Alumni of Marymount’s Education programs display their abilities to use effective and engaging teaching methods in their classrooms throughout the local area. More than a decade ago, John and Joyce Wanda approached Marymount’s Education Department about training the teachers of the primary school they founded in their rural Ugandan homeland. The Wandas had been impressed by the high quality of instruction their own children had received in Northern Virginia schools, and asked Marymount faculty if they would share with the Ugandan teachers how to implement more student-centered learning. For more than a decade, Marymount’s Education faculty and students have partnered with the Ugandan Arlington Junior School (AJS) and surrounding outreach schools to conduct teacher workshops in Uganda. In 2019, Marymount faculty Elizabeth Langran and Mary Gibson opened the annual trip to include Marymount alumni and teachers from the local DC, Maryland, and Virginia areas.
Travel to Uganda was halted in 2020, but Dr. Langran met with the school founders and, in an online video call with teams from both AJS and Marymount, identified areas for a series of online “mini courses” that could be used with the AJS teachers’ new access to technology. In the winter of 2021 and spring of 2022, Aaron Besser, a graduate student in Marymount’s M.Ed. in Curriculum & Instruction program, coordinated a group of Marymount graduate and undergraduate students, staff, and faculty to design courses and deliver instruction through a mostly asynchronous learning model. The courses were typically broken into three parts and included classroom applications and discussion at the end of each part. There was some trial and error in figuring out the time frame for AJS teachers to complete the asynchronous modules and for Marymount volunteers to figure out the most helpful ways to deliver instruction, but by late February the pilot course was launched! By the end of the spring 2022 semester, other courses have been in various stages of development and can hopefully be utilized in the future for AJS and Marymount’s other international school partnerships.
Aaron reflected on his experience: “As my first big project to gather volunteers, supervise and manage others, and connect with educators internationally, I’ve learned a lot. One of the most valuable pieces of this project for me was experiencing first-hand the differences in educational circumstances in the US and Uganda. While we learned about global educational differences as part of Marymount’s program, this was a real-world application that took the next step of helping me use my own experiences to support other global educators. Hearing from those teachers and what they needed and helping them utilize their own new technologies and tools to help them expand their learning was incredibly rewarding. While there were always adjustments being made and not everything we wanted to implement was able to happen, we still provided hours worth of asynchronous training for AJS teachers to complete and expand their educational pedagogy and knowledge. This was a great project with huge dreams that did have meaningful pieces executed well. I hope that this work can serve as a reference and jumping-off point for other international education partnerships for Marymount and other universities.”
In May 2022, Aaron Besser received the “Outstanding Graduate Student of the Year” award from Marymount’s School of Education.
