At the airport in Boston...

Post by Rich Gorham:

It's 9:05pm Eastern Standard Time on Thursday, July 26, and I'm at Boston's Logan Airport, E-terminal, Gate 11, awaiting the flight that will take me to Dubai, then on to Karachi. I arrived at the airport around 8 and quickly spotted my traveling companion, Julia Perlowski, a drama and English teacher currently working in Revere, Massachusetts. The check-in process was simple and quick and we now have close to two hours to wait before boarding the 12-hour flight. Better to be early than late, I suppose. Julia is hunting for a Starbucks and I found a magazine store. Our colleague Alan Nunez, the brilliant music teacher from New York City, arrived in Karachi earlier today, and posted a lovely photo of himself with his welcoming party - Mohsin Tejani and family. The fourth of our troupe, Brendan McGrath, an elementary school teacher and longtime Bread Loafer from Boston, flies tomorrow.

The week ahead is the culmination of 21 years of work, since Mohsin Tejani came to Andover Bread Loaf in 1997 as a participant in the teacher workshop. He returned to Bread Loaf for four summers, earning a Master's degree in English, graduating at Oxford in 2001. Back home, he served as a teacher, principal, school inspector, and in other roles, before founding The School of Writing, based on ABL principles. He joined the ABL staff in 2014 and we have the great joy of working with him in Andover each summer. Mohsin is one of my personal heroes. The School of Writing in Karachi has trained countless teachers and young people, and is one of the most creative and innovative organizations anywhere in the world. He has gotten it done with few resources, and done tremendous work. I am honored to call him my colleague and friend.

Mohsin originally came to Bread Loaf through the International Academic Partnership (IAP) - a collaboration between Phillips Academy, and the Aga Khan network of schools in South Asia and East Africa. The partnership connected us with Mohsin and many other brilliant teachers, including Lee Krishnan of Mumbai, David Wandera and Patricia Echessa-Kariuki of Kenya, Kermali Kermali of Tanzania, and many others. The IAP also supported our first two international conferences - in Karachi in 2000 and in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, in 2002. Although the partnership no longer exists, the ABL work in Karachi, Mumbai, and Nairobi, Kenya, is ongoing, lo these many years later.

I was fortunate enough to serve as one of the directors of the 2000 Karachi Conference, which we billed as the ABL Millennium Conference. (It seems almost quaint know to look back at the year 2000 and the turn of the millennium, which seemed like a really big deal at the time.) It was co-hosted by the school Mohsin was working at, and the Institute for Education Development, a teacher-training outfit. Several of us from the US flew to Karachi, and were joined by others from the network from India, Kenya, and Tanzania. All together, there were perhaps 50 folks there. Those of us veterans in the network presented workshops for less experienced teachers. The IAP funded the event and took care of all the logistics. It was run like a very traditional professional event. We worked Monday through Friday from 9am-5pm. There were directors, presenters, and participants. No youth were involved. There was a fancy dinner on Sunday evening to open the conference with important guests. I gave the keynote speech and was introduced as the Distinguished Professor from Phillips Academy. The Americans who attended the conference were housed in a fancy, 4- or 5-star hotel; the teachers from India were at a decidedly less fancy hotel some distance away. While I definitely appreciated the deluxe accommodations, we were all bothered by the hierarchies, which ran counter to our philosophies. I am proud of the work that we did there, and there were many positive outcomes - a group of teachers re-wrote the writing curriculum for the city based in part on ABL principles, for example - but truth is, we didn't really know what we were doing. The conference produced a literary magazine. Mohisn and I look at a copy the other day and giggled at how young we looked in our profile pictures.

Over the last 18 years, ABL has helped coordinate several more international conferences. In 2002 we were in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, at the Mzizima Primary School; in 2009 at the Aga Khan Schools in Nairobi, Kenya; in 2014 at the Bridge School in Port-au-Prince, Haiti; in 2015 at the Aga Khan High Schools in Mumbai, India; and in 2017 at the Borja and Amun Shea Schools in El Salvador, working with ConTextos. We've also helped with two conferences on the Navajo Nation in Arizona, in collaboration with the Nation and the Navajo Museum and Cultural Center, as well as countless others in the US (Lawrence, New York, New Orleans, South Carolina, Oakland, many more...)  We've learned a lot about how to work counter to hierarchies, to work in solidarity with others, and to learn as we practice. We've learned to include youth in our work in all ways. We're not perfect by any means, and we're constantly learning, but we've come a long way since 2000. David Wandera, now a professor at The College of New Jersey and director of the Bread Loaf Writing Centers, studies what it means to follow Dixie Goswami's mantra: "to intentionally communicate across difference."

And so the next two weeks will look very different from 2000. Next week, July 30-August 3, we'll work with Mohsin and The School of Writing in Karachi. The schools are on holiday, but Mohsin is assembling a group of ~25 youth and a group of teachers from area schools. We will work together with them to document life in the city of Karachi, through drama, music, writing, film, and other media, in preparation for a final exhibit on Friday August 3, and we will publish the work in an on-line book. In Mumbai the following week, the schools will be in session. Us visitors (who will also include Mohsin and Basil from Karachi, and Ingrid Hess, a children's book author and professor from U-Mass Lowell) will co-teach with local teachers in their classrooms. I have been paired with two teachers, and we've been communicating on-line in advance to plan lessons. By co-teaching, we will learn from each other. After three days of co-teaching, we will jointly conduct a one-day professional development conference for teachers from across Mumbai, on Thursday August 9, and then a one-day student workshop, on Friday August 10. All presentations will be joint efforts by visiting teachers and local teachers.

Perhaps the most exciting part of the two weeks to me are the Family Literacy Nights. This is a model developed in Lawrence that has spread throughout our network. It's very simple - we invite families to come to school and write with their children, following very simple prompts (e.g., I hope, I love, I wish...). The event always ends with a sharing session. We've seen them be very successful in different cities in the US, and I'm exciting to see the model in Karachi and in Mumbai.

And so I'm eager for the work to begin. I'm also checking BBC news for updates on the Pakistani election. Yesterday, Wednesday July 25, there was a fiercely contested national election, and it appears that criketeer-turned-politician Imran Khan may become the new Prime Minister. There was some violence around the election, and 400,000 military personnel at polling places to ensure fair elections. My sister is not sure I should get on this plane. I very much appreciate her concern, and I am indeed following the news, but I trust Mohsin and our other hosts, and I know we'll be cautious. I am also excited to be in Pakistan at such a crucial time in its history. The last time I went, in 2000, was but a few months after General Pervez Musharraf came to power after a military coup outsted the Bhutto government. It was an interesting time to be in Pakistan, the world's sixth-largest country, strategically positioned in the Middle East just north of India, south of Afghanistan, and west of China, and subject to competing interests and opportunities. The city of Karachi itself has grown from 13 million people to 22 million in the last 18 years, and apparently has undergone a huge amount of development. I am eager to see.

Still an hour and a half until we board the plane. Julia found a Starbucks and an iced tea. Hopefully I'll post again from Dubai.

Rich