Learning from and Teaching Africans

Birgit Brock-Utne

Dec 2022 · Cambridge Scholars Publishing

About this ebook

This book brings together stories from the author’s exciting life as a professor, consultant and researcher, mostly in Africa, but also in Japan, New Zealand, Norway and the US. The book is aimed at college students in cross-cultural communication and international education and with a special interest in African countries, their languages, their way of looking at life. It dismantles the myth of the thousands of African languages, and shows that many of them have millions of speakers and all of them are cross-border languages. Africans are not “anglophone”, “francophone” or “lusophone”; they are afrophone. The book also discusses projects that aim at cooperation between universities in the North and the South. Why did two of the projects the author has been involved in succeed so well and a third one fail?

About the author

Birgit Brock-Utne is a Professor in Education and Development at the University of Oslo, as well as a Visiting Professor and consultant around the globe. She has served as a Professor at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and as the President of the British Association of Comparative and International Education. She was also the Norwegian coordinator of the Language of Instruction in Tanzania and South Africa project, which ran from 2001 until 2013, and one of the Norwegian coordinators of the TRANSLED project, which ran from 2015 until 2021.