Educational Outreach Activities

 LAU actively engages in a variety of educational outreach activities beyond its campus. These initiatives include: 

LAU Summer Camps 2023

Welcome to the School of Arts and Sciences Summer Camps 2023!

Camps this year will also be in person, and they are all themed around the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) of the United Nations (https://sdgs.un.org/goals). As usual, participants will have the chance to meet like-minded peers from other schools and will get a taste of university-level education with a special emphasis on the new LAU SDG-based Liberal Arts and Sciences Curriculum. 

At the end of each camp, students will present a project, and scholarships will be offered to the authors with the best projects.

The camps will run from July 3 to July 7. 

Selected applicants will be notified by June 24, 2023.

Chemistry Camp (Beirut Campus): Soil Health

The chemistry summer camp will tackle UN SDG2 (Zero Hunger), SDG13 (Climate Action) and SDG15 (Life on Land). A lack of effective soil health monitoring, gaps in available soil data, absence of soil guidelines and inadequate methods for measuring soil quality combined with uncontrolled industrial/agricultural wastewater and solid waste discharges in multiple regions of Mediterranean countries are leading to the progressive deterioration of soil quality through elevated organic, inorganic and complex contaminant environmental loading. Participants will get introduced to theoretical and applied chemical principles of soil chemistry, discover diverse experimental procedures and apply analytical instruments to measure water and soil parameters.

Contact person: Hanan Naccash - hnaccash@lau.edu.lb

Physics Camp (Beirut Campus)

This physics summer camp offers an opportunity to explore fascinating topics, including electromagnetism, Einstein’s theory of relativity and quantum physics. Additionally, the camp delves into various energy resources and technologies, such as fossil fuels, nuclear power, hydropower, geothermal energy, wind power and solar energy. The camp comprises interactive lectures, experiments and documentaries, allowing for an engaging and immersive learning experience. During the camp, you will conduct a residential energy audit and discover the best practices to reduce your carbon footprint. By participating in this camp, you will gain actionable knowledge and skills that enable you to engage in and demonstrate leadership and develop solutions to address some of the most pressing energy challenges. Join us this summer as we embark on an enriching learning journey and discover how you can make a difference in creating a sustainable future.

Contact person: Hanan Naccash - hnaccash@lau.edu.lb

Nutrition and Food Science Camp (Beirut Campus)

The Nutrition camp will introduce participants to the essentials of the nutrition and food science discipline, which you can pursue by applying to BS in Nutrition and Dietetics and BS in Nutrition and Dietetics Coordinated Program. The camp modules will focus on emerging issues in nutrition and food science facing today’s world. It will particularly shed light on SDG2 (Zero Hunger), SDG3 (Good Health and Well-being) and SDG12 (Responsible Consumption and Production).

Contact person: Hanan Naccash - hnaccash@lau.edu.lb

LAU Receives Major Grant from GCC-NIHR to Implement Emotional Intelligence Training for Young Lebanese Adolescents

The Grand Challenges Canada and the National Institute for Health Research fund a two-year intervention program, designed by LAU faculty, to be implemented in schools across the country.

Developing emotional intelligence is becoming more timely, especially for young Lebanese, given the ongoing socioeconomic and political crises that have deeply impacted their mental health.

Even before the pandemic, and in the wider global context, “research had shown that this generation is less happy than its predecessors, despite access to leisure, comfort and technology. The accumulating adversities have dramatically increased their psychological distress,” explained assistant professor of psychology Myriam El Khoury-Malhame.

Driven by their worrying findings and worldwide red flags on deteriorating youth mental health, LAU faculty from the School of Arts and Sciences and the Alice Ramez Chagoury School of Nursing designed a youth-led evidence-based intervention program that offers emotional intelligence training for Lebanese adolescents in public schools and addresses the lack of youth-friendly mental health services in the country.

Their efforts culminated in a CAD 248,553 (USD 185,000) grant from Grand Challenges Canada, funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR).

Leading the study at LAU are former Associate Professor of Psychology Maria-Jose Sanchez-Ruiz – the principal investigator of the project, who has recently joined the Universidad de Alcalá de Henares (UAH), Spain – Dr. Myriam El Khoury-Malhame, Associate Professor of Nursing Rita Doumit – a public health nurse and researcher with prior proficiency working with vulnerable adolescents – and Assistant Professor of English Sleiman El Hajj.

Dr. Sanchez-Ruiz’s work over more than a decade has shown that emotional intelligence is a key protective factor against psychopathology and a predictor of positive outcomes in Lebanese youth.

Titled Yes to Emotions in Youth (YEY), the program focuses on empowering young students to better understand, express, regulate and use their emotions; altogether increasing their emotional awareness as a first step to transforming their personal challenges into opportunities for growth.

This training will facilitate the development of the so-called soft skills needed to navigate current and forthcoming challenges such as compassion, positive communication, stress management and cognitive reframing. It teaches mindfully accepting upsetting situations and developing optimal coping strategies to adversities through evidence-based, youth-led training.

The YEY program includes 11 weekly sessions and targets high-school students in different regions in Lebanon, in close collaboration with the Lebanese Ministry of Education and Higher Education. The project has already been piloted and is currently implemented in three schools around Beirut and Keserwan areas. The hope is that YEY would become more sustainable by subsequently scaling it up and integrating it within the Lebanese school curriculum in the future.

A key feature of the YEY Program is having faculty experts prepare young graduate students to deliver the training in colloquial Arabic at the schools. “This dynamic of having Youth train Youth goes a long way in building a connection, speaking the same language, being relatable, and mostly establishing trust to help trainees open up to the trainers, much like the dynamic we see in organizations such as the scouts, for example,” noted Dr. Malhame. The graduate students – dubbed “Youth Leaders” – will be assisted by Youth Facilitators and will take on the implementation of the YEY Program inside the classrooms.  

To ensure the program is culturally adapted and age-specific, Dr. Doumit added that focus groups had helped them identify and integrate real-life scenarios of common challenges faced by youth in Lebanon. The program touches upon challenges that were raised by students during the pilot study related to bullying, conflict with parents, exam worries, physical emotional and verbal violence, body image, gender inequalities, academic engagement and goal setting.

YEY will make use of active learning approaches like role plays, class discussions, interactive games, etc. to better involve the students during the sessions and leave them with take-home sheets to reinforce learnings outside class time.

Having worked on similar youth-empowerment community programs in the past, Dr. Doumit affirmed YEY expected benefits. “Based on evidence-based studies and previous experiences, emotional intelligence training contributed to curbing anxiety, depression, and even suicide rates,” she said.

Dr. Malhame further expounded on the mixed methodology, where the program will evaluate both the physiological and psychological wellbeing of the high schoolers before and after the training to monitor its effectiveness, with a follow-up stage as well. Dr. Elma Nassar, an LAU faculty alumna and statistics specialist, will lead the quantitative analyses and models whereas Dr. El Hajj will oversee the qualitative data collected in the form of emotional diaries and weekly take-home sheets.

For Dr. Sanchez-Ruiz, “‘Yes to Emotions in Youth’ is a message for adolescents to get curious about their emotional world, rather than avoid it or identify with it, despite the heavy challenges. YEY is a space for sharing and building emotional self-efficacy and self-control to promote their wellbeing, which can have a positive ripple effect in their friends, families, and communities at large.”    

The team is working on designing a website and actively planning to manualize the YEY program in English and Arabic so it can be readily accessible to adolescents and easily implemented by teachers in schools to improve overall outcomes of this sensible age group across the country, providing a cost-efficient alternative to fostering community resilience.  

Gaining the Edge in the Global Labor Market

Alumnus Rand Ghayad, head of Economics & Global Labor Markets at LinkedIn, shed light on the future of jobs in a talk hosted by LAU’s Global Affairs Service Center.

The job market has changed dramatically post-COVID. Some industries are holding out on hiring, while others are struggling to find talent. Job requirements themselves have evolved with new work trends, technology and upskilling. Navigating a labor market in flux at the best of times is challenging, even more so when a recession looms.

To shed light on the State of the Global Labor Market and the Future of Jobs, LAU’s Global Affairs Service Center held a talk by Head of Economics & Global Labor Markets at LinkedIn and Adjunct Professor at Harvard University Rand Ghayad (BS ’06) who provided insights collated by LinkedIn. The event on August 2 on the Byblos campus was hosted by the center’s Lead Director Suleiman Barada.  

Before joining LinkedIn, Dr. Ghayad worked at the International Monetary Fund, advising governments and sovereign states on macroeconomic and labor market reforms, and served in various capacities at the Federal Reserve Bank, International Labor Organization, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 2014, Dr. Ghayad received LAU’s Alumni Achievement Award. 

US unemployment and the labor force became his focal interest after he struggled to find a job as an MBA graduate from Boston University in 2007 during a recession. He decided to upskill – advice he could not overstate in his presentation – with a PhD in Applied Economics from Northeastern University, where he wrote his dissertation on Long-term Unemployment in the Great Recession. 

Are we heading toward a global recession?

As you might expect, the answer is yes. GDP growth will slow down globally. However, the recession will be mild and short with better expectations of recovery than that experienced during the COVID-19 era. The US economy will be the first to be impacted, followed by countries that peg their currency to the US dollar. 

Dr. Ghayad qualified it as a “rolling recession,” which does not hit the job market unilaterally but affects one industry or sector at a time. In the MENA region, for instance, the recession rolled from technology to housing.

As employment will be tight, employers and job seekers will need to revise their strategies. Some cracks are beginning to appear in the labor market, with one job opening for every 37 people on average in the MENA region compared to four to five job openings for the same number of job seekers in 2021.

Following an uptick in hiring in 2021 during the pandemic, there has been a dip globally across all industries. Employers are holding back on jobs until the economic situation crystallizes. The hiring rate in Lebanon, for example, is down by 19 percent year-to-year.

Which industries should one target for employment?

While many industries are still struggling, others are more resilient, said Dr. Ghayad. Recovery from their post-pandemic to their pre-pandemic situation has varied for industries, with job marketing conditions slackening for some and tightening for others. Technology, for instance, has witnessed the largest hiring slowdown, whereas government hiring remains strong.

Jobs that are on the rise for new graduates with a bachelor’s are product management and consulting roles, followed by purchasing, human resources and business development. Industries that are attracting the greater number of new graduates are professional services –which includes software engineers, accountants and legal assistants – healthcare, manufacturing, financial services and technology, information and media in that order.

How can one gain or retain a competitive edge in a changing global market?

“Skills are the currency of the future,” noted Dr. Ghayad. According to LinkedIn data, he stated, members’ skillsets globally have changed by 25 percent since 2015, a number that will likely double by 2027. Even if one remains in the same job, the requirements for that job are changing, which makes upskilling essential for job security and remaining competitive.

Learning new skills will become more essential not only for job seekers but also employers, and industries struggling to find talent would do well to adopt a skills-first approach to hiring, where ability supersedes job history or qualifications. On average, added Dr. Ghayad, a job seeker should acquire three new skills between now and 2025.

To make a degree more valuable, universities should recalibrate their curricula to incorporate foundational or soft skills that graduates will need in the future job market.  In that regard, experiential learning is essential in equipping students with skills that are applicable from day one on the job.

Young Scholars Demonstrate that the Robot is their Friend at the World Robot Olympiad

On August 6 and 7, students from schools across Lebanon immersed themselves in the fascinating world of robotics at the World Robot Olympiad national competition (WRO-Lebanon 2022), My Robot My Friend, co-organized by the WRO-Lebanon Section and LAU.

Guided by student volunteers and judged by faculty from the School of Engineering, the young scholars competed in three categories of different age groups for the chance to represent Lebanon in the International WRO competition to be held in Germany this fall.

LAU’s active participation in WRO-Lebanon 2022, the first robotics competition of its kind to be reinitiated since the onset of the economic crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, proves once again its pioneering role in the development of education in the country.

After a long competitive day, the closing ceremony was held at the Municipality of Byblos, under the patronage and in the presence of the Director-General of the Ministry of Education and Higher Education Imad Al Achkar, the Secretary-General of Catholic Schools Father Youssef Nasr, President of the municipality Wissam Zaarour, Dean of the School of Engineering Lina Karam, WRO Official Representative in Lebanon Jenny Chemaly, Founder and President of Growth Holdings LLC Philip Ziadeh, founder and CEO of the Advanced Computer Technology Center Rabih Baalbaki and supporters of the education and engineering sector.

Welcoming the young students, “Lebanon’s hope and future,” Dr. Karam described robotics as a combination of “several fields, including electrical and mechanical engineering, computer engineering, computer science, artificial intelligence with aspects from psychology, ethics, public policy, and design; it enables various applications from assistive technologies and medicine to transportation, manufacturing, construction, and space exploration.” Robotics, she added, is about dexterity, precision, and improving the quality of life.

Chemali attributed the success of WRO-Lebanon 2022 “to the students who worked hard with their teachers, and to the supporting institutions and people who trusted us.”

As it presents an opportunity for them to develop their creative skills and problem-solving skills in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, she said, “this type of competition helps them to hone their learning skills, thought process, sense of commitment, leadership and teamwork skills, and eventually to choose their career path.”

Chemali expressed her gratitude to all those who contributed to this achievement, from Director-General Al Achkar, the Municipality of Byblos, LAU, LIV, IPT, Dr. Noel Maalouf, Rasha Ghabash, Rabih Baalbaki, Mr. Chadi Al Maasarani, Caritas Youth, and all the volunteers and media.

Prizes were then distributed to the winners of each category, marking the end of this year’s competition. The Jamil Rawas Public School for Boys and Champville came first in the Future Innovators Junior (15-13) and Senior (19-16) categories, respectively, with Champville also taking the top prize in Future Engineers. Edutech claimed first place in the Elementary (12-8) and Junior RoboMission categories while Saint Joseph School came first in the Senior category.

MDLAB 2022: Empowering Women and the Youth with Media Literacy

LAU hosts international experts and students for a week-long summer academy on digital media literacy.

For its eighth edition of the Media Digital Literacy Academy of Beirut (MDLAB), LAU’s Institute of Media Research and Training (IMRT) at the School of Arts and Sciences reunited faculty, students, and activists in a week-long session on empowering women and youth through media literacy pedagogies and multimedia skills.

Funded by the Public Affairs Section at the US Embassy in Beirut and the German Academic Exchange Services (DAAD), MDLAB 2022 hosted 75 participants from Egypt, Palestine, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, and Germany to address the representation of women, youth and other marginalized groups in the coverage of protests and civic activism campaigns, and to advance the digital multimedia skills and knowledge of activists, journalists and media educators.

MDLAB has for years been dedicated to expanding media and digital literacy in the region through a number of workshops and trainings, providing the needed curricular material and resources, and empowering faculty, students, journalists, and activists to transfer what they learned to their communities.

Since its launch, MDLAB has succeeded in introducing media and digital literacy to 60 universities and schools in 12 Arab countries by acting as an incubator of innovative ideas and a hub for a network of regional universities and media educators.

In addition to promoting civic engagement and youth-centered discussions, the academy aims to bring together students and scholars from all over the Arab world and Europe for academic and cultural exchange.

“MDLAB is a bigger example of the social change mission at LAU to pull resources together and empower students through education,” says MDLAB Co-director and LAU Assistant Professor of Multimedia Journalism Gretchen King. “The program tries to shine a light on the media and gives people tools to use the media themselves and center other voices which have otherwise been silenced or misrepresented.”

The lectures were given by LAU faculty along with guest speakers and experts from the United States, Canada, Egypt, Iraq, Germany and Denmark. Daily workshops were organized in collaboration with the Issam Fares Institute of Public Policy and International Affairs, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, The Arab Council for Social Sciences, Switch Perspective, NO2TA feminist lab, Iraq Network for Social Media, Digital Lab and Egab media platform, among others.

“We are fortunate to be able to bring together such a vibrant group of scholars, journalists, and activists to discuss pressing current issues of women, youth and media and develop locally rooted media literacy curricula,” says MDLAB Director and LAU Associate Professor of Multimedia Journalism and Media Studies Jad Melki.   

In the age of mass information, media literacy forms the core of media activism and education. “It literally saves lives,” says project manager of the Algerian Media Literacy Camp and MDLAB participant, Meriem Saoud. “With this great access to information, comes a bulk of misinformation that you cannot filter out without the needed critical skills.”

Media literacy is also central to differentiating real from fake news nowadays, notes MDLAB participant from Baghdad, Taha Yassine. “There are many factors affecting media representation such as sponsorships, funding, and the political economy that inherently prejudice the news and necessitate greater awareness to be able to accurately digest it,” he says.

In these times of crises in Lebanon and elsewhere, “it is essential to consider the role of the media not only from an academic perspective but also from the perspective of young journalists and media specialists who constitute the main focus of MDLAB curricula,” says Dr. Denijal Jegic, researcher in Multimedia Journalism and Communication at LAU. 

	“MDLAB is a bigger example of the social change mission at LAU to pull resources together and empower students through education,” says Dr. King.
	The academy aims to bring together students and scholars from all over the Arab world and Europe for academic and cultural exchange.
	In the age of mass information, media literacy forms the core of media activism and education.
	MDLAB 2022 reunited faculty, students, and activists in a week-long session on empowering women and youth through media literacy pedagogies and multimedia skills.

LAU and Boise State University Collaborate on Virtual Exchange Program

Lebanese and US students collaborate on innovative solutions, overcoming communication challenges.

Students from LAU and Boise State University (BSU) embarked on a virtual exchange program funded by the US Embassy in Lebanon, turning difficulties into co-created, innovative solutions.

Through Flipgrid, an educational video app, 71 students worked on three projects aimed to engender cross-cultural dialog. The first of these projects was an ice-breaker activity whereby the students designed a new product/service for a grocery store. In the second, the students had to develop solutions to a problem that they imagined their cross-cultural counterparts were experiencing and then refined those innovative solutions by carefully listening to their counterparts’ comments.

In yet another project they had to work collaboratively to identify the strategic differentiators for a company addressing one of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals.

“When the students suddenly understood that a nine-hour difference translates into a 24-hour communication cycle, I got a lot of push-back,” said Dr. Jordan Srour, associate professor of operations management at the Adnan Kassar School of Business, who worked on designing the course. “One student even asked: whose crazy idea was this?”

One interesting solution, explained Dr. Srour, was a set of fire poles with embedded sensor technology and sprinklers that simultaneously alerted to and mitigated the spread of wildfires. “This project stuck in my mind as wildfires became a point around which the team members could really understand each other,” she said.

Another project that stood out was one developed in an individual assignment, allowing BSU students to safely return to in-person learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. LAU students developed an app – using BSU logos – that allows students to select a location on campus and then identify the route that takes them through the least crowded and most recently cleaned areas to ensure their safety.

“I was totally shocked,” said Dr. Srour, “as LAU students independently worked on a problem inspired by their conversations with BSU students. With the many problems happening in Lebanon, these students chose to focus their efforts on a problem related to their BSU counterparts.”

The experience has taught the students what no textbook can: how to listen.

“Of course, the technology has facilitated the communication, but the class’s major strength was the fundamentals of what it is to be a human with a problem that needs solving,” explained Dr. Srour. 

“Apart from the nine hours’ time difference and some power cuts faced along the way, I found the program really engaging,” said senior student in information technology management Abdelrahman Ghalayini, “as it gave me a better idea of what it means to work with different cultures and time zones.”

But what he appreciated the most, he noted, was the chance to work with a university abroad and interact with students from different backgrounds. “This helped me expand my knowledge and come up with new ideas that led to completing the project.”

The course also helped improve the students’ critical skills.

“We had to come up with creative, data-driven, and interesting ideas throughout the semester, especially in the collaborative projects with BSU students,” said second-year student Mariam Tahsaldar, who is minoring in data analytics.

“I was happy that they learned more about Lebanon since they did not even know that we spoke English in the first place,” she added.  “I also got to learn more about their country and vice versa.”

Moving beyond intellectual capital and pedagogical innovation, the project embraces the ideal of a university without borders.

“The collaboration with Boise aligns with all three pillars of LAU’s strategic plan,” said Dr. Srour. “I love the fact that we partnered with BSU and not a school in a well-known location like New York or California. It is so important for our students to learn that ‘global’ is an all-encompassing word – not just reserved for the world’s major cities.”

Projecting beyond that, she hopes to see LAU engage even more in virtual exchange experiences across the curriculum.

“One potential future for this modality would be in terms of language learning,” she said. “How wonderful would it be for LAU students to support BSU students in learning Arabic virtually?”

Associate Professor and Chairperson of the Information Technology and Operations Management Department Manal Yunis underlined the vital importance of such programs.

“Nowadays, internationalization is key to success,” said Dr. Yunis. “To be and to stay competitive, universities seeking high ranking levels set a variety of plans, one of which is investing in cross-cultural partnerships with other higher education institutions for research and teaching purposes.”

At the teaching level, she added, developing collaborative activities with international higher education institutions can yield transformative results with high impact. “Besides enhancing students’ engagement levels, such partnerships can help students build global perspectives in life and professional decisions, and can also prepare them for careers in a global and diversified economy.”

Furthermore, she noted, course partnerships foster a positive attitude toward the other culture and its people, which can with time help students eliminate wrong preconceptions, develop flexibility and cultural intelligence skills.

LAU students Abdelrahman Ghalayini and Elie Abou Issa, along with three students from BSU received the top award at BSU’s College School of Business and Economics Challenge (COBE) Innovation Challenge for their idea to convert waste energy from roadways to electricity using vertical turbines.

Other SDG-targeted projects on which LAU students collaborated with their BSU counterparts took the international prizes and were selected as the Dean’s Choice as well as the Judges’ Recognition Award.

Write to Remember Project Commemorates August 4 Explosion

LAU faculty launch creative writing initiative to help students impacted by the blast and document oral history.

The aftershocks of the massive August 4 explosion at the Port of Beirut were of such magnitude that they could not be swept under the rubble. Fear, disbelief and grief are only a few of the tangled emotions that will continue to fester if suppressed.

And what better way to release them than through self-expression? Believers in the cathartic power of words, faculty at LAU’s School of Arts and Sciences (SoAS) took the initiative to help the youth come to terms with the after-effects of the blast through a web-memoir where they could voice and preserve their memories.

The Write to Remember project was launched on the first anniversary of the blast, after Senior Instructor of English Paula Habre and Instructor of English Hala Daouk secured a $10,000 grant from the US Embassy, based on a proposal submitted with Haigazian University colleagues – former LAU faculty and Writing Center tutors – Anita Moutchoyan and Serine Jaafar. 

The outreach project targets youth who had been directly or indirectly affected by the blast with the grant specifying an age range between 16-22.

“We felt this would be a good coverage of high school/secondary level and university students who can write about their trauma,” Habre said. “The project creates a safe platform and a safe space for them to share their feelings and deal with it collectively.”

The one-year initiative serves as an archive of stories, reflections, photos, and oral history related to the explosion and its aftermath through six virtual workshops.

The most recent workshop in November was presented by LAU Assistant Professor of Creative and Journalistic Writing Sleiman El Hajj, who had written about the blast in his widely-cited collective memoir “Writing (from) the Rubble: Reflections on the August 4, 2020 Explosion in Beirut, Lebanon.”

Dr. El Hajj focused on having participants in the workshop explore the use of sensory perceptions to navigate through and reimagine/(re)write trauma.

“Food and trauma have become interrelated for many survivors of August 4 since the sights, smells, sounds, texture, even taste of food, and food in preparation, are ones that now trigger PTSD recollections of the calamity,” Dr. El Hajj explained about the use of sensory details as an embodiment of trauma. “They are therefore no longer the comforting or pleasurable activities they once were.”

“If a concrete object can so easily, and so painfully swiftly, become an embodiment of trauma,” he added, “then thinking of ways of revoking – or at least helping to process – this reality is essential, especially in climates of perpetual tension, such as Lebanon.”

The participants shared short pieces they wrote during the workshop and gave each other support and feedback.

“I was impressed by their eagerness to share their lived narratives, however painful, and also by their alacrity in embracing the reimagined narrative approach, which I suggested as a way of reclaiming a semblance of agency over an otherwise slippery slope into inchoate trauma,” said Dr. El Hajj.

“By concentrating their experiences and/or perceptions of trauma into concrete objects, they managed, in part, to rethink and make sense of at least one aspect of all that we lost on that day,” he added.

The first workshop was led by the Regional English Language Officer at the US Embassy Eran Williams, and the second was presented by Zeina Daccache, the founder of Catharsis. Three open mic sessions will be held in venues that were damaged by the blast to allow the participants to share their pieces with a wider audience.

“We have officially completed half the workshops for this project and have three to go,” Habre said. “We look forward to the upcoming open mic event on December 11, which the participants are very excited to attend.”

“The team plans to recruit more local and foreign specialists for future workshops to help the youth come to terms with their trauma through writing,” she added.  

Browse the Write to Remember website to learn about upcoming workshops and open mics, participants, oral narratives, and more.

	Participants in the workshop explored the use of sensory perceptions to navigate through and reimagine/(re)write trauma.
	The workshop run by Dr. Sleiman El Hajj focused on sensory detail.