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Ash Hartwell (Ed.D. University of Massachusetts, 1973) ashtrish@igc.apc.org

I grew up in Hawaii, and was a surf lover until banished to a New England college where skiing had to take the place of surfing. But skiing was expensive, and I had to work to make it through college, so I began to teach skiing. I found that teaching others to learn was as much fun as the sport itself. That has led to a life-long passion to understand how people learn, and to support the process of learning in various cultures and contexts. Living and working in Ethiopia, Uganda, Lesotho, Botswana and Egypt for extended periods, I have grown to believe in a deep, innate human love and capacity for learning (and playing), which is not inevitably deadened as youth fades into adulthood. I hold that every child - and potentially every adult - is a genius. My work seeks to support individual and community learning - which I believe to be the process of transformation that leads to greater capacity, and opportunity, to participate in society. Learning is connected to our personal meaning, and to our relationships to others. I have been involved in specific projects in Egypt, Ghana, Uganda, Malawi that apply learning principles to classroom, school, community programs, and I also work towards supporting and financing national policies that are built from local successes.

More formally, since I returned from over 25 years living in Africa in 1992, I have worked as a consultant to USAID's Africa Bureau, as well as to UNICEF, CARE and others. I presently am working for the Education Development Center, Inc. as director of the African education program. I am on the Board of Trustees of the 21st Century Learning Initiative, a transnational program to synthesize the best of research and development into the nature of human learning, and to examine its implication for education, work and the development of communities worldwide. The work of the Initiative has informed my contribution to CIE in my role as adjunct professor, where we have had seminars and independent study programs based on the research and readings from the Initiative.
www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~vmiller/onlearn.html