From Manchester to Burlington
Before I left to Burlington, I decided to stop at Bennington to pick up my guitar to keep me company as I spend the coming month in cold Burlington. A week has passed already, and I am very glad I brought it, even though this add an extra hour to the 3 hours drive… One important thing I didn’t realized about the States until I started living here, is how far apart places are from each other, and how this affect the American perception of what distance you need to travel in order to call the drive a long drive. I was in the car for 3 hours straight and I call this a road trip. I am a Palestinian and I can, because for us anything more than this is called cross country.
I arrived at my host family’s house in Burlington early in the evening on Friday Jan 15. They had prepared Risotto for dinner and I cannot remember the last time I have had it, they could not have welcomed me better! They live with a young, playful and a little two energetic dog. We are not friends yet but I hope to get there before I leave. My first day at work was on Monday the 18, Martin Luther King day, definitely a special day to spend at Champlain College. The Diversity and Inclusion department had organized activities for the week and I was able to join them for the first and second day. We mainly watched movies and documentaries followed by a small group discussion about race and diversity in Vermont.
During my internship at Champlain College I will be working with the manager of the Mediation and Conflict Studies Program, Julian Portilla. Today Julian and I played the Frogs and Bats game. I am just going to introduced it and share a link with you if you are interested in learning more about it. It is a very clever game that teaches negotiation skills and introduces new concepts of what does “winning” mean.
PowerPoint explaining the game: https://champlain.instructure.com/courses/373448/files/31781300/download
The residency program will start at the end of the month. For the meantime, Julian and I are working on several projects. I am going to talk a bit about each one and start with the one I am currently working on, which is “The school to prison pipeline.” The title of the project is self-explanatory, however, it is different that the other research that have been done in this field for several reasons. The main two are: the project is specific to Vermont and supported by work that Vermont Legal Aid has published from firsthand experience with kids who have been treated unfairly due to the system in place, and the goal of the project is to hold a series of conversations among key stakeholders in the education field in Vermont to develop a unified, consensus-based set of practice and policy recommendations to change the way discipline is handled. Other projects we are hopping to complete are: Drawing parallels between the “Police-Civilians” interactions and “Israeli Soldiers-Palestinians” interactions and movements that have been established as a response to these conflicts, Revising the syllabus for the MS in Mediation and Conflict Studies program, and finally researching peace organizations, such as Kids4Peace, and discussing their mission, goals and methodology.
On the 30th of this month the graduate program students will be joining us for two weeks. I will be working mainly within the classroom then. I am very excited and looking forwards to grow as a mediator and conflict resolution trainer during this period.
Hadil Marzouq
FWT 16'
