TEACH
Teachers Educating Across Cultures in Harmony
We Cannot Change the World Alone, but If We Each Cast a Pebble Across the Water, We can Create Many Ripples
The Bilateral Chamber’s Teachers Educating Across Cultures in Harmony (TEACH) Fellowship was conceived to actively engage U.S. and MENA educators in capacity building initiatives to produce a new generation of leaders equipped to provide solutions to the world’s most pressing social and economic issues.
Since its inception in 2009, U.S. Educators from 60 cities representing 31 U.S. states have received the Fellowship. In addition to the exchanged best practices and new relationships with their peers in the Middle East, the Fellows have also shared their experience with more than 40,000 U.S. students - changing the misguided perceptions of U.S. youth regarding the Middle East, Islam, and Arab heritage.
TEACH was launched as a vehicle to provide U.S. educators an opportunity to visit the Middle East and gain insight into the culture, the challenges, and the opportunities experienced by their peers.
The Fellowship
The Fellowship provides these insights through a combination of:
1. Cultural site visits, which give fellows an understanding of the history and immerse them in Bahrain’s rich culture and heritage,
2. Educational institution visits, which afford the TEACH Fellows a unique opportunity to discuss best practices and teaching methodologies while exploring avenues for possible classroom exchange, and
3. Business meetings with local corporate leadership, which allows for frank exchanges on the gap that exists between traditional education and the needs of a global workforce. The dialogue also focuses on ways to successfully reduce that gap via closer, more formalized collaboration
between educators and corporate workforce development teams.
The educators who participate are then able to return to their classrooms, communities, and social settings and share these first-hand experiences that reflect more similarities than differences. Through personal communications and professional exchanges, the fellows begin to replace misconceptions with awareness and inspire a new sense of purpose that ignites new possibilities for their students and their communities, the range of which is immeasurable.
The TEACH Fellowship is available to all U.S. Educators regardless of discipline.
Though our 2020 - 2021 TEACH Fellowships to the Kingdom of Bahrain were postponed due to the pandemic, we are hopeful to execute a mission in 2022 and offer a virtual TEACH experience for U.S. educators.
Please email edu@bilateralchamber.org for more information and updates.