The Center's outreach activities in the area of K-12 education strive to create dynamic and diverse professional development opportunities for Los Angeles-based school teachers.

CNES offers an annual two-week summer seminar for K-12 teachers as part of the national Teachers As Scholars program initiated by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. Past workshop themes have included “Islam in the Contemporary World” and “It’s a Matter of Taste: Food in World History and Culture.” The centers in the International Institute worked together to organize “It’s a Matter of Taste” to provide teachers with a foundation in broader, international topics in the morning and regional specific lessons in the afternoon. We are currently working on developing the K-12 outreach programs for 2009-2010.

Beginning in 2003, CNES took a leading role in developing Outreach World, an online portal to resources for teaching international and area studies in K-12 schools. The articles and lesson plans available through Outreach World were collected from nearly 200 university-based and federally-funded research centers nationwide. CNES was also a co-founder and is an active member of the Middle East Outreach Council, a national organization dedicated to increasing knowledge about the peoples, places and cultures of the Middle East in our nation's schools.