About Global Voices

How Global Voices Works

Students in language classes in the U.S. are linked with their counterparts overseas.  Using internet technology and artists-in-residence, they write one-act plays in the language they are studying.  A Mandarin class in the US might be partnered with an English class in Beijing; an English class in Casablanca with an Arabic class in Chicago; a class in Cambridge MA with a drama class in Tanzania, and so on.

The students meet each other during the course of the semester via Zoom and other social media. At the end of the semester they perform their plays for each other and discuss the topics – and their lives. (Elementary students use music and lyrics to make connections.)

Topics focus on areas relevant to their lives. Recent topics have included bullying, family and school issues, substance abuse, morals, immigration, equality, politics, treatment of women, and more. 

“Global Voices is about bridging the world of young people, who all want the same things in life. It’s about making the world a smaller, not larger, place. It’s about hope for the future.”

Lorin Pritikin, French Teacher, Francis W. Parker School, Chicago

Our Beginnings

Global Voices was created by Arlene Crewdson in Chicago in 2002 with support from the U.S. Department of State (for innovative educational programming) and a grant from the Chicago Public Schools. It was an outgrowth of Pegasus Players, an innovative not-for-profit theatre founded by Arlene in 1979. Pegasus was particularly known for its outreach to young people through its Young Playwrights Competition, and for providing the highest quality theatre and arts education at no cost to people who would otherwise have little or no access to it.

“I saw first-hand the impact of the arts on young people’s attitudes and understanding of people unlike themselves – and I wanted to extend that power beyond Chicago,” she says. “Young people today are coming of age in a global community where geographic boundaries have been made insignificant by technology. I knew that learning to speak with their neighbors in their own language and about common issues was critical to fostering understanding across borders and cultures.”

“The best way to bridge our differences is people-to-people. That’s the beauty of Global Voices: using the arts to connect young people throughout the world – not in a political way or through policy decisions, but through simple human contact.‘

Bob Keith U.S. State Department