Teaching Empathy: World Refugees, my class asynchronous interview to Rusul Alrubail.

For this school year 2016 here in Argentina I planned one very touching project which was inspired by Rusul Alrubail who had written a heart-felt article on her experience of being a "refugee" herself.

Rusul is an Iraki-Canadian teacher-colleague from , writter, blogger and manager at The Writing Project whom I "met" during her keynote for Shelly Terrell´s 30 Goals Web Conference, whom I follow on Twitter and thanks to Vicki Loras´ tweet, this idea came to my mind: I asked Rusul if she would read the article she wrote for PBS for my students to listen to her while they read: my goal was to double the impact: to read and to listen to real testimony. So, as soon as Rusul sent me the audio, I had my classes listened to her and write down questions she would kindly answer in the near future.

Being an #MIEExpert eager to connect my classes with classes around the world but not having Internet available at school sets a huge obstacle to progress. So, as all our project was asynchronous, I gathered all the material on Sway, one of the easiest to Microsoft tools to handle which allows to make attractive presentations, among other things.

I cannot be more proud as my teenage students reacted very positively and maturely to the idea of listening to a "real person telling her life story" for further analysis and discussion. Honestly, what we always practice is Listening Comprehension with the coursebooks´ cds. After listening to the audio and reading the article, they were a bit shocked by the reality: first, it was hard for them to understand how I knew Rusul and second, the fact that I could direct message her to ask for that favor: all was a bit confusing for them: they would not believe me that she had sent me the audio on Facebook Messenger. Right now, we are in the process of sending her some questions: Do you miss Baghdad?, Did you ever go back there? Did you understand what the word war was?

This project started when I shared my idea with the History teacher who immediately jumped in, together with the Civics and the Geography teacher: they were fascinated!. The Social Studies teachers are in charge of introducing what ISIS is, terrorism in Europe, Syrians fleeing their country: routes in Asia and Europe. Although all the content is in Spanish, I make my students comment, read and listen about these topics in English, which can be considered a full CLIL class. Up to now, I have done this with two of my Intermediate classes. I will have my other classes do the same activity the first weeks in April.

There is no doubt that this activity is definitely challenging (as an educator you never know how your students will take this kind of piece of news), inspirational, thought-provoking but most of all, it gives teenagers the chance to reflect, think beyond borders, develop their sense of empathy and awareness: it opens their minds and eyes to the living world, it shows them that the purpose of schooling is not only for them to be taught, it is a place where they can show their feelings and emotions, express their opinions: summing up in one word: it helps them to have a VOICE to comment, to express themselves, to develop their critical thinking, to say something, or add any type of previous knowledge they had about it and at the same time to become aware of what is going on in the world they live in.