Name: Mia Rybeck

Class Year: 2017

Internship Placement: I’m working with Fatoumata Sylla, Isabella Nugent, and Alice Lesnick as part of the Bi-Co Dalun Summer Action Research Fellowship.

What’s happening? We’d love to hear how your internship is going.

This was the first year of this fellowship, so we’ve been doing a lot of experimenting. This summer we’ve collaborated with three students at the University of Northern Ghana on various small community-based projects, using technology to communicate across the Atlantic. We’ve also spent a lot of time on research and reflection among the U.S. fellows who are meeting in person every day to try and contribute to the grounding of this program in our home institutions. Each week we have assigned each other readings that have felt relevant to the work we’re doing as we see our objectives and methods shift and change. Developing the fellowship and simultaneously engaging in it has forced me to think about the international educational objectives of our small institutions and the distinct location we engage in research from. Partaking in this experimental summer action research called “Lagim Tehi Tuma—Dreamwork We Do Together” has helped me think more and more about the power differentials implicit in different types of international collaboration and reframed aspects of the way I view “International Development” work. Our research has also allowed me to think about different types of formal and informal education in new ways — even in terms of seeing this fellowship as some intersection of different types of education as I continue to learn and “unlearn” through our emergent research. I’ve learned so much from my co-fellows Isabella and Fatou (see their blog posts for more info/perspectives on the program!) as well as our co-fellows in Ghana and all of the various types of mentors who have been pulled in to discuss and advise us and Alice Lesnick, the professor we are working with here at Bryn Mawr. I’m grateful to everyone who has given so much time to my learning processes and I hope I am able to carry forward the knowledge and new perspective I do into any future endeavors.

How I heard about my internship:

I heard about this opportunity through an email from Ann Brown who works with the Bi-Co Education Department.

Why I applied for my internship:

I was excited to be doing something on campus working with other students and getting a sense of some type of academic research with the Education Department.