Student Leadership Conference

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world.
Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
― Margaret Mead

During our final unit we will bring together the underlying theme of the year, “gaining awareness of our increasingly interdependent and globalized world, and taking responsibility for ourselves, others and the environment.” We culminate the year with a Student Leadership Conference on critical global issue. This conference is designed to represent a United Nations meeting where students have the opportunity to present the research materials, debate, discuss, and create plans to navigate the complexity of these issues. Although rendering creative resolutions to these matters may be a daunting task, this conference gives a forum for students to engage in intellectual and critical dialogue about issues pertinent to the 21st century.

Key Concepts:

Democracy
Human Rights
Transparency
Sovereignty
Accountability
NGOs
Nation
State
Nationalism

Acquired Skills:

Students will be able to:

• apply a “Four Worlds” analysis framework from CALIS (Defining key terms, political, social, economic, cultural, environment, and technology) to a variety of social, historical, and environmental scenarios.

• research, form arguments, and articulate the fragile balance existing between the individual and the economic growth of a nation as it pertains to human rights.

• prepare complex qualified arguments based in research and a variety of data, and they will present that evidence to an audience of judges and peers.

• debate the issue of national rights from a variety of perspectives, sensitive to the needs of individuals as well as the sovereign rights of nations in the era of globalization.

• create creative and effective media expressing the common ground they determine, through debate, to be a consensus-building platform on the issue of clean water; here, they argue that clean water is a human right.