The Craft of Oral History: Learning along the way in Liberia.
WT2010 Dates: January 3-17th
EDPS488L/ EDPS711L (3 Credits)
Overview of the Liberia Program
This course focuses on the evolution and experience of global learning as it has shaped relations between the peoples of Liberia and the United States over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will explore images of Liberian society in two ways. First, we will study the perspectives that have been embedded in the work of influential image makers such as historians, policy-makers, missionaries, textbook writers, and local community leaders in both localities and on the internet. Second, we will study Liberia experientially through observations and conversations with an array of education and cultural actors in Liberia. We will use oral historical methods to enrich face-to-face engagements in a diverse variety of education environments and institutions e.g. in churches and schools; villages and cities; teacher training institutions and informal spaces of learning. There will be opportunities for deep conversations and idea sharing with students and teachers, policy makers and planners, ministers and community leaders, university presidents and college students. Taken together, participants on both sides of the ocean will have gained a foundation of knowledge and experience that can reveal the power, influence, and transformative possibilities of global learning in the 21st century. What is more, they will join the ranks of global learners and rising leaders who have had opportunities to glimpse and reflect on the intersection of the past and the future in Liberian/U.S. connections.
Faculty & Staff
Professor Barbara Finkelstein, is an award-winning teacher, mentor and historian of education. Her research examines historical and cultural dimensions of education policies and practices as they have impinged on the lives of children, youth, minority groups, and women, and shaped the quality of education opportunities available to them. Professor Finkelstein's work integrates the experiences of childhood and youth into the history of education in the United States, documents the evolution of teacher behavior in popular primary schools, explores civic purpose in education, and analyzes the involvement of government in child-rearing. She has also done extensive oral historical field work centered on minority group experience with literacy and school reform in both Japan and the United States, and has, through her work as Founding Director of the International Center for Transcultural Education, organized, participated, and engaged students in interdisciplinary research collaborations centering on the recovery of previously invisible historical voices, on reconstitution policies in the United States, immigrant education policies in Japan and the U.S., and cultural stereotyping in the Middle East, Japan, and the United States.Dr. P Bai Akridge, currently serves as Visiting Research Scholar in the International Center for Transcultural Education (ICTE) in the COE. In the ICTE he also serves as director of the Global Diversity Leadership Institute, which oversees the Prince George’s County-funded International Ambassadors Study Abroad Scholarship Program on the UM campus; this program provides financial support to study abroad for graduates of Prince George’s County Public High Schools with demonstrated need. Bai is particularly interested in international education and development and is engaged in building a relationship between the COE and higher education institutions in Liberia, West Africa. The State of Maryland has a Sister State relationship with Liberia and Bai serves on the programÆs Executive Committee and as Co-Chair of its Education Sub-Committee.
Please contact the Liberia program advisor Ms. Lisa Swayhoover regarding program and course information. Lisa Swayhoover is a doctoral student in the International Education Policy program in the College of Education. For the past two years she has been an active participant in the College of Education’s International Advisory Committee (IAC). Most recently she has been the graduate assistant for the Office of International Initiatives in the College of Education.