The author with SYA students and faculty, Rennes, France, 19 February 2018

By Nelson Graves

Students from this program have submitted more articles to News-Decoder this year than counterparts in any of our other member institutions. They are helping to organize a webinar for later this month and have launched special writing workshops for aspiring authors to hone their skills.

School Year Abroad France stands out for its engagement with News-Decoder and receives our “Decoder in the Spotlight” prize for February.

Since the start of 2018, we have published four articles by SYA France students, including two in February — one by Defne Egbo on being biracial in America and another by Clio Morrison on her hobby of taking photographs with film. Egbo’s article is one of the most viewed on our site this year.

We have received another three submissions from SYA France students, who along with counterparts from SYA Spain are busy organizing our next webinar on March 22 on “Separatist Movements in Spain and France”. The written submissions include stories on poverty awareness and on being a first-generation American.

The string of articles prompted us to offer a set of writing tips to our students, and soon we will be circulating a note advising young writers how to leverage personal reflections to research solutions to social and political problems.

With exemplary teamwork, SYA France students have paired up ahead of the March 22 webinar to help each other research Corsica’s independence movement from three angles — the historical context, the European Union’s viewpoint and the movement’s international implications.

SYA Spain students have also been active with News-Decoder, submitting two articles and preparing to discuss Catalonia’s efforts to break away from Spain in the March 22 online session.

We look forward to working with SYA students in France, Italy and Spain as they prepare their capstone projects. Not to mention SYA China, which will be participating in a webinar in April with students from Greens Farms Academy in the United States and ISF Academy in Hong Kong.

School Year Abroad is one 14 founding members of News-Decoder and has been working with us since 2015. Last year its students in France and Spain held down a webinar on “Whither the European Union”, and they wrote a series of articles on the subject for our website.