MMUN Partners with NAIS for Free Global Classroom Exchange

Now, you can partner with a school around the world to tackle a global problem without leaving your classroom!

MMUN is collaborating with NAIS to bring this opportunity to all Montessori schools. There is no cost to participate in this exciting learning experience.


NAIS’ Challenge 20/20 program enables students to form authentic bonds with students from around the globe and learn first-hand about cross-cultural communication. Together the teams tackle a real problem and their interaction opens up new perspectives and networks. Partnerships can continue after the Challenge 20/20 project and linkages such as teacher and student exchanges may develop.

This is an Internet-based program, free of cost and requiring no travel. Working together, the schools develop globally based, experiential curricula.

MMUN Students have learned through the MMUN experience about pressing issues in today’s society and how to identify practical solutions. Now they can help to implement solutions locally, within their own schools and communities, and internationally.
 

Challenge 20/20 was inspired by JF Rischard’s call to action in the seminal book High Noon: 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them. Rischard insisted that new networks were necessary for real change,  and NAIS created Challenge 20/20 as a free, internet-based series of school partnerships. Challenge 20/20 pairs U.S. schools with overseas schools to work on some aspect of the truly global problems Rischard had defined. “Changing the world, two schools at a time” was the mantra.

“As a trans-national school-to-school partnership program, Challenge 20/20 is designed to facilitate cooperation and intercultural understanding among students and teachers, and communities,” said Patrick F. Bassett, president of NAIS. “One of the program’s goals is to develop global citizens who are adept problem-solvers and who are comfortable working collaboratively across cultures.”

Since 2005, students have been finding solutions to one of twenty global problems (organized by Rischard into three categories):

Issues involving the global commons: global warming, biodiversity and ecosystem losses, fisheries depletion, deforestation, and water deficits.

Issues requiring a global commitment: maritime safety and pollution, the fight against poverty, peacekeeping and preventing conflicts and terrorism, education, infectious diseases, the digital divide, and natural disaster prevention and mitigation.

Issues needing a global regulatory approach: reinventing taxation for the 21st century, biotechnology rules, global finance, illegal drugs, trade, investment and competition, intellectual property rights, e-commerce, and international labor and migration.

Sign up by August 16, 2010, to participate in the Challenge 20/20 Program.  Download Package Here