Fellowships offer K-12 teachers global perspectives
They will use experiences from their Middle East and African Cultures K-12 Teachers Fellowships to develop lesson plans.
Fall classes have just begun at Harris Road Middle School in Concord, North Carolina, but teacher Jennifer Nichols ’04 already has a notebook packed with ideas from a unique summer institute at Carolina.
The 22-year teaching veteran traveled to Chapel Hill in late July for a two-day institute for the Middle East and African Cultures K-12 Teacher Fellowship. Now Nichols is energized for the school year ahead, her notebook filled with poignant anecdotes and potential lesson plans.
“I had a great two days at the MEAC Summer Institute,” Nichols said. “The Area Studies coordinators enlisted engaging speakers. Presentations covered the spectrum with art, music, history, culture, storytelling, literature. Any awesome box you could check, they checked it.”
The institute kicked off a year-long intensive fellowship designed in collaboration by Carolina’s African Studies Center and the Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies.
Nine K-12 teachers from across North Carolina traveled to Chapel Hill for interactive presentations by Carolina faculty, community leaders and other experts on Middle East and African cultures. They will continue to meet throughout the school year as they develop lesson plans to share with teachers via the UNC Area Studies websites.
“What makes MEAC distinctive is that it has sustained engagement with these teachers over the course of the school year, and sustained engagement has really good learning outcomes for students,” said Laura Cox, African Studies Center outreach manager.
This year’s theme was “Bridges, Borders and Migration.”
“The reason for that was that we can see in mainstream public discourse ideas about Africa and the Middle East that emphasize crisis, conflict and displacement,” Cox said. “And what we want to do was impart a more nuanced understanding of those concepts and experiences that teachers can bring back to their students.”
Presenter Juliana Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi, an NC State professor from Cameroon, spoke about African women’s writing moving across borders. Another speaker, Ali Al-Khasrachi, is an Iraqi refugee and artist who led an interactive Q&A and calligraphy session.
“Teachers were giving feedback, asking questions, doing activities; the goal was to make it as interactive as possible,” said Alaa Hammouda, Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies outreach manager. “And the feedback we heard was great. The teachers were really engaged.”
For fellows like Janae Bell, a social studies teacher at Leesville Road High School in Raleigh, those summer sessions were illuminating. Bell, in her second year of teaching, said she joined the MEAC Fellowship in the hopes of giving her students a more globalized perspective that goes beyond their textbooks.
“I find that a lot of the current world history curriculum has such a tendency to focus on European perspectives and traditional storylines that we’ve all heard before,” Bell said. “I went through the same school system that I’m teaching in, so I didn’t necessarily get another viewpoint explained or taught to me. I wouldn’t even know how to go about sharing new perspectives or cultures to students without this MEAC program.”
Created in 2020, the MEAC Fellowship was suspended because of COVID-19 pandemic and revived this year thanks to funding from a North Carolina Humanities grant and sponsorship from Carolina K-12 at Carolina Public Humanities.
The hope is to continue the fellowship with a new group of teachers next year.
“I think they really should continue this program,” Bell said. “I would encourage other teachers to participate. Even if it doesn’t necessarily help you in your classroom, it will open your eyes to a lot of different things that we really don’t hear about in traditional Western perspectives.”
