PEEKS A Hand-up to the World Beryl has been using her Monterey-based classroom as part of a lifetime dedicated to promoting justice and equity in third world countries by training and educating change-agents for appropriate interventions.

Beryl Levinger

For many decades I’ve been on a mission of leveraging research and education in responding to the challenges of injustice and poverty in every part of the world. My work has been motivated by the hopeful belief that systems and people can change.

For the past 15 years I’ve been a professor at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, an affiliate of Middlebury College, and involved in international development projects designed to alleviate poverty.

A profoundly moving incident happened to me back in the 60s. I was a Peace Corps volunteer conducting door-to-door interviews in rural Colombia. We were attempting to identify the needs of people in the impoverished region where I was serving at the time.

I knocked on the door of one poor home and a young woman invited me in. I began the interview:

“How many children do you have?” I asked.
The woman burst out crying.
"Is this a bad time?" I asked her. “Shall I come back later?”
The woman wanted me to continue so I asked again, "How many children have you?"
"I guess two," the woman answered. "Because my baby died."
When I attempted to learn details, it turned out that the woman had been speaking the truth in a dreadfully literal sense. She showed me the small body of the infant who had died moments before.

Of course, the incident was intensely disturbing. But the memory of that woman with her recently deceased child has always carried an ultimately hopeful message. My presence at the house that morning had obviously been a symbol to the woman that change was possible. She thought that I could perhaps be a source for the improvements that she desperately needed.

For four decades I’ve been involved in projects in 77 countries around the world working to help people, like that woman, identify solutions to the problems that limit the possibilities of their lives.

In the Beginning

My interest in international human development began in January 1966 when I was a sophomore at Cornell University. An American History seminar being taught by a distinguished professor named Walter Lefebre. The seminar changed my life forever because I met a fellow student, Sam Levinger. We fell in love, got married, and joined the Peace Corps in Colombia.

This was my first serious exposure to gut-wrenching poverty. We were working with people who were trying to eke out an existence in a barren wilderness left by clear cutters who had destroyed a jungle for the purpose of oil exploration. Eventually the oil, the company, and the jungle disappeared. What remained were people locked in a day-to-day struggle to remain alive.

Sam and I were young, inexperienced, and under-managed so we spent a few aimless months trying to figure out what we were doing. Then I learned that five hours away someone had developed a teaching methodology for promoting effective classroom instruction under extraordinary circumstances.

Imagine being a child in a classroom — sometimes meeting outdoors — with no electricity, blackboard, and few textbooks. Try to imagine sitting with a hundred other kids, perhaps two per seat, representing grades one to five, learning from a teacher who had, herself, attended school only through the ninth grade.

A genius named Oscar MogollÛn discovered a method, based upon principles of active and problem-oriented learning, by which a single undereducated teacher could effectively teach students under those challenging circumstances.

I found Oscar and we became friends and collaborators. I was just 20 at the time, and was setting out on a journey that would take me through a lifetime of advocacy for equity in education — providing support for people living in under-served conditions.

Sometimes we plant a seed and don’t know what the seedling will grow into. In this case of Oscar and me, the seed grew into an international movement that continues today to extend education to marginalized learners around our planet.

Sam and I finished with the Peace Corps in 1969 but we continued working eight more years in Latin America. I had acquired a thirst to experiment with ways to improve both the quality and accessibility of education.

I returned to the States in 1977 to finish my Ph.D. studies graduating from the University of Alabama, which was as socially removed from Cornell’s ivy halls as it was from Colombia’s steaming jungles. But the university had a contract with USAID (the US Agency for International Development) that paid my expenses while I studied. It was a wonderful period in my life!

I eventually became the senior vice president of CARE and the president of AFS Intercultural Programs, which is one of the world’s largest community-based volunteer organizations. We placed thousands of young people in cultural exchange programs as a way of promoting international justice and peace. I also held senior positions in a number of other international non-profits.

Becoming a Monterey Institute Professor

In 1992 I was invited to join the faculty of the Monterey Institute. Besides classroom teaching, I conduct about ten major development-oriented projects every year focusing on multiple countries. For example, I recently provided training to people seeking to combat the human sex trade traffic on the island of Cyprus.

My formal teaching activities work together with field research and development projects in a complementary fashion. Classrooms often provide environments in which I work with students to develop theories and methodologies, which we then take into the field to validate, refine, and sometimes to discard.

So the goal of my teaching at the Monterey Institute is to blend mutually reinforcing activities of theory development and real world practice together in dynamic feedback loops. The fieldwork generates case studies that then reinforce classroom learning; the classroom provides models and philosophical underpinnings for the work in the field. The work in the field often comes right into the classroom; studies in the classroom often go right out into the field.

It’s beautiful!

I’ve conducted projects in 77 different countries in every area of the world and have worked with most of the UN Agencies, the State Department, as well as with many prominent international non-profit organizations. My projects are diverse covering topics ranging from the fashion industry to terrorism, and seemingly everything in between.

Even though I’m engaged with many different issues calling for diverse sorts of learning and training, all of them have in common the theme of using education in the service of promoting justice and alleviating poverty.

Each program begins with our engaging local people in the formulation of a strategy. Together we think through the issues and realities that undergird the challenges we face as we seek to identify and implement solutions.

We’re not trying to provide band-aid fixes. Instead we seek to remedy root problems while focusing our energies on transformational and sustainable results. We look at broad problems, identify local assets, and try to harness them while filling in missing pieces. We seek to change in fundamental ways how industry, government, and school systems serve the needs of people who are being addressed.

We recently provided a retrospective on the educational reform that’s taken place around the world in communities served by one-teacher schools like the ones that Oscar and I helped to develop in Colombia 40 years ago. We learned that the change has become systemic; we started an educational revolution that continues to spread.

We now know how to solve many of the world’s problems. The challenge, of course, is one of dissemination.

Bringing Together Academia and the World

Our Development Project Management Institute (DPMI) is one the Monterey Institute’s most exciting offerings. DPMI is a three-week program that thrusts participants into the world of poverty alleviation and development. It serves as a boot camp for people who want to do something meaningful to address poverty and injustice, but who lack the skills to do so.

Our first DPMI seminar was held in 2002 with 19 students in one session. Now we are conducting four sessions every year — two of them on the Monterey Institute’s campus, one of them in Middlebury, and another in Washington, DC.

DPMI is an extraordinarily powerful program. It supports itself through a $2,500 tuition. A faculty of three leads sessions six hours a day working directly with 30 or so attendees. Students then work individually or in groups to process the content they acquired from the formal instruction.

The DPMI curriculum is both intensive and highly practical. Participants become proficient in project design and evaluation. They also acquire group leadership skills and techniques for engaging stakeholders in their own development.

We use a set of intricate simulations to make our classroom learning as practical as possible.

Students engage in effective role-play that places them in situations where they have to make assessments and take decisions. Through simulations the students are, in effect, testing theories in the face of real-world challenges.

People who complete the course leave with a certificate and a set of professional skills and attitudes that will help them make a difference in the world.

One of the most common comments we hear at the program’s conclusion is, “These three weeks have changed my life.”

My work as academic director of DPMI captures the essence of my entire career. I teach in an academic setting, but my focus is upon preparing learners for meaningful fieldwork. In recent years I’ve begun to apply what I’ve learned about transforming educational systems in developing countries to the challenges of leaving no child behind in the US. My work has taught me that everywhere in the world good leadership lies at the heart of social justice and transformation.

We obviously live in a world that is neither fair nor equitable. Nevertheless, people of goodwill, armed with culturally appropriate techniques and tools, can assist others to make significant and sweeping changes in their lives.

In some ways things are getting better in this world; in some ways they’re getting worse. The AIDS epidemic has cancelled out some of the progress made in the early 80s and 90s, particularly in Africa.

I was research director for a report that examined how well the world is doing at educating all girls. We have made great gains in promoting equity and justice in this area. In some places the increase in girls’ enrollment is startlingly higher.

There are signs of hope. We’re making great strides in treating diarrhea, measles, and pneumonia, which have been primary killers of children under five around the world. Malaria remains a big problem. We still face the scandal of people dying for the lack of $17 worth of medicine.

Every day 28,000 children under five years of age die of preventable diseases.

If we could save only one of them, I would feel all my efforts to be justified. As long as a single one of them dies, I won’t feel that I’ve done enough.