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Teachers College, Columbia University, June 16-19, 2011 Bill Jones, Chair, Planning Committee The fiftieth anniversary reunion celebration for the alumni association of Teachers for East Africa (TEA) and Teacher Education for East Africa (TEEA) can be counted a success. The four-day celebration, Thursday, June 16 to Sunday, June 19, unfolded without major difficulties. All but one of the panelists who had committed to participate in the program were present. Likewise, all but one of the fifty-nine alumni registered to attend were in attendance. This general success is directly attributable to how diligently the New York reunion planning committee members - Mary Hines, Lloyd Sherman, Harry Stein, and Jim Weikart - worked. The rubric "Then and Now" provided a context for structuring the reunion program. The committee understood that the celebration had to include a recounting of the alumni association's historical ties to East Africa. We had that in presentations made by Don Knies and Susan Nanka-Bruce in the opening session on the first afternoon of the reunion and with the Circle of Acquaintance, a getting-acquainted activity, undertaken that same afternoon. Of particular interest to the committee, however, were presentations about education projects in East Africa, administered by non-TEA personnel that aimed to build local competence so that development could be sustained independent of outside expertise. Let it suffice to cite the work of Teachers College's Lesley Bartlett and Rutgers University's Arthur Powell as examples of work in this direction, in these instances, teacher-training efforts that, in the language of Powell, "elevate learning above teaching." In Bartlett's Moshi project, teachers, participants in extended workshops, produce portfolios of model teaching units that are not simply set lessons. They are documents, representing habits of mind and ways of working to ensure that participants can construct lessons so that classrooms become established student-centered, student-participatory sites of learning. Workshop participants aim not only to change their own classroom practice but also to become supportive forces for change among colleagues, locally, regionally, and perhaps even nationally. The alumni association mounted its usual panel to report on the projects it supports: the projects that supply textbooks, computers and science laboratory equipment to schools and the one that encourages recreational reading. Additionally, Henry Hamburger and I explored ways to initiate an archival history project for TEA and TEEA. Tapes from the first reunion, Washington, D.C 2001, and a range of written material on the association's website, not limited to newsletters, provide some indication of what such an archive might include. A showing of a short portion of Ward Heveveld's DVD of Wave 4 TEA alumni reminiscing about how their East African experience affected their lives underscored and highlighted just how powerful first-person audio-visual accounts can be in the project. While the committee encountered difficulties in putting the program in place, not one of the difficulties was insurmountable. We encountered no difficulty using the facilities and services available through Teachers College, thanks to Rosella Garcia, director of alumni relations and her liaison person, Marlene Tucker. It was tedious, on the other hand, working with New York-based East African government offices to identify representatives to be present at our opening-day reception dinner. We were grateful, however, to have representatives from Kenya and Tanzania that evening, particularly so since no Uganda official in New York ever identified a Ugandan representative for us. Likewise, we were grateful that Jim Weikart's familiarity with the Teachers College neighborhood resulted in our managing a fitting close for the program's formal proceedings on Saturday. We had wanted a tour of Harlem, one that would put alumni in touch with Harlem's cultural and political past and inform them of recent changes in its population, notably the growth of Senegalese immigrant neighborhoods along the West 116th Street corridor. When a guided tour with Harlem Heritage Tours that would have included lunch at a Senegalese restaurant proved too costly and time consuming, Weikart suggested a meal at Awash, an Ethiopian restaurant on Amsterdam Avenue close to Teachers College [a meal, incidentally, that complemented the fine food and drink at the dinner reception, the oversight project of Harry Stein and Lloyd Sherman] and a visit on our own to the Studio Museum Harlem and to the Schomburg Center for the Study of Black Culture. The rented bus we used made our self-directed outing wholly manageable. In an indirect way, the visits to the Studio Museum and the Schomburg compensated for our not being able to mount a panel on the arts. A panel that would bring us up to date on new developments in the arts in East Africa would have been richly appropriate. While we have some familiarity with developments in the visual arts and in literature in Kenya, for instance, we know almost nothing about the relatively new film industry there. Ekwa Msangi-Omar, a Kenya-born filmmaker, living in Brooklyn, was poised to gather panelists who could talk about aspects of this growing industry: the phenomenon called Riverwood, the growth of local-language filmmaking in the River Road section of Nairobi; the prominence of women among Kenya's filmmakers; the availability of competent technicians, Kenyans who have supported foreign filmmakers working in Kenya; an assessment of Kenya films of the caliber selected for the annual African film festival at Lincoln Center. Again, costs shut down efforts to put that panel in place. Ms. Msangi-Omar said she could not do the work necessary to realize such a panel without monetary compensation. I understood her position but could not move ahead with the project under that condition. Even in the face of that reality, we remain on amicable terms. No one at the reunion knew of these complications. And, certainly, the complications could not undermine the pleasure derived from the art we did see on our Harlem outing: the four murals at the Schomburg painted by Aaron Douglas, a major figure of the Harlem Renaissance, the quilts in "The African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean World" made by the Siddis, a South Asian Indian ethnic group of Africa descent, and the work of twenty-three photographers on display in "Harlem Views." And who could quarrel with seeing the one work by Wangechi Mutu in the upper gallery at the Studio Museum? In 2003, I had given a talk about her at Paa ya Paa in Ridgeways, outside of Nairobi, only with photographs of her work. There on our outing to Harlem, however, some of us saw an example of her actual work for the first time. And while the cover of Binyavanga Wainaina's new book, One Day I'll Write about This Place, does not have an original Mutu image, it does have a striking reproduction of one. Buy the book, and be doubly pleased.
Guest List for the Fiftieth Anniversary Celebration of
Teachers for East Africa Alumni Association
Alumni and Their Spouses and Companions
(* Name out of alphabetical order)
Vicky Anielski Barbero
Andrea Bardach
Bill Cahill
Fran Cahill
Emilee Cantieri
Lois Carwile
Arthur Callahan *
Gene Child
Fawn Cousens
Linda Donaldson
John Dwyer
Jan Kerr *
Patrick Dwyer
Bruce Franklin
Brooks Goddard
Henry Hamburger
Marsh McJunkin *
Sharon Hartmann
Carol Heath
Hank Hector
Dory Hector
Ward Heneveld
Cheryl Heneveld *
Mary Hines
Rod Hinkle
Kirstin Mortiz *
Ted Housman
Clarence Hunter
Jay Jordan
Bill Jones
Carol Jones
Don Knies
Mo Knies
Gus Lewis
Mary Ann Lewis
Kathleen Lyons
Pat Mische
Peter Moock
Sue Nanka-Bruce
Cathy Newbury
David Newbury
Jerry Schieber
Joan Schieber
Ed Schmidt
Betsey Anderson *
Bill Sensiba
Polly Davis *
Lloyd Sherman
Lee Smith
Harry Stein
Bill Stoever
Nola Stover
Mary Ryan Taras
Beverly Templin
Brenda Tillberg
Jim Weikart
Panel Presenters
a. Don Knies and Sue Nanka-Bruce, TEA and TEEA history
b. Lesley Bartlett bartlett@exchange.tc.edu
Teachers College Moshi Teacher-Training Project
c. Lois Harr
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