In the current era, the world is filled with seemingly unsolvable and dystopian issues. News outlets constantly report on groundbreaking issues from billion-dollar corruptive industries to uncontrollable diseases and mutations. If scientists and top experts can’t solve these problems, who can? West high schoolers?

Global Academy teacher Ms. Wayne assists these students as they try to save the world while checking off academic requirements.

“In theory, you take Global three years and work towards the Certificate of Global Competence (CGC) senior year,” she said. “We try to give you ideas freshman and sophomore year. You submit your proposal work junior year, and senior year is the execution. All three years before that, you’ve met certain literacy and activity requirements.”

Wayne has seen a wide variety of projects throughout her time at West.

“The projects can be really anything,” she said. “We had everything this year from local projects at the middle schools to raising money and donating supplies. Any type of project that is a culminating step.”

Spanish teacher Justin Hable recalls some of his favorites throughout his time as a past advisor.

“There’s been so many good ones,” he said, “but one year, we just had a student who went out and met with refugee families in Oshkosh to cook with them and she put all the recipes and videos working with them into a cookbook. I’ve never been not impressed with any one of them.”

Senior Ella Steffen took on the serious topic of human trafficking with her project with the local non-profit, Damascus Road.

“I organized an event that raised awareness and funds with an art auction presenting local artists who donated some works of art,” she said. “We also had some young musicians play during the event just to set the mood and tone.”

Steffen learned of the perils of trafficking from her church and was inspired to take action.

“It just kind of stuck with me how horrible the practice is,” she said, “It's just one of the things that I think needs to be fixed for sure in the world.”

Steffen credits the project for helping her explore new sides of herself.

“One of the things I learned about myself is my capacity to do something meaningful in the community,” she said. “Before this I never would've even considered myself being able to pull something like that off. I also realized how generous people are for just giving me an outlet.”

Senior trio Annika Nesterick, Cora Pizon, and Anika Larson decided to focus on bringing global perspective into community early-education classrooms. Nesterick has worked hard on her project throughout the past semester.

“We are hosting and funding a Spanish club at Carl Traeger middle school that we hope will continue for future years,” she said. “Every early release, we go to Carl Traeger and meet with about 12 to 27 kids to do crafts, games, and lectures. We teach them about different cultural things from different Spanish-speaking countries, eat cultural snacks, and celebrate independence days for Latin America.”

Nesterick mentions the inspiration behind the project.

“Anika, Cora, and I all had a common interest in teaching kids,” she said. “We thought that this was a good way to incorporate all of those interests.”

Nesterick believes the experience in real-life global studies applications has taught her something new about the community.

“In the Global Academy, we learn so much about what's going on outside of the world that I feel like I kind of forgot there's so much within Oshkosh that we need to be paying attention to as well,” she said. “There’s people in Oshkosh willing to learn about different cultures too.”

Larson credits the project for helping her grow and explore in ways outside of the normal academic spectrum.

“It’s a cool experience because we’re learning right along with the kids,” she said. “I think this has taught me how to be a better teacher, a better listener, and a better communicator. There's a lot of work that goes into setting this up and actually working with the middle school students who have a lot of energy.”

Seniors Robert Valero, Hanna Tran, and Will Vu took a different approach and focused on integrating cultural foods into local grocery stores. Valero helped to create an event of global cuisine for the community.

“We did a presentation, made a lot of food with the global ingredients, and hosted a night at the Food Co-op where people could come in and try it,” he said. “I think that it was really fun. The food was good, and we ate and talked to people about what our project was. They were really receptive to it as they were eating.”

Valero consulted and collaborated with multiple community sources throughout the process to learn more about the cultures of Oshkosh.

“We started out by working with the Winnebago Area Literacy Council,” he said. “It matches students that were born here with recently-immigrated students to help them get integrated here.”

While Valero and Vu were hard at work with immigrant students, Tran helped contribute by searching for a place that would carry the cultural ingredients.

“We partnered with the Oshkosh Food Co-op,” she said. “One of the students helped us learn about Pakistani food so that we could learn about ingredients that are hard to find in our community and bring them to the Food Co-op.”

Like Larson and her group members, Tran feels her global education has helped her improve in ways she didn’t expect.

“At first, I was a little scared and wary of meeting new people,” she said. “But I’m glad I got to be connected and get over that fear. There’s a lot of refugee students around here, and I’m glad that I got to know them.”

Hable is proud of his students and sees improvement in their overall critical skills.

“The greater idea is that they’re looking at global issues, becoming interested in them, and becoming change agents on how to come up with solutions to those issues,” he said.

In addition to global problem-solving skills, Wayne acknowledges that students faced additional challenges with the added Covid pandemic.

“Some of the partnerships that were developed pre-Covid kind of took a hit because you couldn’t meet with people or go into those businesses or organizations,” she said. “That’s been really tough, but the kids have been really tough and resilient in navigating this new reality.”

Although the deadlines for these projects have passed and rubrics have been submitted, Wayne believes students will benefit from the experience for years to come.

“Students learn something with these projects, and they engage the community so we all learn something as well,” she said. “I really hope that these are valuable authentic moments for these students that they can take with them to college or the rest of their life, careers, and beyond.”

by Hannah Chung

Oshkosh West Index Volume 118 Issue IV

January 31st, 2022

CGC projects empower Wildcats to build connections to global community