North America & the Caribbean
US Free Speech vs China’s Censorship
Thomas Thurston talks about teaching transatlantic histories in the classroom.
Thomas Thurston is the Director of Education and Public Outreach at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at the MacMillan Center. Tom has led week-long NEH workshops for K-12 teachers and has organized several collaborative international institutes for teachers in Ghana, the U.S., and the UK. He also has acted as a consulting historian for several Teaching American History programs and has served as a curriculum developer for WNET’s Educational Technologies Department, including the documentary series “The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow” and “Slavery and the Making of America.”
Learn more about Thomas Thurston.
Register now for our 2019 Service Trip to Batey Libertad, Dominican Republic – space is limited!
Batey Libertad, Dominican Republic
March 8 to 17, 2019
The Yale Alumni Service Corps is pleased to announce its upcoming service trip to Batey Libertad, a marginalized rural community in the Dominican Republic. The service trip is timed to coincide with Yale’s spring break so that Yale undergraduates can participate in the program.
Batey Libertad is a community of between 600 and 1,000 residents located about an hour outside of Santiago, in the north of the Dominican Republic. The community is a mix of Haitians, Dominicans and Dominicans of Haitian descent. Most residents are engaged in non-contractual agricultural and construction work, and have little access to healthcare and other public services. Access to clean water is limited, and there are no public sanitation systems.
We are delighted to be able to coordinate this service trip with Yspaniola, a non-profit established by Yale undergraduates and alumni ten years ago to promote quality education within Batey Libertad. Yspaniola operates a literacy center for students in first to seventh grade and an early childhood education program for younger children. In addition, Yspaniola provides a limited number of university scholarships for the most promising students in the community. As part of its program, Yspaniola regularly hosts service-learning programs for Yale undergraduates, as well as programs for students from other institutions. Yspaniola’s expertise in teaching Dominican and Haitian history and culture should make the service trip a particularly rewarding learning experience for YASC participants.
More information about Yspaniola and Batey Libertad is available at
http://www.yspaniola.org
At F&ES, Rwanda Official Makes Case for Stronger Policy-Academic Partnership
Last year, Rwanda became the third of 39 countries to ratify the Kigali Amendment, an amendment to the Montreal Protocol that, among other goals, set a timetable for reducing the production and usage of hydrofluorocarbons, a category of potent planet-warming gases, in cooling and refrigeration systems.
The agreement, which struck a balance between the need for these air-cooling technologies in a warming world and the urgency of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, was named for the Rwandan capital that hosted the meeting where the agreement was reached. It was approved by nearly 200 national “parties” to the historic Montreal Protocol, the 1987 international treaty that sought to reduce emissions of ozone-depleting substances.