Parish Students Learn in Worldwide Classrooms
This fall, global “doctors in training” will wield their own scalpels and learning about viruses by swabbing their own hands and growing bacteria.
These doctors-in-training play a humanitarian role as well — every class they take purchases a class for a student in a developing country.
Together, they share findings and discuss current global issues. Dallas students communicate and Skype with students in Haiti, India, and Pakistan to gain real-world experience.
Perhaps most impressive, the project starts with 8-to-12 year olds. Parish Episcopal School is the first school in the United States to partner with global educator Level Up Village.
As a founding partner, Parish will offer four of Level Up Village’s global STEM-based courses including Global Doctors in Training and Global Scientists in Training. Each course includes hands-on, scientific exploration and the chance to collaborate with students at a partner school in developing countries.
The goal of the partnership is to encourage student participation in STEM while sharing learning opportunities with students across the globe who wouldn’t otherwise have access to them.
“This program really resonates with our young students, and makes an impact more than a typical STEM course would,” said Patty Knodel, director of the ParishEXTEND after-school program. “They connect with children from a very different background and notice how the innovative atmosphere at Parish can help globally.”
In the Global Doctors in Training course, students learn about human body systems and disease through dissections of a frog, grasshopper, earthworm, snake, shark, and more. Students join a local physician on an exploration of the real life application of learning about biology and the human body.
The Global Scientists in Training course is all about clean water initiatives. It explores properties of water, and the model that no drop of water is a new drop, but has always been in our water cycle.
Students explore things that water can do at the molecular level using hands-on experiments and three-dimensional kits. They explore global relationships with water through interactions with their partner school students, and move from the theoretical to the applicable, constructing a working aquifer to better understand how we get, use, and sometimes pollute ground water.
The young scientists explore the innovations that are part of the solution to the global water crisis, creating two different kinds of water filters as part of that process.
The programs for young, would-be physicians are available to all third-through-sixth grade students in the Dallas area — whether or not they attend Parish — through the ParishEXTEND program.
