About 50 kilometers down a dirt road in southern Zambia, more than 600 girls aged 12 to 20 live and attend classes at the St. Joseph’s Girls’ Secondary School. A third of them are HIV/AIDS orphans in a country hit hard by the disease. The pandemic is also ravaging the country’s teaching corps—about 20% of Zambia’s teachers have HIV/AIDS. They are dying at a rate of about 1000 per year, faster than they can be replaced.
When circumstances at the school permit, the girls study physics. Calculators are rare, computers are even rarer, and labs with equipment to run experiments are almost nonexistent. But the girls have to learn classical mechanics, electricity and magnetism, and a host of other topics in the physical sciences to pass their state-mandated exams. Fail, and their formal education ends.
It is into this world that a handful of high-school physics teachers from Virginia have stepped, in what they describe as a “grassroots” effort to keep physics alive in Zambian schools. They’ve chosen St. Joseph’s school, which they describe as being “in the middle of nowhere,” as their base of operations because, despite its problems, it is one of the best schools in the southern African nation.
The US teachers are working with a four-year, $50 000 grant from Hampton University’s Physics Frontier Center, an NSF-funded educational program under the umbrella of the Center for the Study of the Origin and Structure of Matter. Part of the COSM mandate is education and outreach, which is the emphasis of the Hampton program. The university, in Hampton, Virginia, is one of the oldest schools centered on education for African Americans.
The teachers began the project last summer by conducting two weeks of workshops for physics teachers at a handful of Zambian schools. “The people we’re doing these workshops with are the people who are going to be out there in front of those class-rooms with the physics, chemistry, and math students,” said Charles Tisdale, a retired US Navy nuclear reactor operator who teaches physics at Princess Anne High School in Virginia Beach. “We’re thinking global, but we’re acting local in the sense that we’re trying to get down and do something in Zambia that’s going to make a difference. And it is also paying off as a reward to us.”
An education collaboration
Described as “a collaboration in education,” the COSM project began when Ken Cecire, an education specialist at Hampton, led the five physics teachers, three NASA scientists, and a teacher from Marymount International School in Rome to the St. Joseph’s school. After workshops with Zambian teachers at St. Joseph’s, the group conducted workshops at two other Zambian schools: St. Mary’s High School in Livingstone and the Kabulonga Boys High School in the capital city of Lusaka.
Cecire and several of the teachers were back in Zambia last month for three weeks of workshops to begin implementing a four-year physics curriculum that, by 2007, will cover measurements, classical mechanics, waves, light, sound, electricity and magnetism, and modern physics. “We’re looking at two things,” Cecire said. “On one level, we’re working with teachers, trying to help them out, because in fact their ranks have been reduced by the AIDS crisis. But the underlying issue is Zambia’s economic development.” Last year, a student told one of Cecire’s teachers, “We’ll handle the AIDS crisis. What we really need you to do is something about developing this country.”
“Without physics and mathematics, that’s an awfully hard job,” Cecire said. “Hopefully, what we’re doing is helping teachers bring up a generation of students that become leaders, and who have the science background to change some things for the better in their own country.”
Last summer, the group worked mostly with Zambian physics teachers to develop lesson plans and simple lab experiments. Just as in the US, Cecire said, few physics teachers in Zambia have degrees in physics. Most are the product of two-year training schools, and they teach in the classic lecture style that was established before 1964, when Zambia was a British colony.
“One of the reasons they do that is because there are no textbooks,” said Maria Niland, whose experience with the Zambian students in 2001 actually led to the Hampton program. “There are about 40 kids in a class and there is very little equipment, so there is not much ability to do anything else.” Without a lot of training, she said, the “easiest thing to do is write notes on a board. The teachers usually have a copy of some textbook, and the students copy it and memorize it.”
Professional development for the teachers is made all the more critical by the HIV/AIDS pandemic, she said. “It is really taking a toll on the teaching force, not only in terms of teachers dying, but teachers having to cover more than one class, and teachers teaching while they are very sick.” Because of that reality, she said, the workshops focused on low-cost hands-on activities “so that it’s less teacher centered and more student centered.”
A serendipitous beginning
The Hampton program is the result of a serendipitous chain of events that began about a decade ago when Niland, having just completed her senior thesis on health-care policy in prison systems, was doing AIDS education and health-care work in North Carolina prisons.
Many inmates told Niland that they wished they’d worked harder in school and that high school was actually too late for them. “I decided I needed to explore that more, so I went back and got my first master’s degree in education so I could teach.” She ended up at an inner-city school in Newport News, Virginia, where the principal saw she had a background in math and science “and told me what I was going to teach. I very quickly became the head of the science department.”
Niland met Cecire when both were teaching at an NSF summer program to help middle- and high-school physics teachers. That experience led her to do summer research at the nearby Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility and at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. After five years in the Newport News school system, she was offered a staff position in the education department at Jefferson Lab.
“After a couple of years there, I missed the classroom, so I put my resumé on the internet,” Niland said. Officials at the Marymount International School, run by Catholic nuns, offered her a job teaching high-school physics. She landed in Rome and soon was involved in the school’s outreach program in Africa. In 2001, Niland found herself in Zambia teaching math at a school for deaf, blind, and disabled middle- and high-school students.
“It was a phenomenal experience,” she said. While there, she visited St. Joseph’s Girls’ school. The students, daughters of government officials and other elite families, had only cold showers and ate the same thing every day, Niland said. Despite its good reputation, she said, the school was “minimal.”
“I made a lot of friends with these students, and when you teach students you end up loving them and they become very near and dear to you.” After returning to the US, she showed Cecire the letters she was receiving from the girls. “I said, ‘Ken, you’re working at Hampton University, this storied black college. There must be some kind of Africa outreach.’” Cecire read the letters and, a week later, called Niland. He wanted to set up a program to help the physics teachers and students in Zambia.
Cecire turned to several of the high-school physics teachers participating in the Hampton chapter of QuarkNet, the NSF- and DOE-funded physics mentoring program for US teachers. “We told them what we wanted to do, what we were interested in, and asked who wanted to join in,” Cecire said. Three Virginia physics teachers, Tisdale, Lewis Fowler of Centreville High School in Clifton, and Henry Horn, who had been a physics teacher at West Springfield High School, volunteered to help. This year, two other teachers, Charles Merriam of Norfolk Academy and Joseph Fehr of Centreville High School, joined the group.
Differences and similarities
What immediately struck Horn was the enthusiasm of the Zambian students. “They sit down and listen,” he said. “They are really excited about learning. When we went last year, there was a teachers’ strike and students were coming up to the school and sitting in classrooms by themselves, waiting for someone to come in and teach them. You don’t find that in US schools.”
Fowler was struck by the similarities between Zambian and US students. The Zambian teachers, he said, “have the same problems with their students that we have with ours—understanding concepts, behavior-type things. Even though these kids want to learn, they have problems focusing, just the same thing we see in our schools.”
The US teachers also reassessed their own teaching based on what they saw in Zambia. “I’d gotten so involved with all of the technology we have, the computers and high-tech equipment, that I was losing sight of the physics,” Fowler said. “So I simplified. Based on what I saw and learned over there, I went back to the basics and I think my kids came away with a better understanding of physics.”
Cecire and Niland said they would like to expand the program and send young US math and science teachers to the Zambian schools. “We’d like to try to, in some way, help alleviate, or mitigate, the effects of the AIDS pandemic on the teaching force,” Niland said. “We’re not trying to take jobs away from Zambian teachers, but at this time, where they are having such dramatic teaching shortages, this is a way of keeping up the quality of the education.”
But any thoughts of expanding the program are “based on hypothetical funding,” Cecire said. For the moment, Niland said, “We want to keep our heads down and just stay focused on our own little portion. We’re not trying to change the world. We’re just trying to help out our fellow physics teachers.”
