AnthroNotes Volume 24 No. 2 Fall 2003
Young Scholars' Social Science Summit
High School teachers and students from the Washing-ton, D.C. area recendy met at the American Psychologi-cal Foundation to participate in a new social studies ini-tiative, Young Scholars' Social Science Summit (YS4),created by The Esther Katz Rosen Center for GiftedEducation Policy (CGEP). The topic was refugees.Five scholars representing different social sci-ences—psychology, economics, anthropology, geography,and demography—and a diplomatic correspondent fora local newspaper engagingly talked about how they chosetheir field of study—or how it chose them—and howeach of them has been involved with the topic of refu-gees. Scholars came from local universities, theSmithsonian, government agencies, and non-governmen-tal organizations, including humanitarian aid organiza-tions. The YS4 Founding Committee included repre-sentatives from CGEP, the American AnthropologicalAssociation, Association of American Geographers, Na-tional Association for Gifted Children, National Cathe-dral School, Fairfax County Public Schools, Montgom-ery County Public Schools, DC Public Schools, and theAmerican Psychological Association. Sixty-four studentsand teachers attended the October 24 summit.Participating teachers chose up to three studentsto participate, but how the students were chosen was upto each teacher. One anthropology teacher from Virginiaasked student volunteers to show up at 7:30 the nextmorning, which, he said, weeded out several students.Those students remaining were required to write an es-say on why they wanted to attend the summit.In preparation for the one-day summit, theschool team (teacher and students) read five articles, oneof which was Stephen Lubkemann's AnthroNotes article,
"Refugees: Worldwide Displacement and InternationalResponse" (Fall 2002). The team then developed severalquestions in response to the readings that they could askthe speakers.The day consisted of the initial panel of schol-ars and a journalist, with Q & A; two break-out sessions(the first included sandwiches); and a final keynote speakerwho was a second journalist. For each break-out ses-sion, students and teachers were individually assigned bythe organizers to one of five groups, headed by one of
Students and their Teachersfrom Washington-Lee High Schoolin Virginia
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the panelists accompanied by a facilitator. All participantsattended two of the five groups.Following the summit, the school teams are ex-pected to meet, debrief, and decide how to disseminatethe information they gained to their school or broadercommunities. Each student is also encouraged to under-take a school project such as preparing a news announce-ment on the school television, writing an article for theschool or local newspaper, doing community service foran organization that helps refugees, conducting originalresearch for a behavioral/ social science fair project, orpreparing a research article for publication in a profes-sional journal of student papers such as the Concord Re-
view. The students' exploration into the world of refu-gees helped them better understand this complex globalproblem and the emotional, political, and social conse-quences of being a refugee. As one student said, "Glo-bal inequality is a people problem that is difficult to con-trol. Learning about refugees gives us a new perspectiveof the people we refer to as 'illegal immigrants.' Theydeserve respect."
Ann Kaupp
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