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Pulitzer Center Update September 8, 2016

News Bites and Lesson Plan of the Week: Arab Spring Monologues

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Black and white image of children in silhoutte from an IDP camp in Iraq.
English

The unraveling of the modern Middle East, from the Iraq War to the rise of ISIS and the global...

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Fractured Lands

Dear Educators,

We hope you all had wonderful long weekends and are having a great start to the school year. We have begun planning lots of exciting initiatives for the fall connecting educators to reporting from Pulitzer Center journalists. Contact us at [email protected] if you would like to work with us to bring global reporting to your students!

This week's newsletter highlights lessons that use the arts to explore pressing global issues. Our News Bite lesson asks students to explore conflict in the Middle East by writing and staging monologues. Our featured lesson asks students to explore poetry as a tool for investigating and communicating global issues. Consider sharing this newsletter with your colleagues by sending them this link.

News Bite Lesson: Arab Spring Monologues

This week's News Bite lesson plan, which was written by Pulitzer Center Contributing Editor Kem Knapp Sawyer, asks students to create monologues inspired by Scott Anderson and Paolo Pellegrin's "Fractured Lands." Published as the entire issue of The New York Times Magazine earlier this month, "Fractured Lands" uses the true stories of six people to explore the historical roots of modern conflicts in the Middle East. Students will read the story, discuss the major conflicts, write monologues informed by the piece and then break into groups to devise final performances.

Featured Lesson: The Power of Poetry

This week's featured lesson, written by former Pulitzer Center intern Elana Dure, asks students to analyze two reporting projects about how communities from two different countries use poetry to cope with discrimination. The first project, "Shame: HIV/AIDS and the Church in Jamaica," highlights the difficulties people with HIV/AIDS face in Jamaica. The second project, "Afghanistan: On Love and Suicide," discusses the oppression of women in Afghanistan. The subjects of both projects use poetry to communicate their feelings in relation to their struggles.

Education News: Connecting with Pulitzer Center Journalists Over Skype

Pulitzer Center-grantee Erik Vance will meet with a 2nd grade class in Lakeside, California over Skype this week to discuss the impacts of overfishing on the health of oceans. Click on the link above to learn more about our work connecting journalists to classrooms using Microsoft's Skype in the Classroom initiative.

Interested in connecting your class to a Pulitzer Center journalist over Skype? Contact the Pulitzer Center education department at [email protected].

Featured Project of the Week: "The Assad Files" by Ben Taub

Click here to learn more about Ben Taub, and his experience reporting on a group of war crimes investigators who smuggled 600,000 pages of government documents out of Syria. The investigators used these documents to build a case against the Syrian government by tracing the systematic torture of tens of thousands of people to a policy that was crafted by the highest level security team within the Syrian government.

If you are interested interested in bringing the Taub to your classroom, or connecting your students with him over Skype, please contact us at [email protected]. .

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