Teaching Science Labs in Liberia
DAVID BAUER, 2005 LEGACY AWARDEE, TEACHES SCIENCE LABS IN LIBERIA - Liberia is tucked into the corner of West Africa as the coast turns from the Atlantic Ocean toward the Gulf of Guinea. It has been six years since the end of a brutal civil war and four years since the inauguration of the first democratically elected government. This past February, I traveled there to give workshops to science teachers on how to teach “lab classes without labs” as part of a team from the iHelpLiberia project.
I was traveling to Liberia with my former mentor from Hunter College High School (and Liberian expatriate), Asumana Jabateh Randolph, and with Heidi Baumgartner, currently a junior at the high school. We landed at night at Robert’s International Airport and drove an hour and a half to Monrovia, the capital. The house we were staying in was easily the nicest one in the neighborhood—though it lacked running water or electricity.
I had started working with a Liberian group in New York while in High School, so I was familiar with the state of the country. What I wasn’t prepared for was how much had been destroyed during the war and had yet to be rebuilt. Trying to explain on the phone to relatives back home, the best I could come up with was “It’s very hard to explain how much ‘nothing’ there is.”
We hadn’t contacted the government about our trip so that we could see for ourselves the conditions (and not be shown ‘model’ schools instead.) At each workshop, we talked about different ways of teaching lab classes, how to engage the students and how to use battery- and solar-powered technologies available to teachers.
We had brought donated graphing calculators (the TI-83, common in US classrooms) and sensors that transformed them into scientific instruments that measure things like temperature, pH, conductivity, and oxygen gas concentration. With the calculators, students could make graphs and devise experiments that required overnight readings.
Dividing our time between the capital and the countryside, we traveled upcountry to Ganta, on the border with Guinea. Outside the capital, the reminders of the civil war remained: UN checkpoints every 30 kilometers checked for weapons, and the main road was still littered with craters from explosive shells.
We stopped along the way to give workshops at the Booker Washington Institute in Kakata and at Gboveh High School in Gbanga, where fifty science teachers arrived from the town and nearby villages to attend. In Ganta, where we found forty teachers, but no free room, we gave the workshop in the middle of a soccer field.
As we headed back to the capital early in the morning, I was struck by the crowds of children walking along the side of the road all heading to school. And despite the war-worn roads, there is law and order in the form of a new national police force (people do call them in emergencies, a pretty good vote of confidence), a vibrant free press, and free primary education.
Half a year later, I can’t remember meeting a single child in Liberia who wasn’t excited about school. Education even trumps food in some cases, as I learned from a student balancing a scoop of rice on his ruler at lunchtime. He had only enough money to buy a spoon or a ruler, and found that his ruler could do double-duty at meals.
David Bauer is a 2009 Rhodes Scholar and a 2005 Legacy Prize Winner. He currently serves on the Creativity Foundation’s Junto.
