Page 37 - UD Research Magazine Vol5-No1

“We brought tents, camping toilets and a foot-powered shower;
we could use it in one of the villages, which had a well. The biggest chal- lenges in our living condi-
tions were the insects—mosquitoes and chiggers—and the day we had a huge drop in temperature that nobody was prepared for. We were all dressed for the 95-degree heat when the winds suddenly blew in from the Antarctic, and we all nearly froze.”
—Jon Cox, Assistant Professor of Art and Project Manager
Africa. “You need to put together all these different pieces to try to get a full picture of the Ese’Eja. We had small groups doing different things every day, and each group always included a member of the commu- nity working with us.”
For Rosalie Rolón Dow, associate professor of education at UD, the multi- disciplinary nature of the project was so distinctive that she studied that aspect of the work, as well as observing children
and schools in the three Ese’Eja villages the team visited.
“Part of what I did is talk to the team members about how the interdisciplinary nature of what we were doing affected their communication and the way they worked,” Rolón Dow says. “I found that learning and using such new skills really stretches us all in positive ways.”
She and undergraduate Morgan Lehr used educational anthropology as an
approach to their work, visiting schools in the villages and documenting practices re- lated to the Ese’Eja language and culture.
Examining educational issues for the Ese’Eja was an important component of the overall project, Rolón Dow notes. Every task was performed in collaboration with the community, whose members set the agenda based on what they wanted for themselves and future generations, and schooling was a major issue.
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