, Care, Act: Hands-on Peace & Human Rights Education for Elementary and Middle School

Susan Gelber Cannon is an American educator with 30 years of experience in elementary and middleschool classrooms. Her special fields of interest are character, global, multicultural, and peace education: developing teaching methods to help children to think, care, and act honorably and globally. Trained in moral development at Harvard Graduate School of Education, she teaches history and English, as well as Model UN, peacemaking, and debate at The Episcopal Academy, near Philadelphia, PA, in the United States. Cannon has also taught middle school students and trained teachers in China and Japan. She gives presentations and workshops on peace education at conferences globally. She and her husband (the artist J. Kadir Cannon) initiated a Citizens’ Peace Tour in 2006, to Japan, China, Canada, Denmark, and Norway. Cannon created www.teachforpeace.org to give teachers, parents, and students rationales and resources to teach and work for peace locally and globally. Her blog provides updates, news, and inspirations for teaching for peace. Cannon’s book, Think, Care, Act: Teaching for a Peaceful Future, details methods to teach for peace.

A.2 ) Anti-Bias Curriculum in Elementary & Middle School: Creating classrooms in which change is empowering, work is meaningful and community is genuine

Beverly Braxton is a veteran New York State public school teacher, education consultant and adjunct professor.  She has 28 years experience in Partners in Education (PIE), an alternative program she helped develop in the Warwick Valley Central School District. The PIE program is based on multi-age classroom practices, utilizes integrated curriculum, and encourages parent-teacher partnerships.  Beverly values democracy, diversity, and peace education in teaching practices and has extensive experience helping teachers create community and multicultural learning environments in their classrooms.  She is a graduate of the Humanistic/Multicultural Education Program at SUNY New Paltz. She also has training in mediation, conflict resolution, and NVC (non-violent communication) and incorporates these practices in her work with students and parents.  She has taught preservice and in-service teachers at the college level and in several school districts.  She is the recipient of numerous teaching awards, fellowships, and honors, and is currently a member of the Hudson Valley Writing Project.

B.) Peace Education & Human Rights for High School & Post-Secondary Levels

Charlotte DiBartolomeo received her Masters in Conflict Transformation with a specialty in Intercultural Service, Leadership & Management from The School for International Training in Brattleboro, Vermont. She also holds a graduate certificate in civil society building. She has studied post conflict reconstruction in Sarajevo, Bosnia, and has served as an NGO delegate to the United Nations. She has been a trainer and facilitator for seventeen years working in both the corporate and governmental sector. In addition to her training experience, Charlotte was a crisis interventionist, mediator and peace educator for senior high school students for eight years. She also developed and instructs a graduate certificate in peace education at Arcadia University. In 2008 she founded Red Kite Project, a training and consulting organization dedicated to helping people move through conflict.

Zach Stone holds a degree in Counseling and Behavioral Health from Drexel University and certificates in crisis intervention, victim/offender conferencing, addiction studies, human services, and family home interventions.  He specializes in human behaviors, communications, conflict management, and violence prevention.  Zach has spent the last decade as a mediator, facilitator, and corporate coach.  He has worked in the Philadelphia justice system, corporate, government, and academic sectors. For the past 12 years Zach has worked with youth utilizing the Help Increase the Peace Program. He is on staff at Drexel in the behavioral health department and is a regular speaker with the Association for Conflict Resolution and the International Coaching Federation.

12:00 Lunch

1:00 Panel & Discussion: Youth Perspectives on Peace & Revolution
Jamal Alsarraj is a University of Pennsylvania undergraduate alumnus, who has participated in a variety of research and international development programming since graduating. Born in the United Arab Emirates from an Iraqi background and having immigrated to the United States early in his life, Jamal has always been interested in the social and political dynamics affecting transnational and multi-ethnic populations. He has previously reported on global developments affecting various refugee populations for the United Nations Online News Center and evaluated multi-sector trends for both an urban development firm and strategy think- thank. Most recently, Jamal has started collaborating with the Philadelphia Global Water Initiative on projects related to water resource management in the Global South. He continues to grow more interested in the nexus between environmental/resource security and political conflict.
Ayuen Ajok is originally from Bor, a small village in South Sudan. In 1987, an insurgent group from North Sudan attacked his village. Like many of his friends, he fled to Ethiopia, where they stayed as refugees for 4 years. In 1991, they traveled back to Sudan where constant attacks from the North led them to leave for Kenya the following year. In 1992, he became registered as a refugee at the Kakuma Refugee Camp. Ajok and his friends often went without food or water for long periods of time. The camp was often raided, and boys were routinely kidnapped. In spite of everything, they managed to learn from teachers who used the ground as a blackboard. After spending 8 years in Kakuma, Ajok came to the U.S. in 2000. He graduated from high school, Temple University, and most recently Arcadia University, with an M.A. in International Peace and Conflict Resolution. He is described as one of the "Lost Boys of Sudan," a term used for male refugee children from South Sudan who were resettled to United States. Ajok’s daily life and professional aspirations are motivated by the challenges and hardships he endured during Sudan’s civil war.

Jessica E. Lee is a Ph.D. candidate at Bryn Mawr Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research.  Her research interests include acculturation and assimilation of refugees and immigrants, health care utilization, and health policy.  She received her M.S.S. from Bryn Mawr and an M.L.A. in Medical Discourse and a Certificate in Gender Studies from the University of Pennsylvania.  She is an Albert Schweitzer Fellow partnering with the Nationalities Service Center as well as the Philadelphia Refugee Mental Health Collaborative. The goals of her Schweitzer project are to help refugees with high medical needs to navigate the health care system in Philadelphia and to implement a refugee mental health-screening tool at refugee health clinics.

Parangkush Subedi (PK) was born in Bhutan. He lived for 17 years in the UNHCR managed refugee camps in eastern Nepal as a refugee and came to the United States in July 2008 under a refugee resettlement program in Clarkston, Georgia. He moved to Philadelphia in 2011 for his current job as a Refugee Health Coordinator at HIAS-PA (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society). In 2009, PK was granted permanent residency status along with his family members. He eagerly awaits the year 2013 when he can obtain U.S. citizenship. PK completed an undergraduate degree in science in India, MS in Thailand and MPH from Emory University, Atlanta, GA. PK has teaching experience as well experience working with NGOs in the refugee camps in Nepal. PK’s family and over 100,000 Nepali speaking Bhutanese nationals were evicted from their homes between 1990-1993 by the Royal Government of Bhutan. The reason behind their sudden eviction is still mysterious; however, the King and his coterie used the peoples’ demand for human rights and democracy as an excuse to justify the expulsion. Today 1/6th of the total population of Bhutan lives in exile in different parts of the world (USA, Canada, Australia, Nepal, India, Netherland, Denmark, New-Zealand, UK).

3:00 Group Work