After spending several weeks abroad furthering their Arabic studies, two Shawnee Mission South students are navigating their senior year with new perspectives on culture, personal independence, and their futures after graduation.
Seniors Will Thiel and Joseph Goodman participated in two different study abroad programs that took them to Morocco and Jordan respectively.
Goodman was selected to participate in the prestigious National Security Language Initiative for Youth- a United States’ Department of State program that provides full scholarships for students to study abroad.
The program “is meant to encourage and to build opportunities within languages that are less commonly known in the US,” explained Goodman. “And, also, languages that are of political interest to the United States.”
Goodman is in his fourth year of studying Arabic at SM South and has also taken Arabic courses through the University of Kansas but says the 7 weeks he spent living in Jordan taught him “linguistic context” that was invaluable to his mastery of the language.
“Most of the communication that happens [in Jordanian culture] is not directly spoken,” said Goodman. “Most of it is inferred from the ways in which things are spoken, like, what the emphasis is placed on and stuff like that.”
But Goodman says one of the most important parts of his immersion experience extended beyond the classroom.
“I think that a really important thing that everybody on the program faced was something pretty new. It was the feeling of being a foreigner,” said Goodman. “The opportunity to experience being ‘other’ is really, really influential and I think it's an important piece of character building that everybody needs to experience at some point.”
Across the continent, Thiel was having a similar experience.
“I was able to learn a lot about myself as well as learn about other people,” explained Thiel.
Thiel spent more than a month living in the Moroccan capital, Rabat, through the Council on International Educational Exchange (CIEE) program. Like Goodman, the majority of his time was in the classroom mastering the Arabic language, but the program also encouraged students to spend time each day out in the neighborhoods learning about the culture and city.
“I think my biggest takeaway from this experience is that you can find someone to connect with anywhere,” said Thiel. “I could just talk with random people on the street, and they would want to be your friend or tell you about, like, their day or tell you about a cool restaurant they were eating at recently. They were just so inviting. And they loved to see someone learning about their country and their culture.”
Both Thiel and Goodman plan to continue their Arabic studies in college and say they were drawn to the program at SM South because of the culture and community that their teacher, Annie Hasan has built.
“I'd never heard of a high school offering an Arabic class,” said Thiel. “Every high school has Spanish, French, but I never heard of an Arabic class. So, I took it. And it's been so much fun.”