Global collaborations offer both promise and peril but teaching students to work across borders is a key skill. In addition, exposure to other cultures leads to the ability to generate new and useful ideas. Professors in Meknes, Morocco and Seattle, Washington created a service project in a course that reviewed Morocco’s experience with a truth, justice, and reconciliation (TJR) process and the history of slavery and racism in the U.S. Applying TJR principles to the racial justice movement in the U.S., students in Seattle interviewed survivors of police violence as part of a service project led by the Black Community Lobby, a Seattle-based group advocating for legislative change to address police officer killings of black and brown individuals. Students in Meknes, Morocco did legal research and interviewed participants in the Equity and Reconciliation Commission. The four professors, based in the U.S. and Morocco, will describe how they organized an intercultural clinical project that included interpreters in Arabic and English and training on community lawyering, trauma-informed interviewing, and legal research that complemented a more traditional discussion of TJR in Morocco and the legacy of slavery and racism in the United States. They will share how they facilitated student meetings and reflections and worked to build a project over several semesters in which students learned about themselves and each other.
Using an approach modeled on the Liberating Structures Purpose to Practice exercise, participants will then be divided into small groups. They will then design a collaborative clinical education project that addresses a social justice issue (economic, environmental, judicial, criminal, civil, educational, etc.) as a collaboration between two countries. After creating an outline including the following five elements: Purpose, Principles, Participants, Structure, and Practices, they will share challenges and opportunities. The whole group will brainstorm ideas and discuss resources for support.