I Guess I'm a Maverick Now?

I spent the week of July 18 shirking my work. Why? Because Agastya was hosting an international teachers' summit, and I was asked to be a participant!

The event: Maverick Teachers Global Summit. The people: 30 or so incredible teachers from around the world, and several educational "thought leaders," with a special emphasis on inviting Indian educators. The goal: to develop curricula and teaching tools to help educate about and solve specially selected global challenges, inspired by the UN's Sustainable Development Goals.

7 teams of educators working for one week on specially chosen problems, trying to build empathy with global students, designing educational materials and prototyping/piloting them with children at Agastya's campus. In other words?

The Oliner's Natural Environment. (Or, at the very least, mine!)

I was lucky enough to be on the Gender Equality team. We were the largest team by far (10 people!), but we also had one of the largest problems that the summit had selected: how can we design a curriculum that promotes gender equality throughout society? I was happy to be on such a stellar global team: we had three people from the U.S. (including myself), two from Finland, one from Chile, and four from right here in India (four women and six men, if you're wondering). The great part about having such a big team was a diversity of opinion and thought, which was a strength that we tried to leverage to make a gender equality learning plan that would be relevant to children everywhere (that is, something that would be culturally adaptable).

Go Gender, Go Gender, Go Gender, Equality! (PC Prianka)

Our team, truly global (again, PC Prianka)!

Immediately, we were struck at the vast differences in experience of gender inequality. The defining characteristics of what it looks like in different countries is hugely variable, from the U.S, where the popular gender inequality discussions of the day are centered around Lean In, STEM education (2nd link), Hillary Clinton, and #yesallwomen, to India, where sexual violence is (Trigger Warning on this link) being described as an epidemic, but women seem to be doing better in STEM careers (happy link, click away).

So where, then, do we begin? What is the unifying factor in these experiences? I found my own answer to this from a local thirteen-year-old boy I spoke with, who said he had never spoken with anybody about gender inequality. Once we had established that he did understand what gender inequality was, I asked him what he thought the source was. And he pretty quickly responded: "The gents have all the power. The ladies have no power." He also gave me a more-local reason: "The parents respect their sons more than they respect their daughters."

Wow. So the kids get it. They know that they live in a world deeply affected by gender inequality, and they know why. So our team decided to create a lesson in which students can bring their own experiences and viewpoints to the table, speak critically about gender for what may well be the first time, and be introduced to the concept of gender-based violence.

Most of the materials that we made will be posted online soon (hopefully!), so I won't go into details here, but I think we laid some groundwork for what will hopefully be a culturally adaptable curriculum, for all ages, that is as relevant to students in Europe as those in South Asia, and everywhere in-between. I believe that we took a major step toward this goal when I heard the students we worked with commit to change for the better. We had them write a small "promise to act" on a piece of paper, something that they could do to try to make the world a little more equal in regards to gender. I leave you with what one student wrote.

"We should treat all the children as our brothers and sisters.
We should have a good attitude to one another.
We should not do wrong things to one another.
We should never degrade another person."

The conference was fun, the team was great, the curriculum we designed was interesting. But I hope that the change we affect is better.

The above quote as originally written, in Kannada. (seriously, the last one, PC Prianka!)

Bio Discovery at Agastya (and my first few weeks in India)

Hey y'all! I'm Mitch, and I'm an Electrical and Computer Engineering student at Olin. I'm spending the summer at the Agastya International Foundation, near Gudivanka, Andhra Pradesh, India. It's an educational NGO, and is really focused on hands-on and investigative-based learning. This post is mostly an introduction to myself and the work I'm doing, so it'll be a bit long I think.

The campus itself is a huge (172 acres) ecology park in a rural area, where the buildings and curricula are integrated with nature. It's also quite modern, focused on teaching math, science, and engineering to local students to augment their normal education. The whole feeling of the place is one of dualisms, especially between the energy of the hundreds of kids that come every day and the calming natural environment that surrounds and permeates it. I heard one of my professors describe the campus as "pastoral;" that's an apt description, but it seems to leave out some indescribable quality of the air, the kids, the teachers, and the weather. I'd add to it, "invigorating."

I work in the Bio Discovery program here. I say "in," but I really mean "with" or "for." You see, unlike many programs here, the Bio Discovery program has no buildings yet. It's a new program, and they hope to have their first building complete within the next year, ending with (I think) ten buildings to teach kids biology in an engaging, memorable, and high-quality way. The whole center is to have five components: Let's Investigate, The Sensorium, Learning Gardens, Mechanics of Movement, and Genetics. I'm here as a prototyping intern, so my work is mostly centered around building physical models and interactive demonstrations in each of these components.

So far, I've been engaged in 3 projects. The first of these is with another intern here, Katie, and has most utilized my electrical engineering skills. It's to make an interactive demonstration that shows how somatic reflex arcs work. The general idea of the demonstration is that an instructor will press a button on a model of an arm or leg, and lights will engage in sequence to represent neurons firing, up the limb, to the spinal cord, and back to the limb. Finally, the limb will jerk in some way, demonstrating that the muscle responded to the stimulus. I've been focused on what circuitry we need to make such a demonstration simple, effective, and durable.

The second is a special goggles that children will wear to invert their vision. This is a part of the Sensorium, and the goggles themselves will be a fun way for students to better understand the relationships between our senses and our brains' processing of those senses (relevant link). The design of the goggles is really "just enough" to hold special prisms in front of the children's eyes, so I don't anticipate this particular project taking very much time.

The third project is the big one that will take most of my summer: designing and building Mechanics of Motion models. The idea is that students will be able to physically interact with some sort of demonstration or exhibit (think science museum), and see how particular motions in the body occur. To begin, I'm working on a lever-pulling demonstration, where students will see the muscles and joints involved in pulling a lever (encompassing radial abduction of the wrist, flexion of the forearm, and extension of the arm), and in pushing that lever (the opposite motions: ulnar abduction, forearm extension, arm flexion). The general idea of the demonstration is that it will be mostly passive (i.e. not electrical), a mechanical system, and that it will show bones and muscles working together. I haven't quite worked out all the details, but it should be an exciting exhibit when I'm done! After this particular motion is finished, I plan to work on a few more motion demonstrations to varying degrees of completeness. I hope I can finish at least one or two before I leave!

India itself has taken some getting used to, but I'm adapting quickly. I certainly echo much of what Aaron said in a previous post about the experience of being the only white person around (save some of my fellow interns). I'm enjoying the pace of life here at Agastya, and their unique outlook on education. I'm hoping to learn as much as I can before I return to Olin.

Vidkolu,
Mitch

I Did Not Come to Africa to Help the Children

“I just really wanted to come to Africa help the children”, I hear the white girl across from me say. She pushes her straight blonde hair back over her left ear and lays her RayBan sunglasses on the plastic table. She sits in a blue plastic chair with “Pepsi” written on the back, under a tent that leans such that it looks as if it could topple at any moment. On the wall across her is a bare cement building with “Chakula House” in colorful paint on the wall and written again on the Pepsi-branded sign. On both sides of the long table sit Tanzanian men and women, eating wali, ugali and mshikaki. “Chips”, she says to the young woman with an apron who walks up next to her. “Chips, you understand?” she repeats. The woman nods her head.

From my quick interaction I am already forming her backstory. She comes from California, just out of college. She has always wanted to go to Africa, doesn’t really matter where, since last year when her friend went. On the weekdays she goes to orphanages and hospitals where she plays with the kids and unsuccessfully tries to teach them english. On the weekends she goes on safari, lounges by the pool, and goes to all the clubs. Her Instagram is a mix between her with the little children with captions about how happy they are even though their situation is so tragic, and selfies with elephants. Her profile picture is her in the middle a group of African (she doesn’t specify the country) kids. She is White Savior Barbie. She is everything I complain about to my other mzungu friends.

View up the road

But am I all that different? I am in Tanzania for two months, I go out on the weekends, post pictures of landscapes on Instagram, and speak a few words of broken Swahili. I like to think I came to Arusha to do something that mattered and get experience in international development, but I am also having a good time living in another country. There are no doubt things that separate me from her. I am not pretending I know what is best for Tanzania, I take the bus and ride my bike through the local entrance of the national park, I live without many of the luxuries of home, and my profile picture is not of me with a group of Tanzanian children. I want to believe that I am not a “white savior”, but there is a part of me is not sure and it makes my stomach hurt.

Lake Manyaya National Park

One night, after a long talk about what were were really doing in Tanzania, my friend said to me, “The people who are thinking abut the things and questioning if they are really making a difference are usually the ones that are.” So hopefully, by recognizing that I have the privilege to be able to go here (and the privilege to leave whenever I want), that I am not a savior, and that I do not know what is best for Tanzania, I don't have to be like the girl sitting across from me. It is okay for me to go to Tanzania for a summer. It is okay for me to have an experience where I learn about international development, do my best to help, and even go on small trips on the weekends. But I did not just really want to come to Africa to help the children.