Giving Compass' Take:

• NaTakallam is an organization that pairs refugees with people who want to practice their language skills and displaced people can speak to K-12 classes about their experiences. 

• How can donors support refugee empowerment organizations and programming?

• Read about how this photographer tells refugee stories by taking photos of their possessions. 

In Jill Armstrong’s social studies classes, when students learn about other countries, they don’t just learn from textbooks and news articles, which she says can seem abstract and elusive to teenagers. Armstrong, who teaches at a high school in Eastern Kentucky, likes to weave in “that human aspect, because it makes it more real,” she says.

Case in point: About once a week for the last several months, Armstrong’s humanities students have participated in an hour-long conversation with Ghenwah Kharbeet, a 28-year-old Syrian refugee—only, the students are in class in the tiny town of Greenup, Ky., and Kharbeet is 5,000 miles away in Turkey.

During their time together, Kharbeet, whose face is projected on a SMART Board at the front of the classroom, urges the students to ask her anything, and they do.

“I really have become more passionate about global awareness and getting my students to see the world beyond what we have here, in Eastern Kentucky,” Armstrong says. “I tell them, you know, the whole concept of why we learn about other countries is to understand and be knowledgeable. You don’t have to agree. But it’s about understanding and learning and growing.”

Armstrong met Kharbeet through NaTakallam (Arabic for “we speak”), an organization that connects displaced persons with learners all over the world who want to practice their language skills or find out more about a different culture, then compensates them for their work.

NaTakallam was founded in 2015, when Aline Sara, a Lebanese-American graduate student at Columbia University, was struggling to find someone with whom she could practice her conversational Arabic.

Since then, NaTakallam has expanded to offer lessons in four different languages and has hired displaced persons from more than 10 countries, including Syria, Iran, Venezuela and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Read the full article about connecting with refugees around the world by Emily Tate at EdSurge