IB diploma candidates at Big Sky High School recently hosted the school’s annual International Week at the end of February.
This week-long, student-led event has been going on for more than 15 years and originally started out as diversity week, according to Amy Miller, a CAS coordinator for the IB diploma candidates and Big Sky English teacher.
CAS stands for Creativity, Activity, and Service, which all IB diploma candidates are required to actively engage with over the course of a year and a half, Miller said.
The goal of International Week is to provide opportunities that expose kids to other cultures. This year, there were hands-on workshops where students made kimchi and tamales, and also had a taekwondo workshop and a dancing workshop. “Just a few ways to experience culture other than the one we live in,” Miller said.
Another one of the highlights of the week are the films shown all day that teachers can bring their classes to the auditorium to see. These films are primarily provided through the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, an annual event that takes place during the same week as International Week at Big Sky.
Some of the directors of the films are able to come to Big Sky and talk to the students about the film. Contacting and scheduling directors to come to Big Sky is a part of the involved IB diploma candidates jobs.
Students are also involved in choosing films that they think are interesting from a pool of options that have been decided school appropriate by the screening committee with the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival.
Miller mentioned that an art teacher, Casey Matter, also works for the Big Sky Film Festival as a Film Liaison, so having a teacher directly connected made the process smoother.
“The scheduling of it all is probably the most intense part, other than fundraising,” Miller said. The fundraised money mainly comes from various sponsors and donations from the community. The money goes toward things like gifts, thank you cards and other supplies,
Emma Manning is a junior at Big Sky who is an IB diploma candidate that had International Week be her CAS project. “I worked on “thank you” cards, that was usually my thing.”
When asked about the benefit of International Week, Manning said,“I definitely say every year I learn a lot, and it’s always really interesting to me to see the things that I don’t see on the news and to see things that I’m not really aware of.”
