The Craft of Oral History: Learning along the way in Liberia
WT2010 Dates: TBD
EDPS488L/
EDPS711L (3 Credits)
Liberia has deep historical relationships with the State of Maryland. Free Black Marylanders helped to settle Liberia in the 19th Century; most recently, in August 2007, this relationship expanded with the establishment of the Maryland-Liberia Sister State Program, with Bong and Maryland Counties in Liberia—Maryland’s first and only sister state relationship in Africa.
This course will study Liberian education and culture, revealing intersections between global processes and local traditions, and engaging students in ready-made networks of communication and association in both Liberia and the U.S. Because Liberian peoples have been coming and going for centuries – as enslaved persons, as involuntary and voluntary African and U.S. returnees, as culturally diverse diasporic communities-- students will also have much to learn about both U.S. and Liberian traditions and cultural habits.
Students will engage in systematic explorations of the ways in which Liberian students, teachers, parents, community leaders, curriculum makers, and cultural authorities cultivate a sense of place and possibility for rising generations of young people in a world of increasing cultural congestion, economic interdependence, information exchange, and knowledge systems. The focus will be on education and cultural transmission-a time tested way to explore the foundations of culture and community in diverse locations around the world. The following questions will be salient: What purposes are served in institutions that educate? What perspectives about the world, its peoples and its possibilities are inscribed in instructional materials and story-telling, the practices of teachers and professors, the structures of community authority, the technologies of teaching and learning, and the networks of association in which every day life are embedded?
Faculty & Staff
Dr. 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. Dr. 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.
For questions about the application, registration and pre-departure logistics, please contact the Study Abroad Office at 301.314.7473.
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