On July 31-August 4, 2023, CMENAS’ Title VI funding supported the Midwest Institute for International Intercultural Education (MIIIE) to hold a hybrid pedagogical workshop for 19 community college faculty. The week-long workshop titled, “The Nexus of Climate Change and Energy, Food, and Water” welcomed both virtual and in-person educators at Kalamazoo Valley Community College with some traveling as far away as Florida and Nebraska to attend in-person.
CMENAS invited Amelia Burke, a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology & history at U-M, to present a talk titled, “Changing Climate, Changing Livelihoods: Food Production in North Africa”. In a highly interactive presentation, Burke shared her research on communal land management and water policies in Morocco and the impact of climate change on food production throughout the North African region. She noted that because of the large population of people working in agriculture in the region, climate change has a larger impact.
The MIIIE week-long workshop also included a curriculum development component whereas participants created a curriculum module based on the workshop theme of climate change. The goal is to infuse a course that they teach with content on climate change in different world regions at two or three points during the semester. This could include, for example, a case study, a paper, or a team project.
Other NRCs co-sponsoring the event included the Centers for African Studies, Asian Studies, and Latin American & Caribbean Studies at Michigan State University; the Centers for Global Studies and Middle East Studies at University of Illinois; the Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies at University of Pittsburgh; the Center for African Studies at University of Kansas; and the African Studies Program at Indiana University.
