More about This Year's Prize Winners

The winners of the Kansas in the World Award for Excellence in International Education for 2007 are Olathe Northwest High School in Olathe and Leonard C. Seal Elementary School in Douglas, Kansas. Both schools have done an outstanding job of integrating international content in the secondary and elementary curriculum respectively. The two teachers who applied for the awards on behalf of their schools, Annette Johnson of Olathe Northwest and Marjorie Landwehr-Brown of Seal Elementary, share an enthusiasm for teaching their students to be better global citizens through international education. They also believe that international education, including a foreign language component, will prepare their students for the future in a meaningful way.

Both teachers have worked hard to promote international learning in their schools by conducting field trips, participating in the model UN, establishing pen pal relationships with students in other countries, and even taking advantage of technology such as webcams and email to communicate with students around the globe. Both teachers praise their fellow teachers and administrators for being so supportive of their effort to make international learning an intrinsic part of the curriculum.

“At Olathe Northwest, we don’t simply teach international studies, we celebrate, integrate and experience it across the curriculum,” says Annette Johnson. “We pride ourselves on working within as well as across departments, collaborating to bring up-to-date instruction and opportunities to all of our students.”

Annette and Marjorie feel honored to have been instrumental in their schools being named winners of this year’s prize and hope that, as models for creating awareness of international education, they will inspire others to follow suit in this important endeavor.

“If children form global friendships then maybe, just maybe, as adults they will be less likely to pick up weapons to solve international differences,” says Marjorie Landwehr-Brown. We can all agree that this is one important outcome of international education, and that there are many others.