Geography professor earns another Fulbright to work in Ethiopia.
The day he left Ethiopia in June, after a 10-month sabbatical in that country, geography professor Johnathan Bascom served as the external examiner for a dissertation at a the University of Addis Ababa. The person he was examining was only the third scholar to graduate from the new PhD program in geography at Ethiopia’s flagship institution. “It was a great honor,” Bascom said.
Bascom was in Ethiopia—at Bahir Dar University at the edge of Lake Tana—from September through June to teach with Ethiopian geographers, to conduct research with them and to author a digital atlas of the country. His many-faceted project was funded through a grant from the Fulbright Scholars Program.
On the ground
In January, Bascom will return to Ethiopia (where he grew up) to continue his work there through an extension of his 2011-12 Fulbright grant—the fifth since his first to Sudan as a graduate student. Fulbright grants are awarded to only 800 scholars annually by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. The program is the premiere international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government. It is designed to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries.
“I am not at all surprised that the United States would award another Fulbright to Johnathan because I have seen him on the ground in Ethiopia, having gone this last January when he was there,” said Bascom's geography colleague Jason VanHorn. “I can confirm his deep passion for cultural exchange in the teaching environment and his special ability to work within the bounds of his environment to be a man of renewal empowered by Jesus Christ.”
Bascom describes his work in Ethiopia as a type of “educational development.” He stresses intensive collaboration with his Ethiopian colleagues. The country, one of the few sub-Saharan countries not colonized by the British, currently has 24 public universities—most built from the ground up in the last 10 years. However, Ethiopia’s approach to education is stilted, Bascom said: “In many developing countries of Africa, and certainly in Ethiopia, most of their education is at a chalkboard, in lecture mode. Students are rote learners par excellence.”
One of the things this kind of learning fails to instill, Bascom said, is the ability to interpret data. The country also lacks the data itself, including Bascom’s specialty, geospatial data. To address Ethiopia’s “data poverty,” he hosted a GIS workshop for the nation’s geographers taught by VanHorn and his assistant, Calvin student, Emma DeVries. Using data they collected from the Ethiopian census, the professors and student taught 24 professors from universities throughout the country to upgrade their GIS software for mapping every aspect of their country.
The workshop was intended to both teach analytical skills and encourage the geographers to work together: “There are cultural reasons and political reasons why people don’t collaborate,” Bascom said. “But the workshop participants learned to value their colleagues.”
Many outgrowths
While bringing the nation’s geographers together, the workshop also left some tangible benefits: the online atlas of Ethiopia and a state-of-the-art geospatial lab built for the event at Bahir Dar University. The workshop also led to the resurrection of the defunct Association of Ethiopian Geographers. “The spinoffs from that workshop just keep going and going,” Bascom said.
One of the reasons he is returning for another Fulbright stint in Ethiopia is to help organize the first national conference of Ethiopian geographers in February of 2013. Another is to provide serve as coordinator and editor for the first geography of the country authored in more than 30 years. While Bascom is absent from Calvin’s Department of geology, geography, and environmental studies, he’s helped arrange for an Ethiopian colleague, Yirgalem M. Habtemariam, to teach this year in the Geo department.
Bascom will be accompanied to Ethiopia by his wife Betsy and daughter Joanna. (Son Ethan is a Calvin student.) Bascom is eager to re-engage with the many parts of his Fulbright project. “It is exciting to participate in this new era of higher education in Ethiopia,” he said. “My hope is to take students back with me next time.”
