On Sunday, September 4, in Learning Life’s second live, international, family-to-family dialogue, personal introductions quickly led to latin dance introductions.
In this first meeting between two American families and four Salvadoran families, all family participants were asked to introduce themselves not only with their names and occupations, and in the case of the children, their age and school grade, but with something interesting about themselves they wished to share with their foreign interlocutors. Eduardo, a tall, soft-spoken, fourteen-year old Salvadoran boy was the first to speak.
“Me gusta jugar el fútbol y bailar” (“I like to play soccer and to dance”), he said.
“Que tipo de baile?” (“What kind of dance?”) asked Paul, the American dialogue moderator.
“Bachata” — a type of latin dance which originated in the Dominican Republic — Eduardo responded.
“Puedes mostrarnos?” (“Can you show us?”) asked Paul with a smile.
Eduardo smiled in return. Literally less than a minute later the dozen or so assembled Salvadoran parents and children moved their seats to form a dance floor, selected and started playing music, identified Eduardo’s dancing partner — Delmi, a seventeen-year old girl from another of the Salvadoran families — and off they were both, smiling and dancing bachata in an office in El Puerto de la Libertad, El Salvador, before their American audience 3,200 miles away (by car) in Washington D.C.
This proved to be the first of three Salvadoran introductions that led to dance demonstrations — of a Salvadoran folk dance, and “reggaetón,” a music and dance of Puerto Rican origin that blends reggae, hip hop, and latin influences. The Americans, shy in the moment, nonetheless promised video demonstrations of their own passions — ballet in thirteen-year old Elyse’s case, and basketball in eleven-year old Kaniya’s case.
The American and Salvadoran families went on to discuss serious topics, including the problems their communities face. The Salvadorans reported problems with the privatization of water, and criminal gangs that threaten legal businesses and innocent bystanders. The Americans noted problems with youth gangs in school and police mistreatment of African Americans.
This second live, international dialogue — organized by Learning Life in partnership with CRIPDES, a grassroots organization working to empower Salvadorans in some 300 rural communities across El Salvador — followed the first dialogue between two American families in Washington D.C. and a Senegalese family in Dakar, the capital of Senegal. These dialogues are central to Learning Life’s Citizen Diplomacy Initiative, which works to nurture family and youth development through international dialogue and collaboration.
Through November 2016, Learning Life staff and volunteers plan to organize a series of pilot dialogues between families in Washington D.C., Puerto de la Libertad, El Salvador, Dakar, Senegal. Stay tuned for more!
We would like to thank CRIPDES and Learning Life volunteers Karen Tituana and Derrick Costa for their help in making this second dialogue possible. Thanks also to the nonprofit UNIFI for allowing us to use their cafe, Artdrenaline, in Washington D.C.’s Anacostia neighborhood, to conduct this live dialogue.
Internship: Help Organize Live International Dialogues
About Learning Life and Its Citizen Diplomacy Initiative
Learning Life is an educational nonprofit in Washington D.C. that seeks to spread learning in everyday life beyond school walls. Learning Life has recently begun a Citizen Diplomacy Initiative that engages lower-income American families in Washington D.C. in live internet video dialogues or “virtual exchanges” with similar foreign families in order to foster global citizenship and family and youth development.
About the Internship
Learning Life is now recruiting metro D.C. university students to serve as interns. Interns assist with finding and screening eligible families in D.C. and abroad, connecting and coordinating with nonprofit partners abroad, organizing and moderating the live international dialogues, research and drafting of documents, document translation and dialogue interpreting, and mentoring of D.C. youth involved in our Citizen Diplomacy Initiative.
Interns must be able to commit eight hours per week. Learning Life’s founder, Dr. Paul Lachelier usually holds weekly four-hour work meetings with interns as a group, then assigns each intern four hours of homework.
This opportunity is unpaid, but offers substantive, resume-building experience on an innovative international initiative, and a formal reference and/or recommendation letter given satisfactory performance.
The Interns We Are Looking For
Applicants should be interested in international affairs, languages, community organizing and/or social justice. Applicants should also be outgoing, organized, detail-oriented, motivated and responsible (e.g., complete work well and on deadline, and show up to meetings on time). Native or fluent speakers of Spanish, Arabic, French or Tagalog are especially encouraged to apply. People who have lived in or have family in Washington D.C.’s Wards 7 or 8 (D.C. east of the Anacostia River), and/or in Latin America, Africa, Asia or the Middle East are also encouraged to apply.
How to Apply
Email Dr. Lachelier directly at paul@learninglife.info with your resume and times you are available in the next seven days for a phone interview.
After seven months of organizing and preparation, we are happy to announce that our first live, international, family-to-family dialogue successfully took place today at the Anacostia Library in Washington D.C.
The dialogue connected members of two American families in D.C. — a grandmother and her grandson, and a father and his two daughters — with a nine-member family in Dakar, the capital of Senegal, located on the coast at the western-most tip of Africa. After introducing themselves, the families freely asked each other questions about their use of media (Facebook, Youtube, Snapchat, etc.), their food, music, modes of transportation, and cost of living, among other subjects. As the American families learned, residents of Dakar are not that different from residents of Washington D.C. as fellow major city dwellers connected to common media, music, food and other goods.
This dialogue was the first in a series of pilot dialogues Learning Life has planned over the next few months between American families in Washington D.C. and families in El Salvador, Senegal, and Jordan. Working with a resourceful team of volunteers and student interns, Learning Life began building this Citizen Diplomacy Initiative (CDI) from scratch in late January 2016, and has since found partners and families in Washington D.C. and these four nations across the world. In addition, to enable the families to communicate with each other in their respective languages, we have recruited volunteer interpreters and a set of common documents (surveys, dialogue guides, country info sheets, etc.) in the four different languages the families speak: English, Spanish, French, and Arabic.
Our purpose in building CDI is to tap into the power of the internet to nurture international peace and youth development. Our world is clearly globalizing (see our Five Ways World Affairs Affect Us All), but transnational travel is still too costly for many of the world’s people. Moreover, tourism is not necessarily educational, and the use of “virtual exchange” (dialogue via the internet) for educational and cultural enrichment is too often limited to universities. In pursuit of our mission to spread learning in everyday life beyond school walls, CDI connects families rather than schools as a way to make international affairs approachable to more people. We also focus on families that have less money and fewer educational and travel experiences in order to help address deepening inequalities and extent opportunity to more people. And, we do so free of charge to our participating families.
In the coming months, we will keep you posted as the dialogues progress, and we move toward a first international collaboration between the children involved in the dialogues. Stay tuned!
To support Learning Life’s Citizen Diplomacy Initiative, please make a donation here. To volunteer, please visit our CDI page to learn about the various ways you can get involved, then contact us at email@learninglife.info to set up a phone meeting.
Thank you for your interest and support!
Thanks to Learning Life volunteers Emilie Mondon-Konan, Derrick Costa and Samantha Macfarlane for respectively helping with French-English interpreting, photo and video recording, and organizing of the dialogue on the Senegalese side.
What are the ingredients of career success?
How can I be successful in my career? This is a question many people ask themselves. Of course, most workers across the world have jobs (i.e., work that offers no chance for advancement in pay, benefits, responsibility, skill, and/or else), not careers (i.e., work that offers a chance for advancement), so this question assumes one is lucky enough to pursue a career. For those lucky ones, the following answers from experts to this, the latest edition of Learning Life’s Big Question Series, may prove of some help.
Thanks to Learning Life interns Ian Ball and Omar Batterjee for their assistance in gathering the experts’s answers below.
Dr. James R. Bailey: There’s really only one ingredient to a successful career: Do something you really like doing. If you really like doing it, you’ll be intrinsically motivated, which means you want to do it. To be extrinsically motivated means you have to do it. We all find ourselves having to do something that is distasteful. That’s just part of life. But to be intrinsically motivated means your time and talent is willingly given and productively engaged. In fact, pay and prestige place well behind passion and purpose. This is the big part of life. During 50 employed years, you’ll spend one minute out of four working. Repeat: 25% of every minute you live for 50 years is on the job. Don’t spend that time on something you just have to do. Spend it pursuing endeavors that enrich, reward, and renew you. In doing so you’ll devoted and perform better. If the reward comes from within, you’ve found the only necessary and sufficient ingredient to a successful career.
Dr. da Mota Veiga:The ingredients for career success vary from person to person because everyone defines career success differently. But for many, career success is not defined so much by financial success as by happiness and challenges. Career success is often achieved by identifying and understanding one’s strengths. Work experience is one of the best ways to determine what your strengths are, and what drives you. For example, imagine you are searching for a job. You need to understand your strengths and passion to decide what you want to do. Additionally, you want to research industries, companies, especially what they will offer you that will motivate you to do more than just show up, that will make you want to go the extra mile (and offer a lot more!), achieve your goals and more, and challenge the status quo.
Dr. Sheetal Singh: While there can be several different paths and ingredients to success, I believe being open to new experiences is the key. When we choose a particular career, we are selecting certain set of experiences that will allow us to learn and grow in that career. However, we are also closing ourselves to possibilities that could contribute towards new experiences and potential opportunities. We have these perceived limitations that prevent us from exploring other interests that, in reality, can lead us to success and new opportunities. It is important to strive for your goals in a career path, however, it is equally important that you do not dismiss opportunities.
ABOUT THE RESPONDENTS
Dr. James R. Bailey is Professor and Hochberg Fellow of Leadership Development at the George Washington University School of Business, and a Fellow in the Centre for Management Development, London Business School. He has taught at University of Michigan, New York University, IMD, and Helsinki School of Economics, Dr. Bailey is the recipient of many teaching distinctions, including four GWSB Outstanding Faculty Awards. In 2006 he was named one of the world’s top ten executive educators by the International Council for Executive Leadership Development. He has published over 50 academic papers and case studies, and is the author of five books, including the award-winning, best-selling Organizational and Managerial Wisdom and the forthcoming Lessons on Leadership. He has designed and delivered hundreds of executive programs for firms like Nestle, UBS, Conoco-Phillips, and Goldman Sachs, as well as several major law firms and US Congressmen. Dr. Bailey is a frequent keynote speaker who has appeared on broadcast programs for the BBC, NPR, and Fox News Channel, and whose work has been cited in such outlets as the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Forbes, and Business 2.0. He is a frequent contributor to TheHill, Washington Post, Washington Business Journal, and Harvard Business Review. He is the past Editor-in-Chief of the Academy of Management Learning and Education, as well as the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the online magazine Lessons on Leadership (www.lessonsonleadership.org.) Professor Bailey has served as a dean, department chair, and program director during his 25 year academic career.
Serge P. da Motta Veiga is an Assistant Professor in the Kogod School of Business at American University. Prior to coming to American University, Serge was an Assistant Professor of Management at Lehigh University. He earned his Ph.D. in Business Administration with an emphasis on Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management from the University of Missouri, and his license in Economics from the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium.
Serge’s research interests include job search, careers, recruitment, affect, motivation, and humor at work. Specifically, he is interested in examining various dynamic factors involved in pre-organizational entry processes (job search and recruitment), such as the role of affect and motivation regulation. He has published his work in the Journal of Applied Psychology, Personnel Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and in the Journal of Organizational Behavior, and his research has been featured in public press outlets such as Time, Fast Company, and Psychological Science. Prior to pursuing his Ph.D., Serge worked for six years in the banking and consulting industries in London, Paris, and Brussels.
Sheetal Singh is a researcher, corporate trainer, coach and an adviser to several startups. She is assistant professor of management at George Washington University’s School of Business. Her research focuses on studying individual emotions in corporate and entrepreneurial settings. Through her research, she hopes to help individuals and organizations by creating a greater understanding of the role of emotions and how to harness the power of emotions to achieve better results.
Dr. Singh completed her PhD. in Organizational Behavior and Strategy from University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business. She completed her undergraduate work in Commerce from Delhi University, and in Hotel Administration from the Institute of Hotel Management, Delhi, India. She also completed a Post Graduate Diploma in Hotel Management from The Oberoi Centre of Learning and Development.
Prior to her doctoral work Dr. Singh worked for over a decade in the Hotel Industry with the Oberoi Group of Hotels & Resorts and Carlson Group in various positions in Rooms and Food & Beverage before transitioning into Training & Development. Apart from designing and conducting training programs for Oberoi and Marriott hotels, she also delivered training for the broadcast and travel industry.
In this first meeting between two American families and four Salvadoran families, all family participants were asked to introduce themselves not only with their names and occupations, and in the case of the children, their age and school grade, but with something interesting about themselves they wished to share with their foreign interlocutors. Eduardo, a tall, soft-spoken, fourteen-year old Salvadoran boy was the first to speak.
This proved to be the first of three Salvadoran introductions that led to dance demonstrations — of a Salvadoran folk dance, and “reggaetón,” a music and dance of Puerto Rican origin that blends reggae, hip hop, and latin influences. The Americans, shy in the moment, nonetheless promised video demonstrations of their own passions — ballet in thirteen-year old Elyse’s case, and basketball in eleven-year old Kaniya’s case.
working to empower Salvadorans in some 300 rural communities across El Salvador — followed the first dialogue between two American families in Washington D.C. and a Senegalese family in Dakar, the capital of Senegal. These dialogues are central to Learning Life’s Citizen Diplomacy Initiative, which works to nurture family and youth development through international dialogue and collaboration.
