Our Curriculum

 
Through the OWYP curriculum, secondary school students connect with OWYP classrooms abroad through video, voice, letters and the Internet over the course of a year, assisted and mentored by trained student facilitators from their local university.

While students move through our facilitated program once a week in their academic classroom, their partner peers do the same. This allows for deep reflection on and constant collaborative investigation of intercultural communication.

The semester 1 curriculum focuses on giving students the tools to understand their own cultures and begin the process of exchanging and communicating across cultures. From there the lessons move to issues of global connections and development by introducing the ways in which goods and systems flow around the world and to the concept of the UN and the Millennium Development Goals. Using these tools, students will identify issues in their communities and create plans to address these issues.

As they move into the second semester with OWYP, students will continue to learn about ways to communicate with people in other cultures by analyzing different forms and systems of communication. Then they will be prepared to participate in collaborative dialogues to create change by identifying key community players and exploring ways to engage them in conversations around community issues. As students move through the program, these plans will turn into actionable service learning projects.