Long ago and far away, I sat in a January classroom and concluded what was then called January Interim. The month of January was dedicated to students choosing a topic of study that was likely outside the realm of their major field. Biologists studied Shakespeare, English majors learned about personal investments, accounting majors looked at the solar system. (One cold January I even studied a UI, the “language of space,” developed by one of the school’s psychology professors. Foosh um bru?) The Interim was an open space in which to explore new ideas while taking a break from the rigors of a major field of study. The J Term, as it is now often called by many of the schools which offer it, is still very alive and well, though it has morphed significantly. Instead of reading about far-off spaces, today’s J Term student is just as likely to travel there.
As expansive as that opportunity may be, there’s another level of engagement that has been created at some schools. More recently, it’s a matter of not just traveling there, but also interacting with local populations and contributing something of significance and lasting value. Winds of Peace Foundation has been in the middle of facilitating that. The Foundation has partnered with Augsburg University for more than 30 years as it has sought to study, analyze and provide resources for development in rural Nicaragua. It’s the Augsburg Center for Global Education and Experience (CGEE) that has led the Foundation there and served as significant conduit for contacts and entres to the country and the countryside.
What has worked so well is a synergy. WPF has a acquired an in- depth understanding of Nicaragua’s persistent poverty through its development work; it has not only funded organizations seeking to strengthen themselves through access to capital and education, but also created a research base of sociological evidence. Meanwhile, Augsburg has had the benefit of a development “laboratory” at its CGEE site in Nicaragua, a real-life classroom application for students and academics from around the entire country. What began as a small symbiotic partnership has expanded to something larger and more potentially significant.
What the synergy has created is a real-life boilerworks, wherein learners have the direct contact and impact on people somewhere else in the world. It’s well past book learning, and even beyond the personal immersion experiences of the old J Terms. The synergy here is bringing together students who seek to learn and to understand the reach of their abilities, coupled with rural peasants who live day-to-day in deep need of modern resources. How else would one describe the application of mathematics to measure arboreal CO2 outputs of the actual forest surrounding a peasant farm? The result is knowledge for the farmers who can now appreciate the precise contribution and importance of their trees, and real-life, vocational application by students who experience the practical effects of a chosen field of study.
It has been a curious mix, this bridging between rural Nicaraguan populations and urban U.S. students. They would seem, at first glance, to be unlikely collaborators. They speak different languages. Their worlds are thousands of miles apart. Many of the peasant farmers are of an older generation; their student counterparts are millennials or Gen Z members. Rural Nica education is experience, with perhaps a bit of history thrown in. Student education is primarily from the books and classrooms of expensive university surroundings. How different can two group be?
But the “synergy” which holds them together is their universal longing and need to work together, to benefit from each other, to give in return what each has received. What they have experienced, what the University and WPF has sought to foster, what real life teaches us to be true, is that we need each other. We’re better together. We may see the world differently and hold differing views of what that world is trying to tell us, but our differences help us to see it better. What a lesson! If you doubt its truth, just observe any group of U.S. young people saying good-bye to their Nica community.
The collaboration between peasant and student is a remarkable coming together of two disparate entities; that’s a lesson in and of itself. It’s also a mirror of the alliance between Augsburg University and Winds of Peace Foundation: another two disparate entities in collaboration. And, if I may be so bold, a blueprint for our organizational and political leaders in an expanding fog of mutual marginalization….