Wednesday I got to present the research that Dr. Eric Ananga
and I have been working on at the triennial meeting of the Ghana Studies
Association, this year held at the University of Cape Coast. Mr. Wisdom Havor,,
our coordinator for Ebubonko Basic School, provided some testimony about the
impact of Yo Ghana! at his school.
The paper’s title is “’They Are Not More than Us’: Letter
Exchanges between American and Ghanaian Students.” Our research shows that
although before exchanging letters, Ghana students widely associate the U.S.
with development, the exchanges both lead them to improve their writing and to
identify strengths in their own cultures and societies.
The conference itself has been a lot of fun. There are scholars here from North America,
Europe, and of course Ghana, from graduate students to old hands. It is much less pretentious than academic
conferences I have attended in the U.S. or Canada, but the level of
intellectual exchange is high. I’m
already looking forward to the next one, in 2019.
Dr. Benjamin Talton, the Conference Chair, noted in his
opening that although the GSA started in the U.S., it quickly became a shared
enterprise with Ghana. It struck me that
this is also how Yo Ghana! began. And it has been very gratifying to have so
many scholars of Ghana take an interest in the work Yo Ghana! is doing. There were about sixty in our session.
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