Rachel McCormack arrived in Europe last November to research international schools catering to English-speaking students, but her plans were overwhelmed by the magnitude of the continent’s refugee crisis. Now, she’s spearheading a campaign to deliver Arabic-language books to refugee shelters in the Netherlands.
McCormack, a professor of literacy education at Rhode Island’s Roger Williams University, says the crisis felt more real as she watched the European news. “All I was seeing were images of Syrian families walking across Europe, and wondering what’s going to happen to them,” she says. “I thought what I should really be looking at is educating myself more about what’s being done to assist them.”
She paired up with an historian of Syrian descent who’s based in Italy but was born in the Netherlands, and who is writing a book about Syria. Together they drove for 14 hours, visiting several shelters by the German-Dutch border and talking with many of the Syrian families living there.
[For more of this story, written by Tracy Brown Hamilton, go to http://www.theatlantic.com/edu...fugee-crisis/482757/]
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