Our Curriculum
Facilitated by university students, the OWYP curriculum guides middle school students through a year of project-based learning experiences with a focus on cross-cultural exchange and global exploration. 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 begin to address 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. They will then 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.
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.