Future Educator Negotiates and Humanizes Experiences After Virtual Exchange

For Aseel, participating in PATHWAYS Institute for Negotiation Education’s Game Changers in Education has shifted the way she thinks about her place in the world. As part of this virtual exchange, she developed key negotiation skills on how to best communicate with two sides who might have differing perspectives and agendas.

She is now able to look beyond her own bubble, looking further out into the world and exploring the ways in which people from diverse backgrounds and experiences think about different issues.

Using the skills developed during her exchange, she now regularly represents her university as a student speaker and engages with representatives from other countries. In these settings, she advocates for social justice initiatives and pushes for equitable programming in her university.

As someone who hopes to become an educator in the future, she speaks to all those who have a passion for education on the importance of developing these types of negotiation skills. She says, “[Educators] are changing a full-on generation; we are teaching [and] shaping the society…we do need these skills to talk to our students in a different way… because we do have the traditional way of saying, ‘don’t do this’ and ‘you mustn’t do that,’ but [we need to] go about it in the way that Game Changers has done.”

The Game Changers in Education program, implemented by PATHWAYS Institute for Negotiation Education, is supported by the Stevens Initiative, which is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, with funding provided by the U.S. Government, and is administered by the Aspen Institute. The Stevens Initiative is also supported by the Bezos Family Foundation and the governments of Morocco and the United Arab Emirates.