The Advocacy classes
The next excited challenge for Ben Franklin Transatlantic fellows started this week. Using their diplomatic skills “The new Diplomats” are now formulating questions for the Republican National Debate as part of CNN and YouTube’s election coverage. Divided into groups, they will cover important issues in the National and International area, like: Middle East, Africa, Energy and the Environment, Civil Liberties and Globalization. Their weekly work contains researches about an issue discussed during the classes, formulating two questions on that issue, which will be submitted to CNN’s program. The groups will be able to investigate about an issue, than create videos, which will be submitted to ABC News.
The advocacy classes will be a culmination, where the students will be able to summarize their knowledge from the previous classes and their trip in Washington DC.
The Middle East Group
The work strategy of Middle East group is based on: research on an issue, possible questions, filtration of the questions, so the culmination would be two questions. The purpose of the group is avoiding every possibility of making questions in a spontaneous way, but based on previous investigations, that would justify the goal of those questions. Trying to get higher efficiency our group is divided in two small groups, which will work on two issues: the case of Iraq and Democracy Promotion in the Middle East.
24 Jul 2007 Tuesday
After the first tour of the investigations the students came up with different ideas, and different questions, anyway the constituent was the same, these student as everyone in the world indented on democratization of the world and peace solution for every conflict.
25 Jul 2007 Wednesday
After one day thinking and searching the students came up with some questions. The debate continued till noon, still dilemma what should be the two final questions. The
Iraq group mostly prefers to take the side of the American people, “The troops should be back”, What would you do different from president Bush? What will be your policy in
Iraq? How would you correct Bush’s mistake? Do you think that US modified their policy in Iraq, and their goals were different, from those in the beginning? Anyway there weren’t excluded and international ideas expressed on these questions. So the point is: create a mix question, that would please the both sides! It was hard!!!
Four o’clock, the questions are somehow summarized. Our general question about
Iraq case will be: ”Americans are still unclear about the image of the Republican Party. Many associate the Republican Party as the “the Bush Party”. How would you respond to the claim that your Middle East policy will only mirror that of Bush’s? Specifically how would contrast your
Iraq policy to that of the current administration?
Now the video!!! What we should do so it looks the best way, so the CNN editors pick it up.