Dr. Margaret Adamek's advice on international travel: Go for it!

Dr. Margaret Adamek with her Ethiopian students

     June 20, 2008 - By the time the keynote speaker finished talking about the need for schools of social work to internationalize their curriculum, Margaret Adamek was sold.

     Little did she realize listening to that talk nearly two years ago that it would lead to a trip to Ethiopia where last month she taught a course on scholarly writing at Addis Ababa University.

      Adamek, the director of the Indiana University School of Social Work’s Ph.D program was attending the annual meeting of directors of doctoral programs at the University of Calgary in Canada in the fall of 2006 where she met Dr. Alice Johnson Butterfield of the University of Illinois at Chicago, the keynote speaker.

      Johnson Butterfield described her university’s partnership with Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia.  The university had engaged in a university-to-university partnership which established Ethiopia’s first master’s degree in social work and a new School of Social Work.

      “Her focus was international social work education,” Adamek recalled. The whole theme of her speech was the need for doctoral programs to internationalize their curriculum in a global society, she explained.

     “I came away from that meeting feeling like it’s not an option, (but) we must internationalize our curriculum.”  Simply put, the school has to introduce doctoral students in social work to perspectives beyond the United States and Western cultural notions, she explained.

     “One way is to have international students in the program because they have interaction with other students. But we shouldn’t put it all on their shoulders,” Adamek stated.

     As part of its effort, Dr. Carmen Luca Sugawara is preparing to teach an international social development course for MSW and Ph.D students, Adamek noted.

      After she found herself on the same flight with Johnson Butterfield to Chicago from Calgary, Adamek invited her to be the keynote speaker for the annual PhD Spring Symposium in 2007.

     That invitation led to an invitation to Indiana University School of Social Work Professor Emeritus Valerie Chang to teach a course to Ph.D students in Ethiopia on how to be effective teachers. The assumption for many years was if you could earn a Ph.D you can teach, Adamek said. “It’s kind of crazy. You can teach graduate students but you are not approved to teach kindergarten.” The net result is you can end up with ineffective instructors, she noted. 

   Chang’s class was important to Addis Ababa University’s future plans. It has a MSW and Ph.D program and wants to initiate a BSW program as well. In addition, the social work program aims to expand from six campuses to 19 by 2010.

      When Johnson Butterfield learned of Adamek’s scholarly writing course, she was invited to go to Addis Ababa University, too.

     “I think I was up for the adventure, but I had some reservations,” Adamek acknowledged. After all it involved going to a third world country with an uncertain political situation.

     “Ultimately, I decided I could make an impact, not because my course was going to be so grand,” Adamek said. But through helping the doctoral students – they are the change agents in Ethiopia – she could help them get the word out about their topics and what they are learning.

     When Adamek teaches her writing class here, it takes 15 weeks. In Ethiopia, she had 2 ½ weeks. So instead of starting from scratch, she had her students take their MSW thesis and it was her job to help them carve out a 20-page publishable manuscript.

      Besides condensing the course, Adamek had to deal with some other hurdles, too. Electrical power, or the lack of it, for instance. The power was turned off by the government two days one week and three days the next from 7 a.m. to 8:30 p.m..

     Not only did she have to plan her showers – there was no water available when the power was off – but she and her students had to devise ways for them to be able to use computers to finish writing assignments on time.

      Adamek realized she had asked students to turn in a draft the next day, but the power was off on the day they were supposed to work on the paper. They compromised by moving the start of class from 9 a.m. to noon, so they would have some time after the power came back on the night before to work on their paper.

     Living in Addis Ababa took some adjusting to as well. There were no street signs and buildings had no addresses. If you took a taxi or bus, you needed to know the name of the neighborhood you wanted to go to or a landmark. Cabs had no meters so it’s necessary to negotiate the fare before you started out.

     People of wealth lived among those with little or nothing. The difference was people of means lived in compounds surrounded by gates and sometimes barbed-wire. She even saw a couple of people wearing an Indiana Pacers and Indianapolis Colts shirts, though she didn’t think they had any idea what the names represented.

     Also, it wasn’t unusual to see herds of sheep and goats mixed in with traffic along the streets.

      She was often approached by children looking for money. Some could speak a little English, saying, “Hi, I love you.” When she asked one little boy about his mother and father, he mimicked sleeping and said, “Gone, HIV.”

     Sitting at a coffee shop, she witnessed the realities of life there. Adamek saw one little boy sitting happily with his parents, while the restaurant staff shooed away another little boy looking for money.

      She and Johnson Butterfield also dropped off clothing for a baby taken in by a grandmother who was already raising her two granddaughters. The grandmother had spotted a woman with the baby out in the rain and invited them to stay at her home. The woman told the grandmother she had to go and get their things, but never returned.

      While Adamek is back in Indiana, her course is not over. Her students are to e-mail the final version of their paper to her in July.

      When she did return at the end of May, Adamek got off the plane thinking, well, she wouldn’t have to worry about what days the power might be turned off here. She was wrong.

      She had just gotten home when a storm knocked the power out and they were without power for the next three days.  

            Adamek’s advice for anyone who has the opportunity to travel internationally, ‘Go for it!”  The lessons learned about other cultures and the contrast with life in the U.S. are well worth it.