- Shannan Magee. (photo by John Solem)
When Shannan Magee goes into classrooms in Ghana children often want to know how it is that she can look like them and yet be an American. The answer, of course, is rooted in history and the enslavement of millions of Africans transported under horrific conditions to the Americas. The questions create teachable moments that Magee, an educator and cultural entrepreneur, seizes on to get young people to engage in the world of ideas.
Shannan Magee ’96, ’97G is all about teachable moments both in Ghana, where she has been living for months at a time since founding a school in the village of Agogo, and at home in Atlanta, Georgia, where she teaches in the public schools and helps advise home-schooling parents on how to make Africa and African history an integral part of their curriculum.
Magee is also all about ideas. And she hopes the ideas she generates with her bi-continental lifestyle will inspire fellow pedagogues on both sides of the Atlantic. The Youth Institute of Science and Technology in Agogo is the first of several model schools Magee and collaborators are launching in Ghana.
Magee and her team are dedicated to exposing children to science at an early age, and they are experimenting with culturally responsive teaching practices she hopes others will adopt. “As we say, if it’s a good idea please steal it,” said Magee during a recruiting swing through Massachusetts which included a visit to campus last spring.
A graduate of the Social Thought and Political Economy (STPEC) program, with a master’s degree in education added the following year, Magee came to campus to talk up her work in Ghana among faculty and to find students who want to get involved.
Her first UMass Amherst recruit, Shanika Davis ’09, is a junior majoring in journalism. She set out to spend a month in Ghana sharing her knowledge and skills in the classroom while living in the home of a local family. It was to be Davis’s first trip outside the United States. As an African American, she said, “I’m looking forward to seeing where my ancestors came from.”
Upon returning in September Davis reported that the trip exceeded all her expectations and that she only wished she could have stayed longer. “I saw some of the richest people I’ve ever seen and I saw some of the poorest people I’ve ever seen,” says Davis. In addition to teaching creative writing in one of Magee’s programs she visited newspapers and radio and television stations. She also toured the dungeons where human beings were held as part of the slave trade. “It was powerful,” says Davis.
Magee, a native of Springfield, Massachusetts, an Air Force veteran who served in Germany, and the mother of a grown son, has a special talent for setting ambitious goals and then accomplishing them, according to John H. Bracey Jr., a professor of African American Studies who taught Magee and who serves as a sponsor of her school in Agogo. “She is a doer, she is not an abstract intellectual type person at all,” said Bracey; her attitude towards any problem is, “how can we fix it? Let’s go!” On campus, Bracey was impressed by Magee’s energy and brilliance in navigating bureaucracy
“She is one of the most effective people I’ve ever seen... and she is a success by any stretch of what you want your students to be doing when they graduate,” said Bracey.
The problem that set the course for the current phase of Magee’s life became apparent on a sojourn to Ghana five years ago as a Fulbright scholar. It was clear to her that girls attended school in far fewer numbers than boys. Even those girls who were in school had very low career expectations for themselves.
Magee was teaching in the Atlanta public schools when she was awarded a Fulbright grant to go to Ghana as part of a cultural study tour for educators. “That year Georgia made Africa part of its middle-school curriculum,” explained Magee, “since I was a middle-school teacher it was an opportunity to learn how to better deliver the curriculum.” Her mandate during the eight-week trip was to identify primary resources for teaching children in Georgia about Africa and at the same time to study the education system in Ghana. “My research was on surveying 300 young female children and questioning them on their educational experiences,” said Magee. She saw that instead of going to school, girls were “working in the marketplace, fishing, or just walking around.”
Magee knew right away that she wanted to start a school. She returned to Ghana with her teenage son the following summer. An encounter with Nana Akuoko Sarpong, a national leader with a long political resume that includes serving as Minister of Health from 1985 to 1991, led to what Magee calls, “a deal I couldn’t refuse.” Sarpong, now an elder statesman who identifies himself on his own Web site as, “Paramount Chief of the Agogo Traditional Area,” found a building on a compound for Magee to turn into the Girl’s Institute of Science and Technology, the original name of her school.
Magee describes Sarpong, who has a law practice in the capital city of Accra, as a “renaissance chief” working overtime to bring innovative people and opportunities to his home city. Having led the Ghanaian delegation to a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) conference on the Slave Route Project, which is preserving and publicizing sites connected to the suffering associated with the African Diaspora, Sarpong recognized Magee as a kindred spirit for her devotion to understanding Africa’s place in world history.
Ghana has a tradition of welcoming American expatriates going back to W.E.B. Du Bois’s special relationship with Ghana’s first president Kwame Nkrumah—and their leadership roles in the Pan-Africanist movement. Du Bois’s stepson, David Graham Du Bois, who taught journalism at UMass Amherst until he died in 2005, gave Magee her first Pan-African curriculum.
With the promise of a building, Magee returned to her job in Atlanta and started shipping textbooks, computers, and microscopes to Agogo. The school opened its doors in 2006 under the day-to-day supervision of Magee’s local partner, Frank Boeteng, with three teachers and 23 students ranging from pre-K to sixth grade. The Youth Institute of Science and Technology is growing, adding a grade level each year as the oldest pupils progress and younger ones are accepted. Magee is currently partnering with Lamikco Hunt of Atlanta to start a second school in Accra. A third one is in the early planning stages.
She is also active in the African city’s cultural life as the general manager of one of Accra’s leading public affairs and African Diaspora music radio stations, 91.9 Vibe FM. That job, for which she doesn’t draw a paycheck, comes out of one her passions in Amherst, leading the Black Mass Communications Project at WMUA, the university radio station.
Magee, who uses her Twi (the language spoken in the Ashanti region of Ghana) “day name” Akosua, when she is in Ghana, credits UMass Amherst and specifically the program on Social Thought and Political Economy for influencing the path she is on. “The students were open-minded and there was a real passion for changing the world and making it better,” said Magee. “A lot of what I am doing now is an outgrowth of STPEC.”
Bracey said Magee, who before coming to campus earned an associate’s degree at Springfield Technical Community College, was a standout student in a seminar he taught using texts by German political economist and sociologist Max Weber to analyze the inner workings of institutions. She looked at a contraceptive clinic in Springfield, showing her classmates that their assumptions were out of step with the realities of the women it served. Despite some initial skepticism about Magee’s quest to significantly influence education in Africa, Bracey has learned never to question her ability to come through on her latest big idea. Commenting on the model schools Magee is founding in Ghana, Bracey said, “I don’t doubt her ability to string together a series of institutions that will be around 50 years from now.”
