Educate Global takes flight again, delivers same life-changing results

Following two years of COVID cancellations, Educate Global returned this summer.

Yet that long and unpreventable absence could not diminish the program’s greatest product: eye-opening, life-changing experiences.

NIU students and faculty who traveled with Educate Global Indonesia and Educate Global East Africa, which included Kenya and Tanzania, encountered kind and generous people.

Some glimpsed abject poverty, with even major highways constructed of gravel.

Others witnessed a thriving country, where the hustle and bustle of the paved streets laid evidence to a healthy economy.

They visited amazing schools, all thriving with great amenities or steep challenges. They engaged in reflection. They discovered self-assurance, demonstrated resilience and gained motivation.

And, of course, they transformed themselves – and the educators they met.

Caroline Niziolek, a senior Early Childhood Education major from Lombard who went to Indonesia, is one of them.

Caroline Niziolek
Caroline Niziolek

“My students and I created an unforgettable bond. They were like my little best friends, and by the end, we were all crying. They were all so upset to see everybody leave,” Niziolek says.

But she did not leave empty-handed: “I became a stronger and more confident teacher than I ever thought I would be,” she says.

“I was so scared to teach my students on Zoom last year, and I would be very upset afterward, thinking, ‘Oh, I didn’t do enough for them,’ ” she adds of the 2021 online version of Educate Global.

“This year, I went into it with a whole different approach. I went into the classroom, and I just took everything with a grain of salt. Maybe some days didn’t work out the way they were supposed to, but I worked through. I’ve never seen myself be more outgoing and more confident, especially with my leadership.”

Such is one of the goals of Educate Global.

“Our students get out of their comfort zone and really try to start thinking differently,” says Teresa Wasonga, an NIU Distinguished Engagement Professor in the Department of Leadership, Educational Psychology and Foundations, “and I think their growth was so much more because of the challenges they saw and a greater appreciation of what they have.”

For some, Wasonga says, it was realizing the difficulty of trying to learn when the language is foreign. For others, it was acknowledging that plans often fall victim to unexpected realities. For others, it was witnessing how Tanzania’s profound lack of resources need not hinder education.

Where the school presented none of those issues – Central Java’s private Pradita Dirgantara High School, operated by the Indonesian Air Force, ranks third in the nation this year – the growth came through recognizing their ability to teach and advance the learning of top-caliber students.

Huskies also learned alongside their hosts, including those at Wasonga’s Jane Adeny Memorial School, where the NIU faculty conducted a professional development session for teachers there and from a nearby school.

James Cohen feeds a giraffe.
James Cohen feeds a giraffe.

James Cohen, an associate professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction (CI) who spent time in all three of the countries, calls the revived Educate Global a success.

“Every culture is different, and the Indonesian kids were unafraid to express their humanity. They weren’t embarrassed or shy to dance or sing or give poetry or act on stage. They were what teenagers should be. They weren’t inhibited in the social mores we have; they weren’t shy to express themselves, and in my perspective, we saw true humanity,” Cohen says.

“And when I go to Tanzania – this was the third time for me – it takes me a very long time to readjust,” he says.

“You have kids who walk up to six kilometers to school in the morning. No breakfast. No lunch. No water. They sit in class all day long. They’re sitting in chairs that are wood, with no cushion. No movement. They’re sharing desks, chairs and books because the schools don’t have enough desks, chairs and books for each kid. The teacher is basically talking at them for hours a day, and then they go home,” he adds. “They walk six kilometers back, they have a semi-nutritious meal and then, the next morning, they start all over again.”

David Nieto, an assistant professor in CI, agrees that the NIU students came home transformed by what they saw and what they experienced.

“All the students report that this was a life-changing experience for them, and so it was for me, honestly,” Nieto says, “participating in the personal and professional intellectual development of our students, but also of the people that we met in the school, because there were moments in which we had discussions about our cultural understandings, about the role of education, about how we understood leadership in education and what we thought about teaching and learning.”

INDONESIA

David Nieto
David Nieto

PLANNING FOR THE INDONESIAN trip began in 2018 with Cohen; Terry Borg, the now-retired director of the college’s former Office of External and Global Programs; and representatives of the NIU Center for Southeast Asian Studies, including Eric Alan Jones.

Cohen, Nieto and Wasonga were the faculty members who accompanied the travelers.

Huskies were paired with Indonesian educators to co-teach English language lessons and global competencies in the morning. During the afternoon, the Huskies engaged the Indonesian students in club-like activities related to their various interests.

They prepared in advance over five weeks of Saturday sessions, learning not only about the expectations in the classroom but also the culture.

“I made my lessons about global warming because that was a conversation starter to get them using those English speaking skills and writing skills,” says Niziolek, who drew content from her own AP Environmental Science class in high school along with her own review of new articles, especially those that studied climate change in Indonesia.

“And when we weren’t in class, the school created all these activities for us,” she adds. “We got to learn about their food, their language, their music; they took us on these cultural events and excursions on the weekend. We went to different beaches. We got to visit all these different temples and learn about their history. We got to sit on the river and listen to a story while drinking coconuts and watching the sunset. I was like, ‘Where am I?’ ”

Caroline Niziolek
Caroline Niziolek

Where Niziolek stood was the precipice of a newfound assurance in herself and her abilities.

Not only was she teaching older students long past the early childhood years, but she also was working with English learners who needed her patience and empathy. “It truly does change you as a human and as a teacher,” she says.

She also found herself taking charge in ways she never had before, all in response to the situation.

“I kind of stepped up to the plate to be like, ‘OK, we have this cultural event, and we have to plan it. We need to do this.’ So I took on the role of creating it,” she says.

“And, especially in the classroom, I was at first a little hesitant and nervous but, by the day it came, I walked into that classroom with no anxiety. I was like, ‘I know what I’m going to do. These are my students. And maybe it’s not going to be perfect, but we can work through it together,’ ” she adds.

“For the first couple days, my students were very quiet. I had to pick on people call them by name to participate. But by the last week, all my kids ended up being engaged. I was like, ‘Hey, who wants to answer?’ – and I had everybody answering. Everybody was participating.”

Niziolek also was engaged in the learning process.

“I learned that I’m a really great leader and that I’m destined to continue doing these types of things,” she says. “I would talk to Dr. Cohen almost every night, like, ‘Dr. Cohen! Can you believe I did that?’ I’ve become a new person, and even coming home, I have brought that with me. I experienced something that I would never have experienced. I have watched somebody live a different life. I lived a different life. I came home and changed my life.”

Caroline Niziolek
Caroline Niziolek

WASONGA LEFT INDONESIA impressed.

“The school is out of this world. The facilities in that school – we don’t even have those facilities here. Every classroom has touchscreen TVs with internet, and the students can do whatever they want with all the technology, and every technology you could think about is available,” she says.

Teresa Wasonga
Teresa Wasonga

“The students are extremely brilliant. I think they take the best in the country, and coming in, a lot of our NIU students were worried. Many of them were not trained to teach high school students. Many of them are elementary or middle school,” she adds. “But the focus wasn’t content. It was more about developing some of the attitudes and skills of 21st century education and creative ways of thinking and working collaboratively.”

Nieto, meanwhile, continues to process some of what he observed in Indonesia.

“The students in this high school were crying on the last day of class. They were crying because they didn’t want to see our teachers leave. They didn’t want to see us leave. They had bonded,” he says. “It was this amazing experience that I’m still trying to figure out how I’m going to put into my own teaching and into my own research.”

He also saw the NIU students change and, in doing so, fulfill one of his aspirations for the trip: that the young travelers would demonstrate “an openness to the experience.”

“It happens to all of us – that we believe that things are just one way. We are used to that single story, and our reasoning is because we are surrounded by a culture, and we believe our cultural space is basically what everybody else does,” he says.

“But in the back of our minds, there’s something that tells us that things that are different aren’t necessarily wrong, and an openness to be accepting of other understandings and views of the world,” he adds. “That’s really what I was looking for.”

EAST AFRICA

LONZHA DOWTHARD ENJOYED her undergraduate class in Swahili taught by NIU Department of World Languages and Cultures teaching assistant Fortunata Msilu, who is also a doctoral candidate in the Department of Educational Technology, Research and Assessment’s Ph.D. in Instructional Technology program.

The sociology major from Rockford also appreciated the course she took in African Studies.

Both later inspired her to apply for Educate Global’s trip to Kenya and Tanzania during her pursuit of the M.S.Ed. in Higher Education and Student Affairs.

Lonzha Dowthard
Lonzha Dowthard

She and her fellow travelers were accompanied by Cohen, Wasonga and Kurt Thurmaier, NIU Distinguished Engagement Professor and chair of the Department of Public Administration.

“Of course, with me being African American, anything on the continent of Africa I would love to go to or be a part of,” says Dowthard, who completed her master’s in May and now is a residential life coordinator at the University of Houston.

“But I was really surprised when I went because I knew they said we were going to rural area, but I didn’t fully grasp how rural until we got there,” she adds. “One thing that stopped me was how history still exists. Having taken the African Studies class, and learning different things about the tribes, it was really nice to see there are still people there who live off the land. It was just so breathtaking.”

Dowthard’s hosts were similarly surprised by her.

Someone with her skin color had to have been born in Africa, they told her. Same for her parents, they said.

And how had their “mwalimu” – the Swahili word for teacher – mastered English so well?

“They’re like, ‘Oh, you’re not Tanzanian? You’re not Kenyan? Where are your parents from?’ They were so amazed that my parents were from the United States and that I wasn’t Tanzanian,” she says. “Then, I noticed in their journals that they would write, ‘Oh, I want to learn to speak English like Mwalimu Lonzha did.’ Some of them still didn’t grasp that English is my first language.”

Clearly, she adds, “we live in two different worlds.”

Cohen and new friends at Tanzania’s Etaro secondary school: headmaster Jacob and teachers Boniphace and Moses.
Cohen and new friends at Tanzania’s Etaro secondary school: headmaster Jacob and teachers Boniphace and Moses.

“I had no idea that a lot of the students there don’t know that much about Black Americans, or how we’re referred to – a lot of them would refer to me as ‘white’ because I was American. They weren’t going by my skin color. They were going by my accent, the way I talk and my English language,” she says.

“They taught me something in that sense – how we put so much emphasis on color and race here in the United States and how there it’s not a thing. They have colorism, but racism is not a thing there, so it was really refreshing,” she adds. “They wanted to learn about my experiences as a Black American, and I tried my best to teach them all I know. I talked to them about Black history, and the civil rights movement, and a lot of them didn’t know about that. They were intrigued.”

Meanwhile, she adds, the students seemed to see her as a mirror.

“When they would share certain things, they would look at me for reassurance – like they wanted my feedback,” Dowthard says. “Another interaction I had with the students that was definitely different was the courage they had to tell me certain things. Sometimes the students would come to me outside of class to tell me things that they wouldn’t tell the other mwalimus. I actually had one of the girls start crying because it was my last day with her, so I think they really took to me a lot.”

Her work to teach writing to the students yielded mutual learning.

Like her fellow Huskies, Dowthard guided the East African students in journaling activities where they described their childhood experiences, their daily lives and their aspirations for adulthood.

“The hardships the girls face there was also something that really stopped me. Again, I read about in my African history classes, but I didn’t think it was still prevalent today,” she says. “A lot of the girls wanted to be lawyers and doctors and soldiers, but they weren’t looked upon in that sense. They were looked upon as wives or housekeepers.”

She told them she that had earned a master’s degree – and that they could as well.

“I said, ‘The world is not this way in other countries,’ just giving them that insight,” she says. “A lot of them had no idea of the freedoms that women have here, especially Black women.”

Meanwhile, even though Dowthard is not a teacher, the experience of educating proved beneficial.

For example? Flexibility, problem solving and patience, she says: The NIU travelers sometimes had to scrap their lesson plans and start over to account for their student’s lack of English skills.

Educate Global East Africa travelers visit a tea field in Kenya.
Educate Global East Africa travelers visit a tea field in Kenya.

She also gained a greater understanding of the need to explain information and expectations clearly and thoroughly, as well as to never make assumptions, both of which are valuable for someone in a managerial position like hers.

And, like so many others who travel via Educate Global, she returned home with broadened perspectives – and a greater appreciation of the Kenyan expression of “pole pole,” which means to “slowly slowly.”

“Just to see how people live over there! We went to Rakuba Island, and everyone there was just so happy, although they had very little to nothing, and seeing how just how happy you can be with just being around your family, your friends and just life living and basically accepting your life for what it is was a huge takeaway for me,” Dowthard says.”

“I have a different outlook on life now. I’m very grateful for things. I hardly complain about anything,” she adds, “and working in Housing and Residential Services, it gets really busy at times. We have students complain about stuff, we have parents being upset and there are a lot of times when people are all stressed out and I’m the one who’s really calm.”

WASONGA LIKES HEARING such a testimonial.

In her native Kenya and in Tanzania, she says, where the students came with lower levels of English and greater challenges from outside the classroom, and where some of the schools operated with few resources, the Huskies developed in ways beyond improving their abilities to teach.

“A lot of them said to me, ‘Look, I’m going to be a lot more empathetic to my students now because learning a second language and learning content together is really hard,” Wasonga says.

Teresa Wasonga
Teresa Wasonga

“I remember one teacher – Jeff – saying, ‘I literally had gotten to a point where I hated teaching. I was so tired. But coming here and seeing how students are so hungry for knowledge, I’m going back stronger than before. I’m going to work my butt off for kids.’ ”

Wasonga says Jeff also promised to her that he would become “an advocate” for students who are immigrants “because I now understand how they feel being thrown into a culture where you have no clue.” Moreover, Wasonga says, Jeff pledged he would tell the same to other teachers.

“Where else does that kind of learning take place?” she asks.

Cohen, NIU’s 2021 International Educator of the Year and well-documented champion of international travel, was reminded of the power of self-reflection.

Most of that occurred in Africa, he says.

NIU’s delegation was assigned to lead Kenyan and Tanzanian students in creating dialogue journals, where students and teachers exchange messages with each other, in addition to writing autobiographies.

“The reason I chose that was because, in the curriculum of both Tanzania and Kenya, students never see themselves. They see everything as facts, and they have to memorize those facts – and that’s it. They never, ever see themselves,” Cohen says. “Having them write autobiographies, and walking them through the process of what their experiences have been, and what they want to do with their lives – this was the first time these Tanzanian and Kenyan students have ever done that.”

While the young Huskies delivered that content, Cohen joined with Wasonga and Thurmaier to provide professional development to teachers.

It wasn’t needed at Wasonga’s Jane Adeny Memorial School, Cohen says.

“It’s a gem. It’s one of the most beautiful experiences I have ever had in my entire life visiting a school,” he says. “The love, the care, the nourishment of both the emotional and intellectual that the students receive? I literally had tears in my eyes as I was walking around the campus. It was sincerely magical.”

BUT SOME PUBLIC SCHOOLS in Kenya provoke tears of another kind, prompting the intervention.

Children are caned for arriving late to school, not completing homework or misbehaving, Cohen says.

Girls, in particular, are charged with the responsibility of fetching water for their families, a duty that can consume hours each day and potentially make them tardy for class. When that happens, he says, they often choose to stay home rather than receive beatings – and, as a result, fall even further behind in their studies.

Young women already are at a disadvantage because of their menstrual cycle, he adds; they stay home during their periods, or drop out of high school, because they can neither afford nor access feminine hygiene products.

“In Tanzania, Teresa and I spoke a lot with the teachers there about the beating of the kids – corporal punishment – and how illogical it was, how it’s a leftover of British colonial rule,” Cohen says. “And they got it. They understood. But they said to us, ‘What are we supposed to do? If we don’t cane our students, their parents are going to say we’re not discipling our students well.’ ”

NIU Educate Global East Africa officially begins: dinner at midnight after 14 hours of flying.
NIU Educate Global East Africa officially begins: dinner at midnight after 14 hours of flying.

NIU’s delegation provided an idea.

“We said, ‘We want to work with you, but you have to put in writing that you will no longer beat your students,’ so they did,” Cohen says. “What we’re doing now is paying for those public school teachers to drive to Jane Adeny Memorial School, where they don’t beat the kids; where they have good relationships with students; where they respect and trust one another. They don’t know yet how to provide structure or discipline in a more humane way, so they’re learning that.”

Context is a powerful teacher, he adds, not just for the Educate Global hosts but the NIU visitors as well.

“The poverty there is beyond understanding,” Cohen says, “and one of our NIU teachers said at one point, ‘I’m so hungry,’ and a Tanzanian student heard her say that and said, ‘Oh, me too. I haven’t eaten since yesterday.’ The NIU teacher was super-apologetic and said, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t say anything.’ You’ve got to contextualize because these kids are literally having one meal a day.”

It’s a moment she’s likely to carry throughout her career in education, says Cohen, who’s living proof.

James Cohen
James Cohen

And she’s not alone, as Cohen has seen this fall back in the United States .

“One of the NIU students who went to East Africa came to visit me and said, ‘If something goes wrong with the technology, it’s not an issue. I was forced to teach with just a piece of chalk and a chalkboard. That’s all I had, and if something didn’t work, I tried something else, and if that didn’t work, I tried something else. So now, when the computer isn’t working or the video camera isn’t working, it’s not an issue. I don’t freak out. I just improvise,’ ” he says.

“That’s the coolest thing ever because that’s how I learned to teach – because I learned to teach 32 years ago in Sri Lanka in the Peace Corps. I had nothing, and it made me a much stronger and more confident teacher,” he adds.

“Likewise, the NIU teachers who went are saying that it was life-changing. They want to advocate for social justice. They want to advocate for people.”

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