NORWALK, Conn. — Nineteen students at Norwalk’s Center for Global Studies spent eight weeks debating ethical dilemmas, and, at times, doing so alongside peers in Uganda, as part of Creative Connections’ Global Voices Ethics Lab.
Creative Connections describes Global Voices: Ethics Lab as a virtual exchange program that uses educational theater to explore ethical decision-making and cross-cultural communication. The lab format emphasizes collaboration, with students working in breakout groups and whole-group discussions to examine ethical issues affecting their communities.
In several sessions, Norwalk students connected over video with students at Tender Talents Magnet School in Kasangati, Uganda, according to program facilitator Tim Steckler.
The program included one intro session and eight discussion sessions, according to the Ethics Lab Session Outline.
The students discussed ethical dilemmas involving artificial intelligence, cheating, and their core values, according to Creative Connections’ website.
Program Layout
Sessions typically began with theater exercises designed to “warm up students [and] to have students get on their feet and not be so much in their heads.”
Daria Housman, a senior program consultant with Creative Connections, said the program lasted 8 to 10 weeks.
“We would essentially do joint, synchronous sessions with the [Ugandan] students every other week,” Housman said.
Housman said the sessions were recorded “for our own purposes,” but the recordings were not published publicly.
Program Goals and Metrics
Creative Connections assessed student growth through pre- and post-program surveys.
Alan Steckler, the president and founder of Creative Connections, said Tim Steckler, his son, “did several hours of work with [the Ugandan students] ahead of time and therefore could kind of gauge where their starting point was, which was really helpful in assessing the whole program.”
Housman described how Creative Connections measured what students gained from the program.
“Prior to the first session, we had the students fill out a questionnaire online that basically asked some basic questions about their knowledge of ethics, ethical issues, their experience with educational theater, and focused on some of their cross-cultural communications abilities and things like that,” Housman said.
Housman said the students were also asked to complete a post-program survey upon finishing.
According to Housman, the survey took “a close look at comparing the initial data with the closing data to see [if] there have been tangible outcomes.”
One of the questions on the post-survey asked students if they felt “they had meaningful dialogue with a participant(s) from another culture?” Housman said all respondents reported having meaningful dialogue during the program.
Student Voices
Aleena, a senior at Norwalk’s Center for Global Studies, said in one session they read an article about a school implementing programs to detect students’ use of AI bots.
“We acted out different perspectives… the viewpoint of the parents, the viewpoint of the child, the AI bot, or the principal, to really see different people’s perspectives,” Aleena said.
Owen, another senior at Norwalk’s Center for Global Studies who participated in the program, said the students were also sometimes given a prompt and asked to share their reflections on it.
Owen said the class had to do “a reflection at the end of each session that we had with Creative Connections, whether we were on call or not.”
“We had a greater reflection at the end [of the program], where we talked with the employee from Creative Connections that had been mainly facilitating everything,” Owen said.
Editor’s Note: It is the policy of Norwalk’s Center for Global Studies to allow only the first names of students to be published.
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