Arete photo by Melissa Hardesty Bowling Green junior Tessa Duvall video chats with students from other countries for her Honors International Politics class. The students discuss news, politics, and other topics during their chats every week. Duvall said the class is "eye-opening" and wishes everyone could have the experience she's had this semester. "It's one of those things where you know they live a normal life, but you don't really realize it. Seeing, 'Hey, they're just like me,' is really cool."
Arete story by Shelley Spalding
Every Thursday morning, Savannah Larson, a freshman in the Honors College at WKU, gets up at 6 a.m. to attend her weekly session known as Solyia as a part of Dr. Soleiman Kiasatpour’s Honors International Politics class. She perks herself up, strides over to Grise Hall, and participates in a two-hour video conference on a computer between herself, two other students from the US, and students from Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt.
Solyia is an international non-profit organization that seeks to create cross-culture connections between Western and Muslim-majority societies.
It has also “morphed into a non-governmental organization that works with the United Nations,” Dr. Kiasatpour said. By participating in weekly group chats designed to promote educational discussions, the students “get different perceptions of how Arab and Muslims areas really are,” Dr. Kiasatpour said.
“It’s neat finding out their views,” said Larson, a psychology major from Russellville, Ky. “At first we just played icebreakers, but our discussions have gone deeper. One girl from the Middle East kept repeating in one of the sessions ‘We’re not terrorists’ and I could tell that she was saying it to me. I finally had to let her know that I didn’t think she was one.“
One of Solyia’s goals is to break stereotypes of the other cultures created by both Arabs and Westerners. Dr. Kiasatpour said that many students realize that the foreigners who participate in the video chats are a lot like themselves.
“I’ve had one student come to me and was so surprised at how much the Middle Eastern student he talked to knew so much about his own favorite band,” he says.
The Middle Eastern students have a range of beliefs. One young girl shared with a WKU student that she has the belief that a woman can have a house and raise children, but should also be able to be independent and make her own decisions. Then there are others, such as a young man who felt a woman’s job was to raise the children in the house, believing that would save them from the other hard and toilsome careers in the world.
“Obviously,” says Dr. Kiasatpour said, “he’s never raised children.”
Ten students have participated in this semester’s Solyia program from the Honors International Politics class.
When asked if she would participate in this again, Larson had no hesitation: “Absolutely. Without a doubt.”