Creating Community Spaces for Civil Discourse:
Preservice Teachers and Yazidi Refugees Engaged in Arts-Based Education M3 INITIATIVE

September 5-12, 2019

This interdisciplinary and collaborative project brought together preservice teachers in the Department of Teaching, Learning and Teacher Education (TLTE) taking a course designed to teach them to work with multilingual learners with immigrant backgrounds, in continuation with TLTE’s ongoing partnership with Yazda. For the project, we also collaborated with the Sheldon Museum of Art, and Dr. Alison Leonard from Clemson University who flew in from Clemson to take part in the dance workshops.

This initiative has multiple educational aims including:

1. To help preservice teachers learn more about the communities they serve, and how to improve instruction for multilingual learners in their schools.
2. To explore what arts-based interventions can do to increase civil discourse about contentious issues such as immigration, and to expose future teachers to perspectives of people who have immigrated for various reasons.
3. To understand how dance and visual arts can bring communities together, and how we can continue to improve arts-based pedagogy.
4. To help preservice teachers see the value of arts-based education by experiencing it themselves, and help them imagine what it might look like in their own classrooms.
5. To give Yazidi community members a voice by telling their own stories and being heard, and to give them a chance to give suggestions to future teachers about how best to serve students from their community.

The initiative was part of regular coursework in TEAC 413M “Teaching Multilingual Learners in the Content Areas”, a course that is now required for all secondary education majors at UNL. Students in this class will soon be teachers of subjects such as Math, Social Studies, Science, English/Language Arts, World Languages, Special Education, and Business. The initiative was carried out in three phases on September 4, September 12, and September 19th and 20th, 2019.

Affiliated faculty/students/community members:

Dr. Theresa Catalano, Associate Professor, Department of Teaching, Learning and Teacher Education, College of Education and Human Sciences, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Dr. Jenelle Reeves, Associate Professor, Department of Teaching, Learning and Teacher Education, College of Education and Human Sciences, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Dr. Stephanie Wessels, Associate Professor, Department of Teaching, Learning and Teacher Education, College of Education and Human Sciences, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Uma Ganesan , Doctoral Student/Graduate Assistant, Department of Teaching, Learning and Teacher Education, College of Education and Human Sciences, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Alessia Barbici-Wagner, Doctoral Student/Graduate Assistant, Department of Teaching, Learning and Teacher Education, College of Education and Human Sciences, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Julia Ficke, UNL student, College of Education and Human Sciences, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Students from TEAC 413M Fall 2019

Jessica Rosenthal, Assistant Curator of Education, Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Carrie Morgan, Former Curator of Academic Programs, Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Dr. Alison Leonard, Associate Professor, Department of Teaching and Learning, College of Education, Clemson University

Yazda is a non-profit organization based partly in Lincoln which aims to prevent future genocides against the Yazidi community and other minorities and to assist them in recovery from the 2014 genocide (see https://www.yazda.org/).

Yazda community members that collaborated on this project include: Hadi Pir (in recruitment, organization), Adula Mato, Bakir Murad, Wahida Havend, Maysoon Berali, and Shahab Bashar.

Funder/Sponsor:

Humanities Nebraska

Department of Teaching, Learning and Teacher Education M3 Initiative

With support from: The Nebraska Center for Research on Children, Youth, Families, and Schools