What is new at the World Affairs Challenge?
A greater focus on engaging students year-round…
- We have spent a lot of time thinking about how to help students take what they have learned through the World Affairs Challenge and make use of those new found skills and passions to benefit local and international communities. This year we will be holding an NGO networking forum, where locally based NGO’s working on international and local development project will have a variety of opportunities for either individual students or entire class groups to get involved in their programming. It is likely that there will be an organization working on the same themes as your class groups Formal Presentation!
- CTIR is also developing programming to engage World Affairs Challenge participants in experiential learning year around. This program will launch in the summer of 2012, and we will make information available as we finalize plans.
Event Day ‘downtime’ is a thing of the past:
- Mid-day activities on April 21st will keep kids engaged and learning throughout the day. There will be a number of different programs from topical speakers, large group activities with other event participants and judges and other activities based on the programming of NGO’s present on the event day.
- We are also hard at work on developing much more desirable lunch options than we have had in the past!
Resources & the Challenge
- Resources will be provided in a variety of ways this year, and all resources will start being distributed on our website on January 30th. Teaches will have access to CTIR’s entire past catalogue of publications through a password protected area of our website. These publications were written by education designers and include complete curricula for middle and high school in a wide range of topics.
- RSS news feeds will be available on the World Affairs Challenge website in a wide range of topics. If you have a topic you feel isn’t covered by our news feeds, let us know and we will create one for you!
- World Affairs Challenge 2012 Facebook Group – we will be engaging students in pre-challenge discussion and debate through our new Facebook page, launching in February.
- In-class programming pre-event. We would love to use our new partnerships with local NGO’s to get them into your class prior to the event. This is a new idea and will be developed carefully. If you are interested in having an in class educational session from an international development NGO, let us know!
