Students at Hillsboro High School build peace plan models to help solve major world conflicts
Students in Mr. Sawyer's Human Geography course at Hillsboro High School have been grappling with major world conflicts for months and have now created several plans for peace that they think are quite viable. In presentations they designed to present in a mock meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, students designed comprehensive plans to address the following conflicts: Israeli-Palestinian, Indo-Pakistani, Chinese-Taiwanese, Darfur-Sudan, and the intraregional rivalry in Iraq. Students designed linear and non-linear power-points, multi-layer web-sites, blogs, movies, brochures, and wrote speeches and resolutions to present their peace plan concepts. Teams articulated plans involving building summer camps for youth, writing comprehensive treaties among hostile groups, sending in UN peace-keeping troops, and unveiling meaningful symbols to unify groups, among many other proposed peace-reaching strategies. The projects represented the power of solutions-oriented thinking and the empowering effects of students confronting world affairs. Many of the students involved in the peace projects were either from the regions being analyzed or had deep familial roots to the conflicts.
These students presented their projects to the MNPS School Board on Jan. 27, 2009.
The students who presented to the School Board include:
