Invited as a guest to Franklin Yartey’s intercultural class in Dubuque, we agreed on the topic of the refugee crisis as manifest in Denmark.
What?
The group of 12 students were invited to pick and choose from my list of sources so that they would have a bit of background before we started and to form the basis for some questions. I had intended to do a question-generating exercise followed by a problem analysing exercise but in the end only managed the first goal in the 50 minutes available.
I gave a short partisan but varied (as I thought) reading list as follows:
1. An interesting perspective can be found here: (need a free account to read it).
2. There is also a short video in Danish with English subtitles. They are adding them to Vimeo but have not yet added this one. It’s the third video on this page but click on the video to watch on Facebook to get the subtitles.
3. This article is about a woman who was prosecuted for helping refugees in Denmark.
4. Opinion piece and summary of recent refugee-related events:
5. About ideas for setting refugee wages lower than for Danes
How?
We met in the live conferencing tool Zoom.us. Using Today’s Meet to generate the questions I used the wondering protocol which is often the starting point of my work with PLP.
Over a short period of 3 minutes or so we generated the following wonderings.
Wonderings
Here is the list of wonderings generated by the group. Immediately afterwards I tried to cluster the wonderings into categories in discussion with the group. The clustering below is a second round after the event.
Dispassionate academic or biased observer?
I was wondering why you chose these specific articles and their perspectives?
Their journey
- I’m wondering who decides who gets to be hosts countries for the Syrian refugees.
- I wonder how the Syrian refugees travelled to all of the various “host countries”.
Future
I wonder when Syria will be free from the war
Past/causes
- I was wondering why everything is happening all now. You mentioned it all just “blew up” this past summer but why all of a sudden?
- I wonder why it takes so long to escape when we see the people in such terror and chaos
- I wonder why this is still such a panic.
Attitudes and reception
- I was wondering what you think the reason for making the refugees feel even more detached from society than they already do.
- I was wondering how the people of the host countries treat the refugees on a daily basis
- I’m also wondering how we can get past the fear of terrorism, so these people can get all the help they need without being taken as a threat
- i wonder why there isn’t a good educational system for child refugees when they take up half of the percentage of refugees
Link to US
- I wonder how we would feel as Americans if we were the refugees.
- I wonder how American would be treated as Refugees
- I wonder how Americans would treat refugees
Link with refugees?
I wonder how we can make people want to work harder to stop the terror attacks
The very first wondering tells me that I probably did not make my role clear at the beginning and that I was coming in very much on the side of the refugees. And the very last one made me realise that terrorism is very much an added ingredient in this refugee story compared to the one that unfolded after the Second World War and that this suspicion that the refugees harbour terrorists in spite of the fact that the recent attacks have been carried out by home-grown people, is a link that has embedded itself and adds an additional layer of difficulty for today’s refugees.
Technical set-up
Planning: email
Live meeting: Planned to be Skype but ended with Zoom.us with the class as one entity and me at the other end in Denmark
Question generation: Today’s Meet Using this tool on their own devices, this avoided a drain on bandwidth by asking everyone in the room to join the Zoom.us meeting.
Thanks to Franklin Yartey for inviting me into his classroom to bring a global perspective.