Last Tuesday, renowned Seattle Times journalist Nina Shapiro and videographer Corinne Chin visited Hyla to discuss their piece, titled “Life After Deportation.” Over the course of the morning, each grade had the opportunity to sit with Nina and Corinne and discuss the issues surrounding deportation and immigration, as well as hear what it means to be a good journalist.

This collaboration was brought to Hyla through a partnership with the Pulitzer Center, which Jeff had established last year. The organization launched a new program this year called Bringing Stories Home as an effort to shed more light on under-reported local stories in U.S. cities with populations below a certain limit . Ms. Shapiro and Ms. Chin are both grantees of the program, and were put in touch with Jeff through the mutual connection with the Pulitzer Center.

The workshop itself was a perfect connection not only to the Global Health unit Jeff is teaching, but to Kim’s Global Education class and Emelio’s unit on advocacy journalism. The students learned about the importance of compassionate, active listening and how to ask good, open-ended questions. The questions that they themselves asked the journalists were incredibly mature, politely incredulous, and full of a genuine compassion and desire to know more.

Both Jeff and Kim emphasized the importance of an experience like this, explaining that being this close to a story made it much more real for the students. Jeff said, “It gave them a lot of care for the issue and for the skills that go along with that. It mattered to them in that moment to understand what deportation was and why interviewing matters to understand the complexity of [these] issues. It opens up this next level of inquiry.”

These overarching skills and themes will carry through into this year’s Social Justice Mini-Term. As Kim put it, “It goes to show that when you’re talking about social justice, you’re really spanning all of the rights that a human being could have.”