Bennion Jr students make friends in India, Mexico, England
In a world where human rights are disregarded daily, students at Bennion Jr. High are learning to respect each others' beliefs and customs.
Bennion is the first junior high in Utah to participate in the Face to Faith program. Run through the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, the program provides an open forum for young people around the world to politely discuss their backgrounds and values through video conferencing and online chat rooms. Face to Faith is centered around geography classes at Bennion--the students learn about civic discourse and world cultures in those classes anyway, and hearing about other countries from their peers who actually live there makes it more real to them.
"It's far more powerful when a kid from India says, 'Here's how I live,'" geography teacher Pamela Hunter said.
Bennion students participated in their first video conference on Dec. 9 with students from India, England and Mexico, and with United Nations Lead Prosecutor Hansdeep Singh as moderator. Having four schools talk to each other is unusual--only two schools generally talk at a time--but the exception was made because Dec. 9 is Human Rights Day.
Face to Faith was originally started by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair to help heal the religious civil war that has tormented Ireland for centuries, Hunter said.
"The basic premise is that many of the world's problems are caused by religious differences, and learning to how to conduct discourse with civility can contribute to world peace," Bennion Principal Mary Rhodes said.
The program neither teaches nor discourages specific beliefs. It only provides participating students with a safe place to explain themselves and ask questions of others, while teaching them how to do both without causing offense.
"When our kids have a video conference, they're not just representing us," Hunter said. "They're representing the United States."
Although the program started out focused around religion, Face to Faith has grown to be about culture as a whole. During teleconferences, students discuss everything from family life to pets to what kind of music they like to listen to.
Bennion students also discussed the world wide problem of bullying and what to do about it with their new friends. Since bullying is one of Singh's special priorities, the students asked him if it was even possible to have a world where everyone's basic rights are respected.
His answer was that all we can do is respect others' rights ourselves, in our own communities, and from there it can begin to spread to the rest of the world, Hunter said.
Bennion's next video conference will be with Muslim students in Palestine. The date has not yet been set.
