Bangladesh – Development & Community
January Term

Development and Community in Bangladesh won the 2006 Andrew Heiskell Awards For Innovation in International Education. This prestigious award celebrates HECUA’s experiential and collective learning practices and the ways in which HECUA programs cultivate the skills and depth of understanding required to engage society and effectively influence change across the world.

In its inception and short history since 1971, Bangladesh has been the focus of international agencies, governmental organizations, and NGOs implementing and testing various models of development. Students will hear from development theorists and development practitioners. They will talk to the intended beneficiaries of development programs. Through theoretical inquiry and structured experiential learning, students will be presented with conceptual tools to compare and contrast the local understanding of "development" and social change used by the materially poor rural and urban Bangladeshis with the development discourses of experts and the urban elite. Through lectures, discussions, demonstrations, and group field study (with Bangladeshi collaborators), students in the course will explore the ideologies, policies, and practices of socioeconomic development in rural (Comilla and Dhaka districts) and urban (Dhaka) Bangladesh. Our study of community development in Bangladesh will also be grounded in a basic introduction to the culture of Bangladesh, including religion, so as to better understand both aspirations and tensions in the development process.

The course not only introduces students to the challenges faced by local people in urban and rural settings, but also raises critical awareness of the practical challenges of development programs.

Central Questions

• What goals for development does Bangladesh hold for itself and feel are most important?
• What is the role of community in determining the development process?
• How can visiting students make a contribution and bring relevancy back home to local communities?

General Schedule

Our partner institution Independent University Bangladesh is located in the capital city of Dhaka; the program is based there, but students travel to rural villages for field work.  While in the villages students stay at dormitories on the campuses of development agencies.

Faculty

A faculty member from the IUB is joined in teaching this course by a faculty member from a consortium institution.

Professor Haroun Er Rashid
Van Dusenbery, Hamline University

Extras

This program is worth 1 course credit (4 semester hours or 6 quarter credits).

The program fee covers round-trip airfare from Minneapolis to Dhaka, airport transfers, group transportation to field sites, planned group excursions, lodging, all breakfasts, most lunches and dinners, medical insurance and administrative costs. Housing changes throughout the program and is based in a hotel, hostel or with a host family.

Lectures and readings are in English, and interpreters help translate Bengali in the field. Instruction in basic Bengali phrases is offered on the program.

A Rewarding Experience for US Undergraduates with IUBians in Bangladesh
By Lyndel, a Sociology / Anthropology major from St. Olaf College and 2008 student participant

What could we expect? Twenty undergraduates, coming to Bangladesh for the first time for a month of study and direct experience of village life? We arrived on Thursday, January 3 2008 and were welcomed by our host Independent University, Bangladesh (IUB).

Led by Jim Laine, Professor of Religion at Macalester College (USA), and Haroun Er Rashid, Professor at the Independent University, Bangladesh, our group studied community development for nearly a month. This program strives to have students live what they are studying by combining experiential field-work with the typical lecture and class discussion format.

Comprised of students from several colleges in Minnesota, the cold, upper Midwest of America, we have left the land of ice and snow to spend two weeks talking with villagers in Manikganj, and three days learning and touring in Srimangal.

After outfitting ourselves with salwar kameezs, punjabis, and overcoming jetlag our first day, we departed Dhaka for field work at Proshika, an NGO near Manikganj. There, we split into five research teams: health, education, micro-credit/village economy, gender, and agriculture. Each morning the groups ventured into nearby villages and markets where people received us graciously and patiently answered our questions. The IUBians, I mean, IUB students who accompanied us were crucial to our studies. In addition to interpreting, they helped us contextualize information and provided insightful perspectives on subjects we struggled to understand. Along the way, they became great friends.

Though each group maintained a focus, we drew from one another's experiences as a class and as a close community. More than once I would ask questions about health or education in an interview session, then happen upon a well of information that pertained to my subject, micro-credit. As the diffuse boundaries between our interest areas became clear, so did the complex nature of the villager's troubles and the proposed solutions. We realized that micro-credit, often hailed as a beacon of development in America has serious challenges, that the ability to take time for health care is a rare privilege, and that education cannot be viewed as separable from poverty. Nothing is as singular as we expected.

We returned to Dhaka and joined a fitting dinner in our honour hosted by IUB on Tuesday, January 22. During our fulfilling final days in Dhaka, we had discussions with directors of national NGOs and visited IUB campus, national monuments and urban slums in Dhaka city.

As I look back, our time in Bangladesh has been thrilling, sobering, fun and eye opening. We are extremely grateful to IUB, Proshika, BRAC, IUB Prof. Haroun Er Rashid, our IUBian friends and countless other kind and gracious Bangladeshis for this unparalleled opportunity and rewarding experience.

If you have interest in other short-term programs that we offer, use the following short-cuts: