The Research Journalism Initiative

"Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other."
— Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

My students sit in neat rows, staring at the screen as we hold our first live videoconference with the Research Journalism Initiative (RJI). On the other side of the world, Mohammad Faraj, a journalism student at An Najah University in Palestine, tells us about his life as a refugee in the West Bank city of Nablus. At first, my students are shy, giggling nervously as they say hello to the camera and ask their tentative questions. Fifteen minutes later, a huge line waits to ask about the realities of life in occupied Palestine. How hard is it to pursue a degree with so many curfews and closures at the university? What does the wall around the West Bank look like, and how long does it take to get through checkpoints? What have international bodies done, if anything, to help remedy the situation in the Middle East, and what role has U.S. foreign policy played in the conflict?

A sophomore approaches the camera nervously and asks about Palestinian opinions on suicide bombers; I can hear my students shifting in their seats, worried it is too touchy a question to ask. But we were told that any question was a good one, especially if it couldn't be answered by textbooks. We hear RJI founder Mark Turner on the other end: "There's no one opinion; Palestinian views vary a lot more than people realize." I revise the question: "What are Mohammad's views on suicide bombers?" There is scuffling on the other side of the globe, whispered conversation, and my students eye each other with growing concern. "All human life is sacred," Mohammad tells us finally. He says it again, and the classroom goes hushed as his words sink in on this crowd of American teenagers. I see several students nodding, others in tears over the beauty, simplicity, and overpowering authenticity of his answer.

This event was the culmination of our first year as a pilot school for the Research Journalism Initiative. Inspired by Turner's experiences living and working in Balata Refugee Camp in the West Bank in 2002, 2003, and 2007, RJI endeavors to foster dialogue about life in difficult regions of the world. RJI is currently focused on the Palestinian-Israeli situation, but will expand in the coming years to include projects in many regions of conflict, including Latin America, Africa, and Eastern Europe. In communities abroad, particularly in cultures that are either under or misrepresented by Western media, RJI volunteers facilitate the creation of student work, training local high school and university students in film and other media production. RJI's role is purely facilitative; volunteers help students abroad to express their inside perspectives and stories, but the students themselves decide what to share with the world. RJI film, radio, print, and photographic media contain stories produced by young people who actually live these realities daily. According to educational philosopher and liberation theorist Paolo Freire, educational pedagogy in regions of severe conflict "...must be forged with, not for, the oppressed." RJI follows this model so that students in the U.S. are exposed to authentic, personal stories.

The multimedia work produced abroad is then brought into American classrooms via Internet technology, at no cost to schools, where it becomes the foundation for discussion in a wide range of academic disciplines. As RJI expands into more regions of the world, its website will be developed into an interactive online tool for sharing ideas and feedback, creating a global network of teachers and students working together to foster international dialogue in their communities. RJI units might last a day or two weeks, depending on the nature of the course. But whatever the time constraints, the goal is the same: to help young people see reality from someone else's perspective, and to engage in authentic dialogue about some of the most politically conflicted regions of the world.

I have been a university and high school teacher for 16 years, and my students consistently say that the most valuable experiences they have in my classroom are those that teach them to think beyond the limitations of their own experiences and perspectives. As a language arts teacher, I've found that literature provides a safe avenue for exploring different perspectives, a realm free from the fear of bias where subjectivity is assumed and accepted. But the Research Journalism Initiative allows students entry into another world entirely because it explores another reality, not one imagined through the format of fiction, but one viewed directly through real, raw exposure to everyday life in Palestine and other parts of the world.

Teenagers actively question the world around them, whether exploring something as politically complex as the situation in the Middle East, or as personally complex as defining themselves as young adults. If I could, I would take every student overseas so she could have her own experiences and not rely solely on the limited lens of my own travels. Since I can't, I try to expose my students to as many perspectives as I can, as honestly as I can. As an educator, my goal is not to achieve perfect balance and a lack of bias in my lesson plans; rather, it is to introduce myriad voices, allowing students to define their own opinions as they grow to understand the bigger picture.

St. Mary's Academy, an all-girls school, became RJI's pilot school because we focus much of our curriculum on opening the world to our students, helping them to become leaders and agents of change. Many of our educational goals stem from the core values we teach our students — values such as justice, respect, and community, which are developed best by understanding and valuing other people's experiences and needs. We were excited to find that RJI's curricular applications go well beyond fostering global empathy, however. In Middle East Studies, my colleague used a wide array of RJI resources to personalize politics and help students see nuances to the conflict not always addressed in traditional curricular tools. An economics teacher showed an RJI film on the economic impact of closures, restrictions, and land annexation in the West Bank, and was able to tie the material in directly to their studies, providing students an opportunity to explore international and comparative economics. In World Visions — our 10th-grade interdisciplinary course on world literature, history, and religion — RJI films and discussion helped students to understand the intersection of religion and politics in the Middle East and to explore how this complicates diplomacy and dialogue about the region.

RJI resources apply to the arts as well. For example, one of our art teachers is planning an RJI unit in which students will view RJI films and the photography of Mohammad Faraj, the Palestinian student whose photographs accompany this article. The students will then create works of art in response to the imagery and ideas they encountered. In my Creative Writing class, RJI brought us the poetry of Falastine, an English Literature student at An Najah University, who writes,

I need more sight to inspire me the vision of future
A pen to draw my path to the unknown
A sense of art to paint blank gesture.

My students were immediately drawn to Falastine's imagery and language, well aware that she'd written these lines in English as a sort of message in a bottle to the world. Since we'd seen RJI films on recent military invasions in her neighborhood, Falastine's hopeful, even idealistic style, woven with painfully realistic images from her daily life, was deeply inspiring for my students. The experience took them inside the life and psyche of someone on the other side of the globe, and many quoted Falastine's work in their final portfolios and wrote reactionary poetry that resonated with visceral understanding. Several students reflected later that Falastine's optimism, given her circumstances, had given them a new framework for the nature of hope, and that they had been deeply changed by reading her poetry.

Kelcey: This sad situation in Palestine is also made so much more real for me by the fact that we are actually going to get to talk to girls who are experiencing all of the things we saw in the movie.... For me, thinking about living the life I saw in the film is something I wouldn't wish upon anyone, but for these girls, it's what they recognize as normal. ...it just blows my mind to think about anyone having to live through that, let alone get used to it.

Ellie: I guess the main problem... is that hardly anyone who doesn't live in their shoes has a clue about what is actually going on. Instead, we look to the biased media and then we come up with fantastic/idealistic ways to solve problems that a typical American has never even closely experienced.... It is so easy to close our eyes and live in the protective bubble we create for ourselves.

Natalie: I believe what people need to do is to find something they are passionate about and work towards helping that cause. It's not about the quantity of people you help, but the quality of help you give.... I am truly enjoying this unit because it is a good reminder that I need to help someone, somewhere, somehow. I just need to figure out what that something is and how I am going to do it. But I will; now that I know that people can do this, I will do it.

RJI clearly helps students build character, inspiring them to become more compassionate, constructive members of the world community by personalizing injustice and demonstrating that individual activism can make a difference. Partly because of the RJI experience, several of our graduates have gone on to major in social justice and international relations, and several are working to bring RJI clubs into their college communities. Student responses make clear that connecting with other young people is a key ingredient of the RJI experience; students communicate with people their own age who are experiencing very different daily realities. But while students are initially struck by the vast differences between their experiences and those of other young people in the world, what they share in common is an inherently human reaction to what they perceive as wrong. Students on both sides of the RJI exchange find they can relate to each other not because their experiences are the same, but because they share a universally human response to injustice, violent conflict, and the violation of human rights.

Our pilot year was considered a resounding success by our teachers and students, and we will continue leading the way, helping RJI develop creative applications for this unique and powerful tool. For its part, RJI continues to help St. Mary's Academy reach our technological goals and develop global perspectives and compassionate values in our students. Today, RJI materials are being used in over 20 schools across the U.S., and the program is expanding into additional regions. Ultimately, the more varied the region RJI reaches, the more easily the program will be able to guide students across the world toward broader, more pluralistic global thinking."

Stepping outside our own experience can be scary, but it can also change us for the better, and, if we are unable to take every student abroad, teachers can at least cultivate global dialogue in equally authentic ways. Teachers who can overcome initial objections to hot-button topics like the Middle East conflict have the opportunity to empower and inspire students to explore openly, think critically, and, ultimately, go out into the world to define themselves and the issues they will commit themselves to. We hope students will finish RJI units as active participants in a global dialogue — as agents of change and advocates for nonviolent conflict resolution. To open young people's hearts and to show them something new and difficult, to empower and inspire them as they question, and to help them find constructive ways to direct their responses — that is the definition of education and the foundation of the Research Journalism Initiative's mission.