Mellon graduate program in Community – Engaged Scholarship

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This month a Mellon Fellow from Tulane University, Taofeeq Adebayo, will travel to Nigeria to begin teaching middle-school students from a science textbook he translated with four graduate student collaborators from University of Ibadan, Nigeria.

Adebayo was awarded the Andrew Mellon Fellowship in Community Engaged Scholarship in 2017, through which he began translating Longman’s Basic Science 1 into the Yoruba language for seventh-graders. His plan is to collaborate with seven schools, where he and the graduate students will teach from the translated text and perform scientific demonstrations with the help of local science teachers from those schools.

Adebayo’s Mellon project proposal cites a 2010 UNESCO policy brief that argues Africans should work to “plan late-exit or additive mother-tongue-based multilingual education, develop it boldly and implement it without delay.”

“His project suggests an approach that could allow kids who speak a language that is not widely used to think about science in their mother tongue, making science more accessible at an earlier age,” said Ryan McBride, administrative associate professor and director of the Mellon Graduate Program in Community-Engaged Scholarship.
– TULANE Today

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