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Forget
Esperanto. For Gary Edvenson, the universal language is science,
and he spent his Fulbright year hearing it spoken with a Bangladeshi
accent.
A professor of chemistry at Moorhead State University, Edvenson
wanted to mix his love of science with his passion for teaching,
and observe the reaction in a totally different culture. "I'd
wanted to go overseas for a long time," he says. "I've
always enjoyed talking to people from other cultures and learning
about their lives. And I wanted to see what it was like to teach
in a different setting-how do you teach differently?"
So he headed to Bangladesh's Dhaka University, where he taught
undergraduate chemistry majors under conditions that were a far
cry from those back home in Minnesota. Textbooks are rare and
laboratories are poorly equipped, but the students, he found,
are much the same as their counterparts in the United States.
Teaching methods, though, are remarkably different. In an education
system based on the British model, examinations are once-a-year
ordeals, oral tests are frequent and grueling, and laboratory
work looms large-Bangladeshi students spend 12 to 15 hours per
week in laboratory, compared with six for their American counterparts.
"The students work in the lab while the instructor sits in
an adjoining room and drinks tea," he explains. "They
have a lot of lab time, and do lots of experiments, so they get
to be quit proficient in their laboratory skills."
But those laboratories aren't the safest places to be, and safety
became the major focus of Edvenson's work in Dhaka. None of the
students wore goggles or safety glasses, and rather than using
a bulb to draw liquid into a tube, students used a straw to create
suction with their mouths. "Everybody did this very routinely-with
some very dangerous compounds," he explains.
"In their culture, there's a totally different approach
to the concept of personal safety," Edvenson says, "so
I had to pick my battles carefully." But by the time he left,
students were wearing safety glasses, and he's still hard at work
trying to raise grant money for exhaust fans to properly vent
noxious laboratory fumes.
His year abroad, though, taught Edvenson as much about his own
culture as the Bangladeshi. "I learned that as Americans
we try to change everything-sometimes just for the sake of change,"
he says. "The Bangladeshis, though, accept their situation
as it is. They like to mention a recent survey that shows that
they're the happiest people in the world. We tend to get too concerned
with our goals and our work, but to them, relationships and other
people are everything."
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