Teaching teens to understand a changing world

Much has changed around the world in the 25 years since the new millennium began. A major earthquake and tsunami in Japan, wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, and a global pandemic have all dominated headlines. Smartphones, then social media, and now generative AI have upended how we share news and even discern reality. 

Throughout it all, the Teaching International Relations Program (TIRP) has provided Los Angeles-area teens with the skills to better understand complex global events. TIRP is run by the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences’ Center for Active Learning in International Studies (CALIS), which is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year.

The program trains and then deploys Trojan undergraduates into local high schools where they “team-teach” using analytical tools and lessons specially designed to get young people thinking critically about foreign relations. These student volunteers also gain new skills, like classroom management and, in the age of instant information, practice in thinking on their feet. 

“Student teachers are often confronted in the classroom with questions they can’t just look up on their phone,” says Steve Lamy, CALIS founder and Professor Emeritus of Political Science and International Relations and Spatial Sciences.

CALIS replaces missing studies in K-12 classrooms

CALIS is part of Lamy’s career-long effort to fill what he sees as major gaps in K-12 education. Social studies classes have been dropped from some districts. History classes often stop with the end of the Cold War. Lesson plans don’t always provide a framework for in-depth analysis of conflicts or foreign policy decisions. 

As a graduate student at the University of Denver in the 1970s, Lamy spent his weekends traveling the state to provide continuing education on international relations to high-school teachers who were eager to update their classroom materials. 

When Michael Fry, former dean of international relations at the University of Denver, arrived at USC Dornsife to lead the international relations department in 1981, he recruited Lamy to join the faculty and spin up its undergraduate and outreach programs. 

At USC Dornsife, Lamy continued his training of high school teachers, launching the Center for Public Education in International Affairs (CPE) to house these efforts. Through a CPE-sponsored workshop, Lamy met Teresa Hudock. He recruited her to work at CPE, and she later became the founding director of CALIS.

Lamy also began training undergraduate students and partnering them with teachers in local classrooms, laying the foundation for TIRP. In 2000, California provided funding to centralize Lamy’s initiatives into a resource center for K-12 international studies. This launched CALIS, and although the source of its funding has evolved considerably since then, its mission has remained the same. Each year, CALIS pairs over 150 USC students with partner-teachers in local high schools and also provides training and instruction materials to teachers.  

TIRP’s curriculum uses a variety of unique tools and frameworks, most notably, Lamy’s “Four Worlds” model. 

In this analytic framework, students dig into cultures and nations by considering the four “worlds” that exist within each society: political, economic, social and cultural. 

Within the political sphere, students uncover what laws citizens are expected to follow, the taxes they pay, and what civil rights they have. In the economic world, students study property rights and how services are paid for. Social and cultural spheres encompass living conditions and lifestyle options. As these four worlds are better understood, students can examine how these factors work together or clash. 

The framework can be applied historically, such as a CALIS lesson plan on the four worlds of the ancient Mesopotamian civilization of Sumer. It can also be used to better understand the United States students are living in today. 

“With partner teachers, the Four Worlds tool has been credited with raising state test scores and dramatically increasing the pass rate for Advanced Placement exams,” says Hudock.

Above all, Lamy wants CALIS’ analytical tools to help students get out of “groove” thinking, the well-worn perspective shaped by peers, parents and media consumption. Thinking critically about world events from a variety of perspectives, even just for a little while, challenges young minds in fruitful ways, he says.

CALIS’s legacy spans generations

Thanks to its longevity, some TIRP student-volunteers have now returned to the program, this time as CALIS partner-teachers. 

Leylâ Fikes ’03 served as a TIRP student-teacher while completing her bachelor’s degree in Spanish and International Relations at USC Dornsife. The experience changed the course of her career. “TIRP was such a positive experience for me,” she says. “The response and feedback I got played a huge role in my decision to become an educator,” she says.

Fikes now teaches Spanish and social studies 30 minutes from USC at Hawthorne High School, where she’s also an enthusiastic CALIS partner-teacher. “I have absolutely relished the opportunities for me and my students to participate in USC leadership conferences and in simulation elections,” says Fikes.

Alumnus Reid Lidow says TIRP teaching enables many USC students to put their interest in changing the world into actual practice. 

“Passion is great, but it’s not enough,” says Lidow, who completed his bachelor’s degree in political science and international relations at USC Dornsife in 2014 and is now completing his law degree at Yale. 

“That passion must translate into action, and that action must improve the lives of others. That’s the guiding spirit behind CALIS, a message Dr. Lamy and Teresa have shared with students like me for more than a generation.” 

CALIS looks forward to the next 25 years

CALIS is currently working on an expansion of TIRP to local 5th-grade classes, says Hudock, and is developing a curriculum that will prepare students in 3rd through 8th grades for the TIRP discussions they’ll encounter in high school. 

She’s hopeful that USC Dornsife will continue to be a strong source for robust K-12 social science education, both locally through TIRP and globally through CALIS teaching resources.

In December, Hudock is headed to the National Council for the Social Studies conference in Washington, D.C., where a CALIS partner-teacher will give a presentation on the analytical tools CALIS has available for all interested K-12 schools. “It’s been an exciting and humbling journey, and we have a very long way to go,” she says.