S5E4 Megan Diercks, Steve Sacco: Open All the World with Vision and a Grant

Curious about how storytelling can transform education and create global citizens? Join us as we chat with Megan Diercks and Steven Sacco, who are on a mission to enrich language curricula through a Fulbright-Hays grant. They share their ambitious plan to take 14 educators to Côte d'Ivoire, immersing them in its vibrant culture. Discover how this initiative will bring the rich, often overlooked, histories of Francophone Africa into classrooms around the world, enabling students to feel a part of the global community.

Their team will create 14 unique curricular units for K-12 and higher education, focusing on the power of storytelling. From teaching dual language immersion at the elementary level to entrepreneurship and beekeeping for women in Francophone Africa, the units focus on the multidisciplinary applications of the stories. Megan and Steven delve into how these innovative teaching methods can foster a deeper appreciation of diverse cultures and contributions.

Megan and Steven also highlight the broader implications of integrating authentic storytelling into education, connecting African-American and African narratives to enrich learning for traditionally under-represented students. Tune in to learn more about the AATF's vision of creating virtual and physical exchanges between students and universities, and how these efforts are building bridges through education, fostering global connections, and offering a more inclusive representation of the languages and cultures of the world.

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Transcript

0:00:02.8 Norah Jones: You know, it's the nature of organisms to grow. And education and societies are very much organisms. Yet sometimes we place blocks on how much we want to understand or how far we want to grow. My guests for this week, Megan Diercks and Steven Sacco, show us pathways to opening up to more learning, more growth, more understanding, in ways that free us up to really be full citizens in the global community in which we already live. Welcome to Season 5, Episode 4 of It's About Language with Norah Lulich Jones. This episode's guests, Megan Diercks of the American Association of Teachers of French, and Steven Sacco, talk with Norah about a groundbreaking Fulbright Hays Grant connecting educators and learners worldwide to chronically underrepresented cultures and histories. Come experience how creative thinking and educational professionalism can open opportunities worldwide to hear the stories of people in their own voices.

0:01:05.4 Norah Jones: I had an opportunity before, if you have listened to It's About Language, that to have heard my two guests today as individuals, Steven Sacco, Megan Diercks, and they are bringing today something very important. Not only for what they've accomplished and for what it's going to mean in the world of French education, French usage, but also what it can mean for you in your life, in society, wherever you live, wherever you're listening from. So today, welcome, Steven, and welcome, Megan.

0:01:44.2 Steven Sacco: Thank you.

0:01:44.7 Megan Diercks: Thank you, Norah. It's a pleasure to be here.

0:01:47.7 Norah Jones: It's always a pleasure to have each of you, and both of you together is just double the pleasure. Megan, I would like you please to introduce yourself so that folks know why it is that you are talking today about this grant for creating Interdisciplinary Francophone African Curriculum.

0:02:09.9 Megan Diercks: Sure. I'm the executive director of the American Association of Teachers of French, which means I oversee pretty much the day-to-day running of the office and all of our contests and scholarships, grants, awards, and publications. This is a role that I'm entering my third year of being executive director.

0:02:26.8 Norah Jones: And a third year of growth and increasing impact of the AATF too, and it's wonderful to see. Thank you. Steve?

0:02:35.1 Steven Sacco: I'm Steve Sacco. I'm a professor emeritus of French and Italian from San Diego State University and also a director emeritus from the Undergraduate International Business Program, which just celebrated 20 years of being a top 10 program in the United States, and also a co-director of the Center for International Business Education and Research, or otherwise known as CIBER.

0:03:03.8 Norah Jones: Which is such a cool name, by the way, CIBER. Thank you. And therein lies the rationale for why it is that you have both gone after and succeeded at receiving this Fulbright Hays Grant. So the audience is clear about what it is that has just been awarded. Could you please describe the grant's intent and the nature of it?

0:03:33.3 Megan Diercks: Sure. We received a Fulbright Hays Group Projects Abroad short-term grant to take 14 K through 16 educators to Cote d'Ivoire to study various aspects of the culture and business, geopolitics, society, also through the lens of storytelling. So that's going to be a thread that we'll all look at, and the team that's chosen to accompany us will also be able to create some curricular units based on a topic that interests them. That's phenomenal. Steve, what would you like to add about the nature of how this particular concept and the proposal work?

0:04:17.8 Steven Sacco: Well, just from my experience with a 2009 Fulbright Hays to Cameroon, it was just exciting to see for 30 days K through 12 teachers, and they came from all over the country to Cameroon. And it was a wonderful opportunity for them not only to learn the culture, but to go to virtually all the major sites within Cameroon, including a two-hour canoe ride up this river to go see a pygmy colony, to give the chief a carton of cigarettes, which is what he required of all of his guests, and a bottle of Johnny Walker scotch, and to talk about politics, because they have an incredible political system that maybe we should think about adopting ourselves, and dancing with all the villagers after we got done doing our filming and interviewing.

0:05:17.3 Norah Jones: Well, I definitely wanted to have a repeat of that, I guess, or that which is likely to come here with the Côte d'Ivoire and with all the adventures you're about to experience. There is a curriculum engaged with this. Tell us about the curriculum. Tell us about what its intention is for educators and those who are about to be educated.

0:05:40.6 Megan Diercks: This is really exciting. I feel like a lot of French teachers have a fairly firm grasp on the culture of France or Western Europe, Belgium, Switzerland, Monaco. They're fairly comfortable with teaching Canada, but when it comes to Africa, a lot of teachers just don't have that hands-on experience. They haven't been able to visit. They're not sure how to go about organizing a visit, and so it's a little bit daunting to them to try and teach something about which they have very, very little experience. It might be unlikely that they even know anybody who has been to Africa who can kind of help dispel some of the typical stereotypes. It's also really important for French learners to be able to see themselves as French speakers, and so opening up Western Africa, Northern Africa, that opens up a whole range of different people who look like our current students as well, so our students can identify with someone in an African country or possibly trace their heritage back to that African country, and then teaching quality units that aren't just stereotypes or they're not just outdated stereotypes about Africa is really important.

0:06:58.3 Megan Diercks: Africa is an emerging economy. There are lots of French speakers in Africa. The French-speaking population is growing, and the Francophone African world is very diverse based on what country you're in, and so then this is just a small start, hopefully, to really building a curriculum that teachers will feel confident using, and once these curriculum units have been created and proofread and tested, they will all be available free of charge to anyone on the AATF website, so it doesn't matter if you're an AATF member or not. We want to support all French teachers in teaching this new emerging continent, and we want them to have quality lessons, so they will be available to everyone regardless of AATF membership.

0:07:46.2 Norah Jones: And to not be intimidated by that and to recognize the impact that makes, even at a personal level, I remember in my French classrooms that when our students first started seeing the range of ethnicities that were part of the Francophone world, it was so exciting for students who did indeed think of, well, what has typically historically been a Northern European orientation around, say, France and Luxembourg, and that was so motivating. That changed completely who was saying, you've got to take French. It's cool in just my school too. So Steve, you've had a lot of experience with looking at the impact indeed of the Francophone experience in Africa with regard to business, and we've talked about how it's kind of made... We've missed the boat in understanding the impact of Africa. How will this grant and this approach and this education have an impact on the future of the way that people think about and use French?

0:08:55.1 Steven Sacco: Well, it's interesting because I read John McWhorter's 2014 article which was entitled let's Stop Pretending that French is important. And I thought that's interesting given my situation in interviewing representatives from 135 multinational corporations, 85% of whom have English as their official language. In talking to close to 250 representatives, Francophone Africans who are working for these companies, they work in French. Obviously, when there's multinational podcasts and meetings going on, they have to speak English, but among themselves, what we call backstage, they are speaking French. And at this point, quite a lot of them expressed a negative feeling of being forced to speak English even in their own countries. And that's where I believe that French majors in the future are going to represent those companies as mid-level managers who are going to try to keep the peace between the uni-lingual business giants and the bilingual Francophone African workers. So I think in the future, there's going to be a severe or a critical need for them not only in business but also in international development, in the military, because at this point, AFRICOM, which is our military presence there competing with China and Russia, are basically in all 21 countries of Francophone Africa.

0:10:42.7 Steven Sacco: So there's a whole lot of new opportunities for AATF members and their students, and we look forward to keep pushing that and showing a leadership role with this particular grant as a start.

0:11:03.2 Norah Jones: Phenomenal, and one of the things I listen to, and I want to make sure that those that are hearing this conversation and looking at this exciting opportunity, that there's a curriculum, and sometimes people are thinking of curriculum as a focus in the classroom on, you know, this week we're going to learn about this cultural kind of thing, we're going to learn about these foods, we're going to build this, but we're looking here at curricular areas and the concept that some of our listeners, I'm sure, are very familiar with but maybe not all, Language for Specific Purposes, LSP, if we happen to use the acronym together here. That Language for Specific Purposes combines things like, say, people that are interested in French who may or may not be majoring in French per se or might be a co-major with another area when they get to the university, and I'm going to actually lay two questions on you at once to be able to describe how this grant works with something like that and how, since it's a K-16, that is to say kindergarten through 16 work.

0:12:09.0 Norah Jones: What kind of way of making sure that the integration of this usage builds these capacities, builds these understandings in a bigger way than, say, what do people eat in Cote d'Ivoire?

0:12:23.5 Megan Diercks: That's a really great question or group of questions. And I found that our curricular team, we are hoping for 14, to take 14. Seven of those would be K through 12, and seven of those would be higher ed... And so once our team decides what units or curricular units that they would like to focus on work together in order to make sure that there is a seamless thread between these curricular units, and we are hoping university instructors who travel with us will focus on French for specific purposes or language for specific purposes, focusing on women entrepreneurs, beekeeping, economics, things like that. So I think the fact that they can work together as a team but also develop level-specific units or curricular will help as well.

0:13:20.5 Norah Jones: Fantastic. Steve, do you have something to add with that?

0:13:23.5 Steven Sacco: Norah, if I could add, when we look at a group representing kindergarten to grade 16, we don't plan on separating and putting them in their particular silos. We want college professors to know what it's like to teach dual language immersion. And if we take a theme like storytelling, for example, it can be done from K through 16. How should it look in a third-grade class, for example, in a dual language immersion class? How should it look at the middle school level? And we want dual language immersion teachers to see what we're doing at the college level to see how we're teaching storytelling in terms of history, because, for example, the Malian Empire lasted twice as long as Alexander the Great's. Or if we look at different engineering techniques like metallurgy, which is key at Megan's school at the School of Mines, metallurgy was pioneered in Francophone Africa. So there's so many things that we're going to learn just from one concept, that being storytelling, not to forget and to mention that women are the future of Africa.

0:14:45.7 Steven Sacco: It's like Louis Aragon, the French poet, said, La femme est l'avenir de l'homme. Woman is the future of mankind or humankind. And in Africa, as we go beyond the storytelling, we're going to see that the major entrepreneurs, especially women beekeepers, who are serving as the bulwark of pushing the Sahara Desert back and northern Ivory Coast in order to keep Ivory Coast as the leading producer in the world of cashews. That's done with bees. And where there's bees, you need beekeepers. And these women, it's interesting that they send their kids to college. They're not going 4,000 miles to the Mediterranean, possibly to die in a sinking ship. They are rebuilding Africa. It's what our colleague Samuel Maté calls Africa 5.0. And so those are just two aspects that make it so exciting for me.

0:15:48.3 Norah Jones: That storytelling, I'm so glad there, and I'm going to probe to evoke a little bit more because storytelling has so many layers. It's the way that humans learn from each other from the very earliest times of humankind. It evokes history and connections. And I fear that I myself started out by kind of thinking of storytelling in a fairly narrow range. Storytelling of heroes and a little history, almost in a childlike way. But what it sounds like is the way that your curriculum development is happening and your experiences are to develop, is that storytelling plays an important role, not only because it reflects humanity and the way we learn, but also because of how it has an impact on people understanding these Francophone cultures and what you're about to do. Have I stated anything there that makes sense and is part of why you're focusing on this?

0:16:51.3 Megan Diercks: What you said makes perfect sense, Norah. And we are so excited about this part of the project. So that way you can really learn about a society's values from these stories and legends that have grown up. And I know Steve likes to talk about the trickster animals that like the tortoise and the hare type of stories. And it really serves as a lovely comparison to what are stories and legends and what are stories and legends that you can find in other cultures? And are they similar to the ones that we find in Francophone Africa? So being able to film these storytellers and have the video and the audio so we can watch their gestures and see how animated they are when telling their stories, hear their accent, but also through that experience, discover the morals and the values of that particular society or region. It's really exciting. And I think we'll discover a lot of new tales that are going to speak to teachers and students.

0:18:00.2 Norah Jones: You actually answered the question that was in my mind before I even had a chance to ask it, which is, who gets to tell the story? That's critical. Who tells the story. And we know that in world language education over the years, thank goodness, less now than ever, the tellers of the stories were not necessarily those that were inside the culture at the time or were telling the stories of their own history. Bravo. How will these storytellers then be evoked in the curriculum? You're talking about video. You're talking about audio. How might these wonderful K-16 writers that you have now being there work with to help those stories to, in fact, anchor what will happen in an integrated curriculum?

0:18:48.2 Steven Sacco: Yeah, it's something I think we're going to find out when we start putting them together because normally we don't have third grade dual language immersion teachers working with college professors in French. We're looking forward to seeing that. But one thing I wanted to add to what Megan was saying is I heard of a case, in Ivory Coast the other day, of a storyteller who was brought to court because there were two families who were arguing over the ownership of the land. They brought the storyteller in to tell the story of that land from 500 years to modern times, and they found out that person or family A owns the land based on the story that was told. So it's not just history and culture, but also some in legal circles that's being used that way as well.

0:19:40.6 Norah Jones: Wow. Phenomenal. Megan, what else did you have in mind that you were thinking of in the answer to that question?

0:19:46.6 Megan Diercks: I think Steve really hit the nail on the head, but it's using stories and legends in the classroom, has become more and more popular it's very relatable to students and to students at all different levels. It's easy to do cultural comparisons between stories and legends. It's easy to see yourself in these stories and legends. And so I think that's just another really exciting way of highlighting what this opportunity offers to French teachers and students. So to be able to create something curricular that can be used at multiple levels, in multiple classrooms, in multiple different ways, hearing right from the source, it's just, it's going to be a really powerful tool for learning.

0:20:33.7 Steven Sacco: And if I could add, we're... There's another grant that we're doing. I don't want to  identify the source at this point, but we're working with the Center for Advanced Language. So it's one of our colleagues in New York City. And what we're working on there is the underserved. The underserved in New York City, for example, like the Mount Vernon School District. There's so many African American students there. How do we tie African American storytelling with African, Western African storytelling to make it even richer for them, for their heritage, but also, as Megan mentioned, the tricksters, how do we dupe and get over on authority figures who we've... Who they might feel are oppressing them. So we're hoping to get that grant to, in order to expand to the underserved at the high school level and college level throughout the United States.

0:21:34.3 Norah Jones: And interesting too, because you brought up about the underserved in a specific in this case a specific population or region. And I was thinking in general about what this challenge then will be to... Well, even within the French curriculum, that... What will the storytelling look like that can happen in those traditional focus areas, but being done in a different kind of storytelling way that opens up new doors. And that makes me think of what are some of the thoughts that you have had or some of the experiences you've already had, even at this early stage of people that are in other language learning areas or in areas of social studies in the case of a case 12 area or global studies in the case of university where folks may be looking at this grant and these concepts and saying, we want to learn more as you do once you experience the development of this curriculum. Any tapping on that, the greater and larger use for a variety of directions?

0:22:45.1 Megan Diercks: I think that's a really wonderful idea. And with the materials being available on the AATF website, anyone would be welcome to access them. We would encourage the French instructor to possibly kind of shop these around to different departments in their institution to see if someone would like to go in on a co-curricular unit or exploration. I think this could dovetail, like you said, really nicely with some interdisciplinary models. And it would be great for the French teacher to initiate that contact and say, here we have these, they're authentic materials. How can we work together to incorporate this in both of our classes and make it even more powerful for students to reinforce the underlying theme.

0:23:29.4 Norah Jones: Thank you, Steve.

0:23:31.2 Steven Sacco: In addition to storytelling, look at what we're looking geography, economic, political systems, history, those, when I think of our... Basically it's a triple degree program at San Diego State and undergraduate international business language area studies. I'm thinking of mines, I'm thinking of the University of Rhode Island's International Engineering School. I'm seeing those schools as kind of like taking a leadership role and showing how these modules could be done maybe in the future with another grant that we just sent off where we have engineering professors working with French professors or business professors working with engineering and women's studies professors. I mean, what a great major in the future that would combine French Women's studies and environmental sciences. So that would be one potential answer to address the topics beyond storytelling.

0:24:36.9 Norah Jones: Phenomenal. Thank you. Now Steve, I'm going to ask you a two part question here, and it's going to be directed to you first and Megan, then I'm looking forward to you jumping in there. Okay. But here's your two parts Steve. You have been in the role of grant finder, grant writer, grant getter, including doing it pro bono for folks now for quite a while. Sum up a little bit about that and number one, that background you have. And then the second part of that grant specific question is why Fulbright Hays and why then did they say yes to this particular grant proposal over others.

0:25:21.4 Steven Sacco: That we don't know yet? Because we haven't received our scores back. We'll have to look at the scores and see where we stand, but since I retired on January 1st, 2014, I've decided to do pro bono work with colleges and universities, high schools, all levels of education. Multi-level corporations I still charge. For the schools it's, or with organizations like FAFEDE Samuel Mathey is an organization in Africa … Samuel Mathey is a good friend of ours. He has developed over 250,000 women entrepreneurs in Africa. Why would I ever want to charge him to help him and, push his mission just even a little bit further. But just to give you a real quick story about how it got started. In 1987 in year three of my Michigan Tech career, 'cause I was at an engineering institution for eight years.

0:26:25.8 Steven Sacco: My department chair came up and said all your publications, that's all really good, your teaching evaluation's all good, but if you don't bring in twice your salary by next year you'll not be, you'll be fired. And I'm thinking, that's not in my contract. So I had to look up the word grant. I had no idea what it meant. So my salary at the time was $30,000. I brought in 60. And what he did for me, it was my first US Department of Education, undergraduate International Studies in Foreign Language Program. But what it did for me, it was kind of like releasing a true release because my provost said, I can't support you, but if you bring in grant money, I will support you. And I haven't stopped writing grants since then because it helps us develop programs that we can only dream of because so many of us are disruptive innovators. We want to  go against the norm. We want to  create programs that we know that will attract students. And grant getting is basically one method of being able to do that. So I thank my boss every day. I didn't at the time, but I do every day as I'm working professionally, even now at age 72.

0:27:48.2 Norah Jones: Thank you Steve. That was a great story. Megan, I'm going to turn to you for a moment. You became the executive director of AATF and you were engaged with the organization beforehand and certainly you're embedded in its leadership in the French. What was in your heart? Where did this concept come from? What is your dream? What is the purpose for which you are gathering so much work to do on behalf of French educators and current and future French students?

0:28:25.9 Megan Diercks: So there is a real need to have accurate curriculum that teachers feel comfortable teaching Africa to their students. Like we've talked about, it's important for teachers to see themselves in different language... In the French language learning culture, in the francophone world, it's important for teachers and students to see themselves. And given the regular AATF budget, there is not room in the budget to put anything together. And so about two years ago, Steve wrote me a little note on his membership renewal form and I emailed him back to answer the question he asked and he said, Hey, have you ever thought about applying for grants? And I said, well, yes, but I don't have any experience of grant writing. I'm brand new in this job. I'm drinking from a fire hose. I'm just trying to keep my head above water. So maybe we'll wait a little bit.

0:29:20.4 Megan Diercks: And he's like, no, no, I think we should get started and I think we can give it a try and I'll do a lot of the heavy lifting and I will guide you through that process. And so I said, okay. And that was really one of the best decisions that I've made as executive director because now through Steve, we are finding these opportunities that enhance our AATF reputation. They enhance our collaboration with other organizations because we're getting letters of support from these organizations when we apply for grants and we're able to do more than what our traditional budget allows for us to do and offer experiences to our members that they would not normally have. And so that's why I'm so excited about this project. And I know it's going to be a lot of extra work for Steve and for me and for my staff. But the benefits to our members and their students in all of our members and their students, you just, you can't put a price tag on that. It's going to be just an incredible experience that I wish all of our members could have. But we will start off with a team of 14 for now, but we're just really excited to, and we keep looking for opportunities to take this project and expand it into something bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and really strengthen our ties with different francophone African countries.

0:30:44.9 Norah Jones: Thank you Megan. And that study abroad and the faculty exchange, how do you perceive that both of you? How does it look? Who goes over? What age groups do they have? How long do folks stay? Do you have any of those specifics down yet? Or is this part of what's ongoing development?

0:31:05.9 Megan Diercks: For right now, it's ongoing development and that's a project for another grant. We are looking at doing some virtual exchanges just because that's easier and it's a lot more tangible right now, but with an eye to the future of doing actual exchanges where we would send a group over and they would send a group over here to work with particular universities. But we haven't really nailed down specifics. But that's... That would also be really exciting. And I would love for students at the Colorado School of Mines who have to do a senior design project. My real dream is for these senior design students to partner with an African university to create a tangible product that would help serve a need and then be patented and be able to hit the market and generate some revenue for these African university.

0:32:01.8 Norah Jones: Here's one. Steve, what other kind of dreams did you have rolling around in that mind of yours?

0:32:07.3 Steven Sacco: Well, one thing I wanted to add to that is when one of our excursions, 'cause we're going to have excursions on the weekend, we want to  go to my old school INPHB, which is one of the best poly-techs in all of Sub-Saharan Africa. And I want the group to visit my colleague Jean Moise Kobino. And I was a visiting professor there in 2017 and the students there can't afford engineering textbooks. So what does he do? He creates sustainable inventions in every class. They sit down at the beginning of class. So when we're talking about project based education, a student, one student came up and said, look, we've got all these plastic bottles. Let's create some kind of formula that we can turn that into cement because cement is one of the biggest imports for Ivory Coast. And by the end of the term, they did it.

0:33:11.7 Steven Sacco: Another student came up with a thought of, we can take those same plastic bottles. 'cause if you're going on roads in Ivory Coast, they're about six foot high on each side of the road. And so that kind of waste is critical to eliminate. What he came up with is an idea of creating business or construction supplies, flooring, paneling, all from the plastics that are being eliminated from the roads. And yet another one in the class that I was there, created for the women beekeepers, a four wheeled solar powered vehicle so that they could sell their honey. Because honey in Africa is a medicine as well as food. That solar powered vehicle with no need for gas can go from one little village to another to sell their wares. That all in a mechanical engineering class. So for us, I think that's going to be a wonderful experience to experience project-based education from an African perspective.

0:34:20.8 Norah Jones: And the storytelling that will go along with it that will continue to fill these. That's so exciting these stories on the ground as well as stories in the mouth. It's phenomenal. At... When those who are listening to this podcast hear about this opportunity, hear what kinds of things you've been dreaming of, think about what that you will be doing and how that might have an impact on what they might think about doing, how they might open up possibilities as well in their world, or join yours, because of their role and the connection with French, they're going to be able to go to my website fluency.consulting as well as to the website for AATF and I'll connect everybody up. So I hope that you will come to my website and take a look at what Megan and Steve are sharing there about this project and about the various connections. When they go there or when they go to the website, what kinds of things will they be able to see basically now about entering into your process here at the dawn of this experience and how will they keep up with what's happening? Are you going to have publications? Will you... However you have links. How will folks continue to follow your story as it unfolds?

0:35:44.9 Megan Diercks: That's an excellent question. So we are building a website right now and the website has a lot of the nuts and bolts of who is qualified to apply, how long is the program, what are the program dates, what is the program itinerary. So a lot of looking at the basics to see if it's a good fit for you. And if it is, then you're welcome to apply. You do need to be an active, like a current paid AATF member in order to apply. So because the AATF got this grant, you do need to be an AATF member in order to apply. There are some questions on the application that we are legally required by Fulbright to ask. So there's some things on there that we wouldn't normally ask, but Fulbright says you have to ask these things because these are government funds and they can only be used in certain contexts. But we can definitely post updates once we have selected our team. Our team will have about 16 hours of pre-departure meetings that they will do with, and that will include some homework, some reading, or possibly some films to watch just to kind of dip their toe into Francophone African culture or the culture of Cote d'Ivoire to give them a background in Cote d'Ivoire.

0:36:54.1 Megan Diercks: Of course, we'll talk about immunizations and what it will look like when we're actually there. And then when our team is there, we can post updates on what's happening, what they're doing that particular day, where they're going. And then once the curriculum is being written, we can continue to update as well and have a potential launch date for at least some of it. And it doesn't all have to get launched at the same time. We can, as things are ready, we can make those available.

0:37:21.6 Norah Jones: Thanks, Megan.

0:37:22.5 Steven Sacco: Can I just add one thing real quick? Megan came up with the idea as well of having a webinar in the next couple weeks or so, so that all the AATF members and anybody interested can get on and ask the questions they need to ask to be given more information from our slides that we'll create. So I think that's going to benefit a lot of members as well.

0:37:46.9 Norah Jones: Fabulous.

0:37:47.3 Megan Diercks: And we'll share that webinar date with you, Norah.

0:37:49.8 Norah Jones: Wonderful. Wonderful. So folks keep connected with Megan, with Steve, with me by the, again, by my website please Fluency.consulting. We'll make sure that we get this word out over and over and over again five years from now, eight years from now, a decade from now. What's this going to look like? What's this going to have done for individuals, schools, our society?

0:38:16.8 Megan Diercks: I hope that this will be a continuing process. That we will continue to apply for these grants and get these grants and be able to expand our mission. Going from sending a small team to do curriculum writing to create these curricular units, to expanding, to setting up virtual exchanges, to expanding, to set up in-person exchanges, to expand to set up interdisciplinary classes either in American universities or with American and African universities. Continuing to send teams to other countries in Africa to do pretty much the same thing, but countries are different with different histories and stories to tell. And then continuing to keep that curriculum updated and just offering this experience to as many AATF members who want to go.

0:39:04.1 Norah Jones: Thank you Steve.

0:39:05.6 Steven Sacco: Nothing to add to that, that was perfectly stated.

0:39:09.6 Norah Jones: Today I have asked you a variety of questions. Thank you for the storytelling that you have done here today with me. What do you want to  make sure today that you say that you want people to hear about why this is happening, what's happening, however you want to interpret it. What do you want to make sure that you say before we end today?

0:39:32.8 Megan Diercks: I want people to know that the AATF cares about curriculum and we care about inclusive curriculum. Whether you're an AATF member or not, it doesn't matter. We want you to have access to this and we want you to use it to serve as a model for you to serve as a model for your students. And so that way you know that we care about what you are bringing to your classroom and what information you are giving to your students. We want it to be accurate, we want it to be enriching, we want it to be thought provoking. And so no matter member or not, we care about what is going on in your classroom and we are going to do everything we can to make sure that you have access to high quality materials.

0:40:18.1 Norah Jones: Beautifully said. Thanks Megan. Steve.

0:40:20.0 Steven Sacco: Well we prepped this by having a checklist 'cause Megan is organized like that and I think we checked everything off. I'm sitting here checking this thing off that and I think we fulfilled our goals for the day.

0:40:37.3 Norah Jones: Wonderful. Well, I'm going to add something. Atypical for me here since the guest always has the last word. But I would like to point out that those of you that are listening who are engaged in interest in an education in the French speaking world, the AATF, as you can hear, is a passionate place and you ought to go and check it out and put your name down too as a member of the AATF so that you can help to change the world this way. If you are already not a member of that organization or other organizations that need to hear your voice about the inclusivity, about opening up the world, making a larger understanding, this is the time to join it. This is the time to break down some of these walls that we have that have inadvertently sometimes been built up and sometimes all too consciously, time to break 'em down, time to put those stones that are in the wall and the path so that we can build a way for people to walk along a path together, including all.

0:41:42.7 Norah Jones: So I'm going to encourage everyone that's listening today to look at your own life and say, where can you belong that you can make a difference? And if you're engaged in French in any way, AATF is a wonderful, wonderful place to start. And sounds like Megan, they're going to stay very, very inspired. Folks, this has been so helpful to hear. I look forward to folks connecting up with you about the ongoing experience of this grant and its impact. I'm excited about what you will do and grateful on behalf of, especially those who will be fired up in ways that they've not potentially been fired up before in their educational process, recognizing who's out there in the world that they can get to know even better through these stories. Thank you so much for what you've done already and what you're about to do and for being here today.

0:42:35.7 Megan Diercks: Thank you Norah.

0:42:36.5 Steven Sacco: Thank you Norah.

0:42:37.3 Norah Jones: Thank you for listening to this podcast about opening up new options for our minds, hearts and opportunities. Check my website out fluency.consulting to learn more about this particular project and to see where pathways might take you to opening boundaries and expanding minds and becoming full citizens of the global community. Until next time.