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Birkbeck Students Participate in Global Classrooms Project with Amherst College, Massachusetts

Project promotes academic dialogue across institutional and geographic boundaries

On Monday 9 February 2015, five undergraduate students from Birkbeck’s School of Law participated in the first of a series of ‘virtual classroom’ exchanges with students at Amherst College in Massachusetts to discuss capital punishment in the USA. The conversation was part of a collaborative teaching initiative, called the Global Classrooms Project, which has been running at Amherst College for several years.

The aim of the Global Classroom Project is to use live videoconferencing technology to connect students in different countries to enable them to learn collaboratively. This year, the project involves five students from Amherst and five students from Birkbeck, who are convening for three one-hour seminars via ‘real time’ video conferencing, to discuss a series of issues related to capital punishment in the USA.

The seminars are part of an undergraduate module – ‘America’s Death Penalty’ – at Amherst College taught by Professor Austin Sarat. Professor Sarat is a leading scholar in the field of socio-legal studies who has published more than a dozen books on the death penalty.

Dr Sarah Lamble, Assistant Dean for Criminology at Birkbeck, is co-facilitating the seminars and is thrilled to offer this opportunity to students in the School of Law. She said: “This is a wonderful and unique chance for our students to engage with their counterparts in the USA and to learn with one of the world’s leading experts on the death penalty."

Students from both colleges read a pre-assigned article before each seminar, which then forms the basis of their discussion. For example, students discussed a piece that traced changes in US public opinion polls on support for the death penalty. Students engaged in a lively debate about what might explain recent changes in public opinion and what impact these changes might have for efforts to abolish the death penalty.

Isabelle Aitken, a second-year undergraduate Law student at Birkbeck who is taking part in the project, said: “The global classrooms project has been a really rewarding experience for me. It is fascinating to be able to learn from students and professors who study capital punishment and live in a country where it is a prevalent topic.

"Having access to the readings and being able to experience studying capital punishment in the USA has also been great for those of us who are interested as we wouldn’t otherwise have an opportunity to learn much about this in our chosen degrees. I would recommend taking part in the global classrooms projects to anybody with an interest in this subject.”

This is the second year that the project has run between Birkbeck and Amherst. As Dr Lamble describes: “This is a great model for building partnerships with other universities as it allows students to engage in academic dialogue across institutional and geographic boundaries in ways that they might not otherwise have the opportunity to do.”

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