"Is it fair trade when you get designer prices for it?"

"New York education standards should require students to learn the relationship between their shirt and the global world."

"We need to connect fair trade with local poverty in Ithaca."

Such comments characterized the March 24 outreach workshop, "Fair Trade and Local Development Initiatives," for area K-12 teachers at the A.D. White House on the Cornell campus. The workshop was part of the Cornell-wide Professional Development Day (see sidebar below).

Among the approximately 22 educators gathered for the daylong workshop were teachers from the Lehman Alternative Community School, Ithaca High School, DeWitt Middle School, Fall Creek Elementary School and Homer Central School, and two representatives from Ten Thousand Villages, a national fair-trade retailer with a store on the Ithaca Commons.

Fair trade aims to pay low-income artisans and farmers in many parts of the world a "livable wage" -- enough to live on modestly -- in exchange for their goods.

The fair-trade movement is growing, focusing mostly on primary producers and farmers in developing countries. Since 2 billion people live on less than $2 a day (and one out of seven goes to bed hungry), there is plenty of opportunity for creating fair trade relationships, workshop speakers asserted.

Take coffee, one of the most heavily traded commodities in the world, said workshop speaker Liam Brody from Oxfam International. A quarter of a billion people rely on coffee for a living.

"We as consumers have amazing power and even more amazing responsibility," said Brody, who only drinks fair-traded coffee. "It's the little choices we make, every day."

On the surface, offering a better price for coffee and crafts is simple. But as it becomes more widespread and formalized through certification guidelines, fair trade can get complicated, the speakers noted.

"Can you give sustainable living to weavers when the prices are so high you can only give them two to three sales a year?" asked Charlotte Jirousek, a Cornell professor of textiles and apparel and a scholar of fair trade and Turkish rugs.

Turkish rug weavers tend to be women constricted by such traditional customs as turning over all wages to fathers and husbands and having their handiwork and proceeds stockpiled as dowries to attract higher-income husbands. These women may be better off working in Turkish factories that offer decent wages and benefits, and, indeed, many of them are choosing to do so, Jirousek said.

And then there's the ethical question, she added, of whether to even try to perpetuate arthritis-inducing, back-straining rug weaving in the name of cultural preservation of an art dating to the fifth century B.C.

Speakers also addressed how companies are climbing on the fair-trade bandwagon: A coffee producers' cooperative in Chiapas, Mexico, for example, recently was reported to have withdrawn from a deal with Starbucks after the coffee chain insisted on involving a controlling intermediary. Starbucks purchases a small percentage of its coffee through fair-trade networks.

"There are deep conversations in the fair trade movement about whether big corporations should be allowed to carry fair-trade labels," said Brody of Oxfam. "The systems of fair trade only grow when we wrestle with these issues."

The workshop was co-sponsored by Cornell's Latin American Studies Program, Institute for African Development and Institute for European Studies and funded in part by U.S. Department of Education National Resource Center grants.

Alice Horrigan is the outreach coordinator for Cornell's Institute for European Studies.

Some 1,400 central New York educators were on campus March 24 to attend 125 educational enhancement workshops at Cornell's second annual Professional Development Day, intended to help hone the skills of preK-12 teachers, counselors and administrators.

"Cornell cares about the education of our community's children," said Stephen Hamilton, Cornell's associate provost for outreach. "This is part of our mission as New York state's land-grant university."

Workshops during the daylong event were designed to improve educators' knowledge of their subject matter, provide engaging classroom materials and activities and give educators a deeper understanding of their students and how they learn. Workshops ranged from hands-on chemistry activities for elementary-age students and an introduction to nanotechnology to cognitive development and language learning in infants and toddlers and what it is like to be a minority student.

Last year, the inaugural Professional Development Day attracted 200 educators from secondary mathematics, science and technology. The enthusiasm of teachers and educators at the first event led to the huge increase in attendance at 2006's development day, organizers said.