CHOCOWINITY — Students from Beaufort County recently gave a presentation to the North Carolina State Board of Education, presenting their findings from a project conducted earlier in the semester. The presentation was the first one given to the State BOE by students from Beaufort County, according to Southside High School Principal Dale Cole and Sarah Hodges, public information officer for Beaufort County Schools.

Meredith Southworth’s English II classes at Southside High School partnered with a class of students in India earlier this year to learn from one another along the theme of Global Poverty Awareness. The project was organized through the Center for Global Understanding at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Two students from the classes, Madison Farmer-Cashion and Jamya Moore, presented lessons they and their classmates learned from the school’s partnership with India to the State Board of Education in Raleigh during its December meeting, Southworth said.

The new, innovative program, the U.S.-India Partnership for Real Communication, links North Carolina high school students with their peers in India for a three-week study of global poverty. It also provides young people the opportunity to learn alongside students in another country through the use of technology and gain skills necessary in today’s interconnected world. The initiative, coordinated by UNC’s Center for International Understanding (CIU), received funding from the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi and the Center has built a network of six North Carolina and six Pune, India high schools for global learning, Southworth said. The students who participated engage in technology-based, interactive learning modules centered on global poverty. They also conduct research and develop presentations on the local relevance of global poverty, gain knowledge through expert guest lectures and have regular, direct interaction with teams across the globe, Southworth said.

Through the project, the students have opportunities to gain global competence, interact with their peers and learn cross-cultural skills, utilize technology and support from teachers to help build relationships and expand perspectives beyond the classroom walls and to experience working in multi-national teams to develop important global awareness and global understanding skills that today’s work environment demands, Southworth said.

During the presentation to the State BOE, Farmer-Cashion played a video compiled by SHS students involved in the partnership and Moore delivered a speech, describing how the partnership’s focus on poverty affected her personally, Southworth said.

“I feel like if I don’t step in — if we don’t step in — to make a difference, the problem will never be solved,” Moore said during the presentation.

Southworth said all students who participated were unable to attend so, in the video, students made clips of themselves talking about what they learned. Some students shared personal reflections while others shared how they felt before, during and after the project. Members of the Board were impressed with the presentation and mentioned the project’s correlation to its overall vision, according to Southworth. The vision of the NC BOE states, “Every public school student will graduate ready for post secondary education and work, prepared to be a globally engaged and productive citizen.”

“I think (the presentation) was a good way to culminate the entire experience,” Southworth said. “Our students here don’t really get a lot of opportunities to share things they learn about with very important people. This is something the students were very excited about from the beginning so the opportunity to share this with people who make really big decisions in our state is really an honor. The students had a lot of pride that they were able to present this project to the State Board of Education. The fact that the State was interested in what they did kind of solidified their feelings of pride.”