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1. Description of Our Team
We are four students from a small Russian town Uzhur. Our names are Natalya (16), Marina (15), Elena (16), Kristina (17). We all like social studies at school and as we live in Siberia we are interested in researching the problem of indigenous peoples. We took different regions and countries: Natalya studied Europe, Marina studied Africa, Elena studied America and Kristina studied Russia (as it is located in both Europe and Asia). We defined the main problems (territory, demography, culture) and analyzed them. Our coaches are Anna A. Bukhtoyarova from U CAN School (English and technology, project coordinator) and Oksana Y. Merenkova from Uzhur public school number 6 (Social studies teacher).
2. Summary of Our Project
The goal of our project is to study some problems of indigenous peoples in different regions of the world. These peoples usually don’t have national states to protect their rights. Their territory, language, culture, way of life are currently facing global challenge. We think that it is really important to raise international public awareness on this issue, support diversity and define the role of traditional cultural heritage on global scale. Taking the indigenous peoples’ interests into account is necessary to maintain global stability and harmony of international relations.
3. Our Computer and Internet Access
A. Percentage of students using the Internet at home:21-50%
B. Number of workstations with Internet access in the classroom:4-6
C. Connection speed used in the classroom:dedicated connection
D. Number of years our classroom has been connected to the Internet:more than 6
E. Additional comments concerning your computer and/or Internet access (Optional):
Unfortunately not all of our students have computers and interne tat home. So sometimes it was difficult to coordinate our work properly.
4. Problems We Had To Overcome
We faced some obstacles, when we were working on our project. To begin with,the main problem is there are only a few indigenous peoples in our area, so, it was difficult to contact them. Besides, we had difficulties finding information:because there are a lot of descriptions of their cultures but very little data on the problems of such peoples. Moreover, documents and reality are don`t match often. Also, the important problem is difference between English and Russian terms. In the end, there are diverse approach to the problems indigenous peoples. Besides, we all are very new to computer technology and web design so we had to put a lot of effort to study how it works. Sometimes we also had connection problems as the Internet in our small city is not always good.
5. Our Project Sound Bite
Respecting the right of small ethnic groups that don't even have that own state show our respect to human rights in general. Success in saving cultural diversity on the Earth depends on how well we can care of the groups that don't have strong political power in international affairs. Diplomacy should take their interests into account.
6. How did your activities and research for this Doors to Diplomacy Project support standards, required coursework and curriculum standards?
Our project covers some themes from geography and social science. Indigenous people of the Russian North is one of the important topics of our local heritage class. while working on this project we learned a lot about indigenous people all over the world. Besides now we understand how similar can be problems of small ethnic groups all over the world and how different can be policies of the counties related to them. The Internet helped us compare different situations and find a lot of valuable information for our project in both Russian and English.
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