Dear Educators, Parents, Guardians, or Students 18 or older (If you are a student under 18, please have a parent or guardian fill out this Registration Form),
Middle and high schoolers (age 12 or above) are invited to participate in a project (IRB Protocol #23-358) that empowers students to become leaders who can build connected, resilient communities. Students will participate in an interactive five-hour virtual training and will receive a certificate of participation from Teachers College, Columbia University.
Project Belonging is a free peer-to-peer learning opportunity for students across the United States to promote belonging, social connectedness, and violence prevention in their communities. With the support of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Education, Teachers College, your students will develop the leadership skills and knowledge to foster empathy, connection, and belonging in their communities. This study is being done to attain feedback from your student before, during, and after undergoing the peer-to-peer learning training for middle-school and high-school students focused on building resilient communities and preventing ‘Othering’, as a form of targeted violence. The researchers will do this by facilitating students through an online training course. The project is led by Dr. Amra Sabic-El-Rayess - a survivor of the Bosnian Genocide, acclaimed scholar on violence prevention in schools, professor at Columbia University, and author of the young adult and middle-grade memoirs, The Cat I Never Named: A Story of Love, War, and Survival (Bloomsbury, 2020) and Three Summers (Macmillan Publishers-FSG, 2024).
Please note, students from NYC Public or Charter Schools can not apply for this training at this time.
After you register either as a parent of a student (
age 12 to 17) or as a student who is 18+, you will be emailed a consent form for your child or for yourself, respectively. If you are a student who is 18+, once you sign the consent form, you will receive access to the training and/or program. If you are a parent of a minor, once you consent, your child will receive an email asking them to review and sign the assent form before they are given access to the training. For more information about the training, go
here.
Note that this form is not required for the Project Belonging program. Students signed up for the Project Belonging Program through their school do NOT need to fill out this form. For more information about registering for the Program, go
here.
If you have any questions, contact us at belonging@tc.columbia.edu
We look forward to you or your child joining our training!
Regards,
The Project Belonging Team
