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CCAS Outreach Program Celebrates 25 Years in Style
Published in 2009
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CCAS Outreach Program Celebrates 25 Years in Style
The Center for Contemporary Arab Studies outreach program, the Community Resource Service, celebrated its silver anniversary in the fall of 2008. It was 25 years ago, in 1983, that the Center started a K-12 educational outreach program, with a focus on educating American teachers about the Arab world and Islam and providing them with appropriate resources.
To celebrate this important milestone, the Center hosted a reception on November 21, 2008, with wine and hors d’oeuvres and a brief program that included live Arab music by local musicians Fuad Foty and Lena Seikaly. Present were CCAS faculty, students, staff, friends, and colleagues who had traveled to Washington to attend the Middle East Studies Association’s annual meeting. Most importantly, in attendance were a large number of educators from the D.C. metropolitan area who had participated in the outreach program’s activities over the years.
Director of Educational Outreach Zeina Seikaly spoke briefly about the history of the outreach program and its accomplishments, highlighting a milestone in 1997 when Georgetown received its first Title VI grant to establish a National Resource Center on the Middle East. She said that over 1,000 teachers from D.C., Maryland, and Virginia (and beyond) are now on her e-mail list. In the last 25 years, the program has sponsored 68 one-day workshops or seminars and 10 week-long summer workshops; the aggregate attendance at these workshops is about 3,500 teachers. The program has conducted three trips to the region—the first in 1990 to Jordan, the Palestinian territories, Israel, and Egypt; the second in 2002 to Turkey and Syria; and the third was just last summer, to Morocco.
In addition, dozens of Georgetown graduate students have visited schools to do presentations for students in grades K-12, and a large number of faculty members have conducted trainings and given presentations to teacher groups. Over the years, the outreach program has also enlisted the expertise of hundreds of outside professors and scholars on the Middle East to give lectures at various workshops and teacher training programs on topics such as the Arab-Israeli conflict, the conflict in Iraq, the oil industry, Islamic art, women in the Arab world, the Ottoman empire, law in Islam, the Crusades, Arabic literature in translation, the Abrahamic faiths, Al-Andalus, water conflicts in the Middle East, refugees and migrants, and…how to make hummos in the classroom!
Ms. Seikaly invited the guests to look at the colorful and extensive collage on the history of the outreach program, created by her daughter, Lena, which consisted of titles of all the outreach activities, testimonials from teachers, photographs, and other mementos of the last 25 years.
Professor Michael Hudson, Director of CCAS, made a brief speech about the program, followed by remarks by Ambassador Rocky Suddarth, chairman of the Center’s Advisory Board. Several local educators and colleagues then spoke about their own experiences with the Center’s outreach activities and how the programs have helped them in their teaching and understanding of the Arab world and Islam.
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