On October 7, our first-grade students held “The 1st Global Discussion 2015” with 7 international students studying at Kanazawa University.
This activity intends to brush up on students’ cross-cultural communication skills in English before participating in “Overseas school excursion to Taiwan” as part of their cross-cultural experience learning.
The main topic of discussion was “National flags”.
Invited participants consisted of 4 students from Indonesia, 2 from Argentina and 1 from Russia.
Now our students are planning to have further discussions once every three weeks.

On July 27 and 28, our first-grade students went on a two-day excursion to Noto Peninsula as part of an ongoing “regional studies” project.
Students joined several activities in order to have contact with the local people and natural environment of Noto Peninsula, and they also had an opportunity to listen deeply to the people working there for local revitalization.
Through these experiences our students had in Noto, each group of students is expected to advance their studies so that they can make more practical proposals to solve the problems.
Each and every group chose one option from each category of the following timetable; so all students enjoyed three different kinds of activities during their excursion.

27 July (AM)
・Morihachi (Traditional Japanese-style confectionery)
・PFU(Frontier industry)
・Ishikawa Agricultural Research Center

27 July（PM）
・Sugiyo, Co.,Ltd.(Seafood processing)
・Amaike textile industry Co.,Ltd. (Textile)
・Ishikawa-Sanken Co., Ltd.(Semiconductor)

28 July
・Tofu (bean curds) making workshop
・Natural dyeing workshop
・Salt extracting workshop

All companies and institutions students visited on the first day are successfully promoting innovative products and hence expanding global presence while they are acting locally. Based on a series of visits to these innovative companies, each group of students made poster presentations on the afternoon of July 28. By this means, students shared information and important findings from the visits, which would be good clues to make further progress of their “regional studies” project.

On July 15, our students had a great opportunity to interact with twenty-six students from PII program, in order to discuss the global food issues directly with them.
PII (Princeton in Ishikawa) is the exchange program that provides experiences of residing in Ishikawa prefecture for 2 months, which is offered to the students who major in the language and culture of Japan at Princeton University or other Ivy-league schools in the United States.
As our second-grade students have been working for a quasi international conference on global food security, as part of an ongoing “global proposal” project, this exchange program with PII had conducted within the same context of the project.
Contents of the discussion are listed in the following table.

Agenda Ways and Means
Dietary culture of the world (14 countries) Quiz (mainly in Japanese)
Dietary culture of Japan and Kanazawa Discussion (mainly in Japanese)
Global food issues
(Ex. Genetically-modified food products) Discussion (mainly in English)

Through their interactive discussions, our students had fully gained appreciation and understanding of the issues from a global perspective.

Presentation of “proposals on BENTO (a boxed lunch) for a hypothetical international conference”

Our second grade students worked on “Global proposals”. They hold an introductory discussion about “proposals on BENTO (a boxed lunch) for a hypothetical international conference”. They worked in each team of five students. Their proposals were aimed at making all of five leaders feel satisfied with four dishes packed in the lunchbox served at a hypothetical summit meeting by the leaders from five major countries.
On May 21 and on 23, our students hold the presentation of their proposals. Each team made well-considered proposals on the basis of various circumstances of each country, such as its climate, culture, religion, and history. The BENTO evaluated as the most creative proposal of each class will be actually made in their home economics classes. Students will start preparing for “a hypothetical international conference” to discuss “food security”.

The illustration of BENTO (a boxed lunch) for a hypothetical international conference, proposed by our students