Development and Educational Programs Manager at News Deeply

As one stream of News Deeply we are working with teachers and our Formal Advisor Steve Armstrong, President-Elect of the National Council for the Social Studies to create an interactive lesson plans around the humanitarian issues and global conflicts for middle and high school students. In our rapidly globalizing world, educators and students today need an up-to-date understanding of the rapidly changing social, political, and economic forces driving a global society. Under the banner Teach Deeply, these innovative, collaborative, and rigorous open courseware tools will be shared with teachers across the US, enabling them to prepare their students for the challenges of a globally interconnected world by teaching them about global issues and current events. All open courseware will be licensed by Creative Commons for public use, raising awareness to a higher degree.

The Issue

There is a deficit of foreign policy programming in American public schools, and yet the teachers we’re serving tell us that even the most basic attention and off-the-shelf tech solutions can make a monumental impact in bridging the gap. We want to do it, by truly linking the newsroom and the classroom in a free and digitally empowered lesson plan.

In a globalized world, our youth must be able to comprehend global crises, lest we fall behind others in a rapidly shrinking economic space. Furthermore, the famous line by George Santayana, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” could not hold more true at this time in the course of our history. This lesson is vital for students, especially as they study core concepts in our world’s history: absolutism, government, genocide studies, among other relevant and linked topics.

By introducing an element of the global into the classroom at a younger adult age, teens learn to be knowledgeable about world events, they learn empathy towards others, in addition to expanding their horizons at a time when teens are still trying to discover out where their passions lie. This small effort, literally, one day of classroom time, can impact the next generation.

Our Solution

Educating a millennial audience isn’t difficult, you just have to speak their language. That is why Teach Deeply has developed tech-savvy interactive lesson plans that educate, inform and engage students. This model will be expanded to cover other complex global issues and conflicts, such as: Teach Iran, Teach Pakistan, Teach Cuba, Teach Global Water, etc. Teach Deeply hopes to provide a whole new level to curriculum support that is teacher friendly, student friendly and Common Core Standards compliant.