Reflections by Dr. Michael Pearce, Flex Time Guest Lecturer at ALU Rwanda
By: Dr. Michael Pearce, lecturer in Socially Engaged Theatre at the University of Exeter
In April I visited Rwanda to develop a new research project on conservation and tourism. During my two-week stay I travelled all over the country, from the lush and mountainous Volcanoes National Park to the savannah landscape of Akagera National Park. There I met with many interesting people working for conservation and in the tourism industry at all levels who kindly provided me with their insight and offers of support for my research.
In-between travelling, I also delivered a short series of seminars with undergraduate students from the new Africa Leadership University (ALU). Nestled within the dramatic landscape of Rwanda in its capital Kigali, ALU is an inspirational new initiative. The university seeks to nurture the minds and hearts of Africa’s future leaders through an interdisciplinary and challenge-led learning approach that is vigorously decolonial. When Fred Swaniker, the university’s founder, invited me to host some seminars at ALU I jumped at the opportunity. ALU’s aims chime strongly with my research goals and my pedagogical beliefs. As an African currently living in the diaspora committed to contributing to the continent’s advancement there is also a personal and ideological resonance.
The seminars I held at ALU focused on the culture of African wildlife tourism and conservation. Thinking about tourism and conservation from a cultural perspective requires an approach that draws on knowledge from the sciences, social sciences as well as the humanities, so for each seminar I set readings that confronted this topic from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. The texts were theoretically dense but the students rose to the challenge. Over the course of our meetings we covered a lot of ground and delved into some complex issues, including the importance of domestic tourism to economic development and sustainability, the extent to which local tourism might have a positive impact on conservation and the legacy of colonialism on conservation practices and participation in wildlife tourism. With my background in theatre and performance I was keen to challenge the students to think about how the arts and theatre in particular might be useful to thinking about and through current conservation issues and practices in Africa.
What inspires me about research-led teaching is the insight students bring to particular problems I am grappling with myself. In this way the process of teaching becomes an integral part of the research process and vice versa. At its best, the classroom becomes not just a place where the lecturer imparts knowledge to students but a space in which new ideas are generated. The ALU students’ experiences and backgrounds from a range of countries, including Ivory Coast, Kenya, Rwanda and Zimbabwe ensured a most lively and varied discussion that was regional and even continental in its reach.
Teaching in a multi-lingual and multi-cultural classroom is not without its challenges. But by encouraging students to draw on their own cultural and national experiences we were able to generate a lot of information about specific domestic tourism practices and how they intersected with conservation goals which we could then compare, contrast and critique.
The multicultural composition of the seminar made me think about the importance of a diverse student body to a healthy university ecosystem. ALU’s mission is to bring together students from across the continent to discuss and find solutions to challenges facing Africa. My interdisciplinary research aims are to connect experts from fields that are not necessarily obvious bedfellows in order to re-think approaches to understanding and exploiting relationships between tourism and conservation in Africa and imagine new ones that will deliver sustainable benefits to wildlife conservation. What was particularly exciting about the experience of teaching at ALU was how conducive the cultural composition of the classroom was to generating and exploring interdisciplinary ideas.
I am currently back in the UK seeking funding to develop my research further. I would like to thank ALU for the opportunity to engage with their students and participate in their rather unique learning environment. The experience taught me a lot too, both clarifying my research aims as well as pedagogically. I hope to visit again soon.
