Period 2 - Mia Prange

[CALIS]

Thank you for participating in TIRP service-learning outreach!

Your reports are the basis for academic credit.  Whether or not you are seeking a credit option, reports are required as a university record of service-learning efforts and impact in local schools.

Required Format:
Session 1 materials: [The first line of your report is the session number and full title of the database item(s).]
Focus Q: [On a new line, list your focus question from your TAP form. If you changed the question then add the new version after the TAP version.]
*** For the minimum of 3 student specifics, do not refer to students by name; instead call them Student A, B or C.
*** For the minimum of 500 words, guiding questions are here: https://www.forums.usc-calis.net/showthread.php?tid=297

Use clear paragraph structure. If you include too much focus on the step-by-step process of the lesson rather than substance, you may be asked to revise your report.
*** The webboard is public. If you include names, commentary or observations, you will need to revise your post.

To Post:
1. For each report, select Post Reply.  (Do not select New Topic)
2. Copy/paste from your Word file and save a copy until after the semester is over.
3. Before pasting, confirm that you have met the minimum of at least 500 words.
4. Each report must be submitted by midnight within 3 calendar days after each session.

A CALIS staff member will review your report each week and post a message below of the scoring for your performance evaluation.
We welcome any questions or concerns you have about scoring.
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Session #1: 0142 Four Worlds: Social Science Factors & 0079 Foreign Policy and National Attributes: Domestic Sources of Foreign Policy
Questions: What is foreign policy and why should we care about it? What connections to the international community might you have?

On time: 0/3
Substantive: 6/6
Student specifics: 6/6
Total: 12/15

Comments: Thank you for your thorough reflection about your second session! I greatly enjoyed reading more about your student specifics and I felt as though I was there with you! Please remember to submit your reflections within 3 days. After that, you will lose points. After 6 days you receive no credit for timeliness. Overall, great job!

–AS 11/6


Session 2: 0007 International Priorities, supplemented with video explaining realism & liberalism, and slideshow explaining vocabulary
Focus Questions: How do different worldviews shape decision-making on an international level?

On time: 0/3
Substantive: 6/6
Student specifics: 6/6
Total: 12/15

Comments: Thank you for your thorough reflection about your second session! Nice job getting your reflection in a bit earlier, but please try to submit it within 3 days. After that, you will lose points. Thanks for taking the time to talk about specific students and nice job adjusting the simulation to adhere to you and your students’ needs.

–AS 11/6

Session 3

On time: 0/3
Substantive: 6/6
Student specifics: 6/6
Total: 12/15
Comments: Very substantive with your lesson on human security and has great student specific examples. Good job! -- OL 11/21

Session 4
On time: 2/3
Substantive: 6/6
Student specifics: 5/6
Total: 13/15
Comments: Thank you for your report! Your report was very informative and I'm happy to see that students were able to draw conclusions from their previous lesson.
-PS, 11/21

[Mia Prange]

Session #1: 0142 Four Worlds: Social Science Factors & 0079 Foreign Policy and National Attributes: Domestic Sources of Foreign Policy
Questions: What is foreign policy and why should we care about it? What connections to the international community might you have? 
Our goal with the first session was to introduce the concept of foreign policy, provide a basis for thinking about international relations and foreign policy, and get students involved so they can understand how foreign policy develops. Going into the session, we planned to use the four worlds social science factors to provide students with an understanding of what policymakers must think about, and try to connect their own experiences with the subject. We spent the first third of the class going over the four worlds. We explained each world, then had the students place words/topics from a list into the world they felt it belonged in. Myself, Hayden, and Tia went around and helped students understand words they weren't familiar with, and think through why they would put certain words in certain places. During this activity, we encouraged students to discuss their opinions with their small groups or neighbors. As I walked around helping students, Student A asked for help on the phrase "common identity." In order to help explain this concept, I posed this question: "what is something everyone in this class shares?" Student A responded "we are all students." I explained that meant everyone in the class had a common identity of being a student at this high school. So, common identity can refer to something a group of people have in common. He then understood that would fit in the cultural world!
After this, we moved into the main activity for the session, the Domestic Sources of Foreign Policy simulation. For this activity, we split the students into small groups. We assigned each group a country, and gave them the country bio from the simulation. We then, as a class, went over some key vocab words, including developed vs developing countries. We asked the students to read their country bios, and decide which category their country fell in. We told them to keep that in mind during the simulation. After giving the students time to understand their country, we began the simulation.
For the simulation, we posed a situation and asked the students to work in groups to decide what their country policy would be. Our first situation was this: Interpol, the international police force, has decided to crack down on trafficking of drugs. We asked the students to think about these questions while developing a poliy: will your country support this new Interpol policy? Will you comply with the investigations? Do you think this new Interpol investigation is targeted at your country in an unfair way?

We went around helping the students determine their policy. One student, Student B, who was in the USA group, had an interesting opinion that changed how many students thought about the activity. Student B said that the USA would stay neutral on the issue, because they had a drug problem and didn't want to invite in an outside police force. After this, Student C, from the DRC group, said that they thought an outside police force coming in would only contribute to the instability, so they did not support the policy. 

We went through a few more situations, and introduced the idea of allies and enemies in foreign policy. Countries that wanted something from other countries might choose their policy to appease that other country. For example, the Brazil group wanted help from the US and Australia on a situation that had developing states asking for aid from developed states. The Brazil group wanted aid from the US and Australia, so they said they would offer natural resources and trade deals in exchange for aid. This level of consideration was surprising and exciting, and it allowed our group to introduce some more complex thought processes into the rest of the activity and plan for that in the future. 

Overall, this session was great! The students were much more engaged than classes I have had in the past. They seemed to really enjoy the simulation, getting very in character, so we thought it would be good to do more of these in the future. I

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Session 2: 0007 International Priorities, supplemented with video explaining realism & liberalism, and slideshow explaining vocabulary
Focus Questions: How do different worldviews shape decision-making on an international level?

For this session, we wanted to dive into another side of foreign policy while revisiting the tools we used last week. Our plan for the session was to start off by answering questions from last week, then explaining some key vocab for this week's activity, then doing another simulation for the main activity. Upon entering the classroom, the students seemed excited to see us. 

After answering any lingering questions, we began to discuss the key vocab and concepts for today. We wanted to explain how different actors in IR and foreign policy develop worldviews, and how those views inform policy. To start, we showed a short, 3-minute segment of a video explaining realism and liberalism. We wanted students to understand the differences, and to help inforce this I asked students for 2-3 key words that explained each one. For realism, Student A suggested the word "selfish," I said that is a good example. Realists are focused on self-interest. For liberalism, Student B suggested "communication," I expanded and suggested cooperation and communication helped explain liberalism. Liberalists want to communicate with other states and groups, and are in favor of international cooperation rather than self-interest alone. I was pleased by how quickly the students picked the concepts up!

To further explain how actors develop worldviews, we explained these ideas.
Systems: Maintainers, Reformers, Transformers
Number of Actors: Unilateral, Bilateral, Multilateral
Policy Examples: defense spending, contributions to international institutions, social programs, infrastructure.
After explaining each, we posed this question: what matters most? 
We wanted the students to understand that policymakers had to balance many different needs and ideas, and needed to prioritize. 

After explaining this vocab, we moved into the simulation. Similar to last week, we put students in small groups and assigned them a group & worldview. We gave each group about 5 minutes to do independent research to try and ascertain if their group are maintainers, reformers, or transformers, realists or liberalists, and more likely to pursue uni, bi, or multilateral action. 

The simulation had the groups determining what kind and how much aid they wanted to give different countries in different situations. We then spent time explaining different types of aid (project, program, technical, food, specific, and military aid.) We slightly adjusted the simulation to make it more understandable and drive home the point of priorities. We had the groups first go country by country and determine what kind of aid they wanted to give, if any. After that, we gave them a budget of 200million to fund the aid projects, which totalled requests for 390 million. This forced them to underfund or not fund some countries. 

While determining aid, Student C asked if they had to give aid. I explained that if their group would not support that country, they don't really have to give aid. This was a domino effect, and students began to be more critical of who they did and did not give aid to. They really got into their characters/worldviews. One student, from the "american trade association" group, told me that they would not aid one country because that country was anti-west/USA, and they would instead fund a neutral country to try and draw them to the American side because of their group's worldview. Another student, from the "new internationalists" group, said that they thought their group would prioritize human rights and thus did not care if the countries were pro or anti US. 

This was once again a wonderful session! More students were present, and more participated than last week. I really enjoyed talking with the students, as they had some funny but insightful ideas. When allocating their 200mil budget, one group decided to only give a country that they didn't like 500k, and severly overfund another group, simply to drive home their approval/disapproval. 

I am excited for the next session!

[Mia Prange]

Session 3: 0686 Human Security Agenda: How Secure Are You?
Focus Questions: How secure do you feel, and what factors influence those perceptions?

After the first two sessions went so well, I was excited going into week three. I knew this week would be a little harder since we did not have a true simulation planned, but I thought the information would be interesting. Our plan was to first show a video explaining the difference between liberalism and realism in international relations, and how each side sees security. We planned to connect this to our previous discussions of theory/perspective in IR and foreign policy. After showing the video, we planned to explain the different types of security and have them discuss this in pairs/small groups. We hoped they would connect this discussion to our previous discussions of policymaking. After this, we planned to introduce some examples of each security, and then break them into small groups. In the groups, they needed to rank the different types of security in the level of importance by placing them on a continuum from 1-10, 1 being extremely unimportant, and 10 being the most important. We planned to then make one big continuum averaging everyone's answers. 

When we got to the class, I knew it was not going to go as well as the previous weeks. The first issue was that there was a substitute and we had not been told in advance. As a result, we were unable to adapt our lesson to this. We were unable to play the video on the screen and had to have the students watch it in small groups, which made it difficult to ensure everyone watched and paid attention. Also, the substitute had told them it would be a free period to do work, so the students did not really want to give that up to do our lesson. This meant they were much less engaged and less interested in participating. The Q&A section after the video was difficult, as few students volunteered to answer. One student, student A, was always eager to participate and tried to get his groupmates to answer as well, which I appreciated. He answered our questions about what they thought each type of security referred to. 

After this, we moved to giving examples of the types of security and what may threaten each type. Again, attention was low. In response, we shortened this section and moved to the more simulation-esque section. We broke the students into groups and asked them to imagine what they would prioritize as a world leader. We then had them rank the types of security on their own continuums, debating as a group where to put things. We all went around to help them make the decisions and differentiate between the types. Student B asked my what environmental security was, and we talked about how in California part of our environmental security is having buildings made to withstand earthquakes, and in other places they did not have that security since it is expensive. Student C asked about how the types of security interacted. We talked about how food security is impacted by economic security, because you usually cannot have food security in a country without economic security. We discussed other connections as well. 

Finally it came time to make the group continuum. To get the "average", I had students raise their hands as we narrowed down the ranking for each type: "Who ranked it below 5? Below 7? Above 9?" and so on until we had an average ranking for each type. What was interesting was that none of them were ranked below a 5, showing that the students though they were all connected and all important. 

Going into next week, I think this was a valuable experience. We learned that the students truly need to be roleplaying to stay interested. Something I did think was productive was that I think we got across the point that foreign policy is not as complicated as one may think. Last week a student described a price floor without our input, and this week similar ideas were had.

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Session 4: 0286 NPR: Jordan Accused of Harboring Sweatshop Factories
Focus Questions: What should the international community do about slave labor and human trafficking? How do international labor standards get set and enforced?

I was excited for this week because I was responsible for planning. Learning from the previous week's issues, I adapted our planned activity to have more simulation-like activities. The plan for the session was to play the NPR audio for the students, then have them answer the questions and do think pair share. I added a simulation aspect where we would put them in small groups, and have half take the perspectives of countries and half take the perspective of NGOs. We wanted to drive home the ways that NGOs and countries interact to develop foreign policy. 

To start off, the session was better because the teacher was back and the substitute was gone. The students were ready to be engaged and participate a lot more. Before playing the NPR audio I introduced some key vocabulary, such as "sweatshop". Surprisingly, most of the students did not know what a sweatshop was! After explaining this and some other vocab, we played the audio. After the audio, Tia and Hayden led the questions section. We gave them time to answer the questions and then had students share their ideas. I again was surprised by the ingenuity some of the kids displayed! Student A was able to point out multiple textual examples to answer the first question, and Student B remembered our previous discussion of alliances and referenced it when asked how US policy about sweatshops would affect Jordan, a US ally. The student rightly pointed out that prices would go up and jobs would disappear in Jordan.

After going through the questions, I led the simulation. I developed the activity based on our previous lessons and simulations. We had previously had the students take on the perspectives of countries and interest groups, and now we were introducing the interaction between the two. Half the groups had a country, and half the groups had an NGO. We first gave them time to look up their assigned country or NGO and get their perspective on sweatshops, slave labor, and foreign intervention. We had them then develop a "policy". Would their country/NGO try to intervene? Who would the NGOs ask for funding? What NGOs would the countries fund? We had them consider these and other questions. 

After they developed their policies, I explained the "negotiation" part of the activity. Each country would be paired with an NGO. They would each take 5ish minutes to present their policy and hear the other's policy. After this, they would go back to their groups and determine what they did and did not like about their counterpart's policy. They would then come up with an agreement offer. After the first offer, both teams discuss the other's offer and then come back together to make a counteroffer. At this point, the goal was to create a final agreement through compromise.

Through this process, the students used all their prior lessons. One student even brought out their four worlds paper to help think out their ideas!

I was overall very pleased with the progression of the sessions. It seemed like we actually taught them usur-wordeful information. At the end of the last session, we had a bit of time for questions, and the students seemed interested not only in college but in studying IR specifically! It was a great class to work with and I will definitely take the lessons I learned into my next class next semester.