Teaching Science Labs in Liberia

by David Bauer, 2005 Legacy Awardee & a member of the Creativity Foundation Junto

Liberia is tucked in the corner of West Africa as the coast turns from the Atlantic Ocean toward the Gulf of Guinea. It has been six years since the end of a brutal civil war and four years since the inauguration of the first democratically elected government. This past February, I traveled there to give workshops to science teachers on how to teach “lab classes without labs” as part of a team from the iHelpLiberia project.

I was traveling to Liberia with my former high school mentor from Hunter College High School (and Liberian expatriate), Asumana Jabateh Randolph, and with Heidi Baumgartner, currently a junior at the high school. We landed at night at Robert’s International Airport and drove an hour and a half to Monrovia, the capital. The house we were staying in was easily the nicest one in the neighborhood – though it lacked running water, or electricity.

I had started working with Liberian group in New York while in High School, so I was familiar with the state of the country. What I wasn’t prepared for was seeing the next origin how much had been destroyed during the war and had yet to be rebuilt. Trying to explain on the phone to relatives back home, the best I could come up with was “It’s very hard to explain how much ‘nothing” there’ is.”

We hadn’t contacted the government about our trip so that we could see for ourselves the conditions (and not be shown “model” schools instead.) At each workshop, we talked about different ways of teaching lab classes, how to engage the students and how to use battery- and solar-powered technologies they had available.

We had brought with us sets of donated graphing calculators (the TI-83, commonly used in US classrooms) and sensors that connected to the calculators and allowed them to instantly “become” scientific instruments that could measure things like temperature, pH, conductivity, and oxygen gas concentration. With the calculators, students could make graphics and devise experiments that required readings overnight.

Dividing our time between the capital and the countryside, we traveled up-country to Ganta, on the border with Guinea. Outside the capital, the reminders of the civil war remained: UN checkpoints every 30 kilometers checked for weapons and the main road was still littered with craters from explosive shells.

We stopped along the way to give workshops at the Booker Washington Institute in Kakata and at Gboveh High School in Gbanga, where fifty science teachers arrived from the town and nearby villages to attend. In Ganta, we arrived to find forty teachers, but no free room. We gave the workshop in the middle of a soccer field instead.

Driving back to the capital early in the morning, I was struck by the crowds of children walking along the side of the road – all heading to school. And despite the war-worn roads, there is law and order in the form of a new national police force (people do call them in emergencies, which is a pretty good vote of confidence), a vibrant free press, and free primary education.

Half a year later, I’ve not been able to remember a single child I met in Liberia who wasn’t excited about school. Education even trumps food in some cases, as I learned from a student at lunchtime, who was balancing a scoop of rice on his ruler. He had only enough money to buy a spoon or a ruler and found that his ruler could do double-duty at meals.

DAVID BAUER, 2005 Legacy Awardee and current member of the Creativity Foundation Junto, is in charge of his own lab at the Francis Crick Institute in London. His work focuses on how virus RNA structure affects replication, transcription, and immune activation. Formerly a Rhodes Scholar and an NSF postdoctoral fellow at Oxford University, David once teamed up with his high school teacher from Liberia. The Liberian organization David runs, United Liberia, began consultation with Liberian community and media organizations regarding the creation of a service to facilitate their publication of news content on the Internet by removing the technical burden associated with Internet publication. The service, United Liberia Press, launched in early 2006.