Learning Life’s third video about our Citizen Diplomacy Initiative is now out! This video is 3 minutes long, and features our founder, Paul Lachelier, explaining CDI’s project-based learning and photovoice project.
This video was put together by Andrew Jorgensen, a talented senior in film and video studies at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Andrew interned with Learning Life this spring semester, and this video is one of four he produced. All our videos are on our Youtube channel. Click here to see the videos.
Learning Life’s Citizen Diplomacy Initiative engages lower-income American families in live internet dialogues and project collaborations with lower-income families in other nations to nurture more caring and capable global citizens. Learn more here.
Watch: Second Citizen Diplomacy Initiative Video!
Learning Life’s second video about our Citizen Diplomacy Initiative is now out! This video is 4 minutes and 41 seconds long, and features our founder, Paul Lachelier, explaining Learning Life and the Citizen Diplomacy Initiative.
This video was put together by Andrew Jorgensen, a talented senior in film and video studies at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Andrew interned with Learning Life this spring semester, and this video is one of four he produced. Here is the first video Andrew produced. Stay tuned for the third and fourth videos!
Learning Life’s Citizen Diplomacy Initiative engages lower-income American families in live internet dialogues and project collaborations with families in other nations to nurture informed, skilled, connected and caring global citizens. Learn more here.
Get Notice of DC Live International Virtual Exchange Meetings
Are you using or interested in using live international virtual exchange (LIVE) to advance education, development, or civil society engagement? Learning Life, an educational nonprofit based in DC, is working to establish periodic meetings of live, international, virtual exchange practitioners and other interested parties in the Washington DC metro area. Details about the planned meetings follow below.
If you would like to be notified of these meetings, contact Paul Lachelier at paul@learninglife.info with your name and email address.
Name: DC LIVE Dialogues, or DC LIVE
Purpose: To facilitate communication, sharing and collaboration between LIVE practitioners, researchers, teachers, participants, funders, journalists, and others working in international education, development or civil society arenas in metro Washington DC.
Proposed Structure: (1) networking for first 15-20 minutes to allow everyone to arrive, (2) 2-3 minute updates (news, what’s going well, challenges, resources, collaboration opportunities) from a representative of each participating organization, (3) open discussion, (4) announcements.
Day & Time: First meeting will be on Thursday, July 20, 4:30-6pm. Contact Paul Lachelier at paul@learninglife.info for location details.
How Do We Build Peace in a Divided World? Three Ways in One Day
Last Sunday was the busiest day yet for Learning Life’s Citizen Diplomacy Initiative (CDI): two live international dialogues, and one international potluck. All three events exemplified how Learning Life is building peace through dialogue and collaboration across divides of race, class and nation.
The day began with a live dialogue between Learning Life staff and a Jordanian family in the city of Jerash, Jordan, home to extensive Roman era ruins. Learning Life’s Director, Paul Lachelier, and former U.S. foreign service employee and volunteer Arabic interpreter, Jamila Attaoui, discussed a photography guide with the Mustafa family in Jordan.
The guide provides families participating in CDI some training in photography as part of our first international collaboration, a “photovoice” project now ongoing. That project will culminate in an electronic photo album comparing the answers of families in the USA, Senegal and Jordan in answer to the question “what is the past, present and future of your community?”
Next, we organized an international potluck bringing together people who normally don’t meet, let alone eat and talk together: African American families east of Washington DC’s Anacostia River, George Washington University students west of the River, and experienced U.S. foreign service officers.
Those who came to the potluck with a dish explained its contents and cultural origins, pointing to the country of origin on a world map when the dishes were foreign.
The potluck then moved to this discussion question: “Why is there so much social division (racial, religious, national, etc.), and what can we do to help overcome these divisions?” The participants focused mostly on how to overcome those divisions, and their answers underscored the need for dialogue, friendship, even marriage, across social divides. It helped, coincidentally, that one of the parents participating in the potluck had just given birth to bi-racial twins, who came along for the fun.
The potluck, organized by Learning Life and its affiliated CDI student chapter at GWU, featured:
Israeli tomato & cucumber salad
Peruvian lomo saltado (grilled beef & onions)
American roasted chicken wings
Moroccan flat bread and beef kebab
Middle Eastern baklava (filo dough filled with nuts and honey)
Chinese sweetened mango rice
Japanese mochi (ice cream covered in rice cake)
European nougat (a sweet made with almonds, sugar and whipped egg whites)
The day finished with a live internet dialogue between two American families in Washington D.C. and a Senegalese family in Dakar, the capital of Senegal. The families discussed photos the Senegalese family recently shared as part of their first international collaboration, the photovoice project. A growing number of photos from our CDI participants in the USA, Senegal and Jordan are gathering at our new Facebook page, which allows our international families to see each other and comment on their own and others’ project contributions. We look forward to seeing our CDI Facebook page come alive as more and more families join from across the world.
Building world peace takes sustained, conscious effort. That’s why we at Learning Life are developing a novel model for building peace, based on (a) live internet dialogues and (b) project collaborations between (c) lower-income families rooted in (d) particular neighborhoods across the world. Stay tuned for more as we develop and test this model through international dialogues, projects and activities like the ones above.
