Turkey

In a classroom in Queens, a student looks out her window onto Corona Avenue, turns to her computer monitor, and types a question: “What kind of food do you eat?” The next day in a classroom overlooking the Marmara Sea in Istanbul another student replies, “We eat everything when we are hungry :) Of course, we eat normal food such as rice, kebab, salad, beans.” Back in Deanne D’Aloia’s class at Newtown High School in Elmhurst, the student asks her teacher, “What’s kebab?”

Ms. D’Aloia’s student was participating in an online community that is the precursor to a simultaneous broadcast between New York and Turkish schoolchildren incorporating live performances and dialogue—the finale to the Citi Global Encounters Program’s fall semester, a Distance Learning Event presented by The Weill Music Institute (WMI) at Carnegie Hall. Aided by the United States State Department, the Citi Global Encounters program engages New York City high school students in an integrated curriculum of world musics and cultures.

Although she teaches to a diverse student body of mostly first-generation Americans and foreign-born immigrants, Ms. D’Aloia believes the cross-cultural education provided by Global Encounters is certainly helpful.

“Here in Queens, we’re in one of the most diverse parts of the world … and the students don’t even know about each other,” says D’Aloia. “You have the chance to open their eyes. It’s the same thing with the different types of music, what it is and where it’s rooted in and what it comes from. I tell them, ‘you’re all the same; you tend to focus on your differences, but you’re all the same.’ And they see that.”

WMI consultant Russell Granet, who visited the four partner schools in Istanbul in October, says that what distinguished the students he met in Turkey was their curiosity: “They are so willing to learn, and so open to reassessing what they’ve heard about America and about American students.”

Granet’s observation on the students in Istanbul and New York could serve as a motto for the program as a whole: “Much as they see the world from different points of view, music will be what they have in common.”

Not, apparently, kebab.