Susan Graseck
Senior Fellow, Watson Institute;
Director, Choices for the 21st Century Education Program
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It’s a frigid December day on campus, finals are
nearly done, and most students are packing to go. But while the
cars are queuing up on Charlesfield Street and the campus begins to empty
out, up on the top floor of the Watson institute, a small group
of
students and faculty are still at work, discussing how to turn
the findings of a Watson scholar, recently returned from a United Nations
meeting, into a hot-off-the-press curriculum developed for high
school teachers all across America. The curriculum is just one component
of the Choices for the 21st Century Program which, at its core,
places groundbreaking
research into the hands of teachers by connecting history to
current events in way that provokes students to think about their
own future,
and the future of the country as a whole.
The success of the Choices curriculum, which to date has reached
nearly half the high schools in America, is due in part to word
of mouth, teachers telling
other teachers, but also because the need for tools to teach international
relations in the context of current issues is so great. Susan Graseck, senior
fellow at the Watson Institute and director of the program, points out that
when Choices began 16 years ago, teachers were so hungry for these kind of
teaching tools that they paid for it themselves.
“We saw a lot of personal
checks. We’re cheap now, but we were even cheaper then. Today, it
costs $15 to get everything you need to put on a copying machine and use
for your
classroom. When we started it cost $3 and, of course, we had far fewer
topics to offer. We were getting these personal checks for $3, $6, $9 from
teachers… We
see a lot more purchase orders today.”
In addition to curriculum, Choices offers professional development to teachers.
Sometimes the teachers come to Providence and interface directly with Watson
faculty. And other times, the Watson faculty travel to them. For example
next month, professors James Blight and Janet Lang will travel to Michigan
to lead
a professional development workshop entitled "Reducing the Risk of
Conflict, Killing and Catastrophe in the 21st Century."
By no means
are these workshops a top-down talking-head kind of experience. Graseck
says that faculty consider
interacting with high school teachers an opportunity. “They tell
us they learn something new every time. It’s where the rubber hits
the road. High school is a very different audience from college students.
So when you
find the teachers able to do that, you also find that they are really interesting,
fascinating people, and the scholars love working with them.”
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(December 2004)
