Professor David Wandera (MA ‘08, MLitt ‘13) will serve as the 2023 BLTN Faculty Fellow , sharing his expertise in intercultural communication, and engaging in conversations about pedagogies in our “diverse, globalizing world.” We asked Professor Wandera to answer a few questions about his background and his work this summer, and we relay his responses here.

We understand you’ve spent a fair bit of time at Bread Loaf. Could you recap your BLSE history? 

While a few lines cannot effectively summarize my time at Bread Loaf, I first came to BLSE in 1999, when I travelled to the USA to attend Andover Bread Loaf (ABL). That year, I was among the ABL guests who came to the mountain for a two-day visit. During that  visit, I decided that I wanted to return to Bread Loaf for the MA degree. I also decided to become a member of BLTN. After some procrastination and fundraising, while working as a high school teacher of English and literature in Nairobi, Kenya, I attended my first BLSE summer in 2004. Needless to say, my Kenyan friends always wondered about the name “Bread Loaf”. It sounded redundant. The Swahili (National language) translation of both “Bread” and “Loaf” is “mkate,” so for a Native Swahili speaker it conjured the name, “mkate mkate”. It also did not sound like the name of an academic institution. Before the end of the four MA summers, in 2008, I had decided that I would continue with the MLitt program. Fast forward to 2010, when I migrated to the USA as a full-time doctoral student at The Ohio State University, I was in my second MLitt summer at BLSE. Over my time at BLSE to date, I have taken up several roles including being a student, Director’s Assistant, writing center coordinator, BLTN VT campus coordinator, and faculty. A lot has changed at BLSE since that hot summer afternoon in 1999 when we were all seated in the Blue Parlor talking to faculty. In my opinion, the special and unique aspect of the place remains the same. I am in admiration of kindred souls (i.e., fellow Bread Lifers) who have stayed at BLSE for much longer than I have.

What are your roles this summer? 

I am faculty, I am advising a DRW project, I am a participant in the cross-class exchanges for the Conflict Transformation/Change participants, I am the Ken Macrorie Writing Center director, and I am the BLTN Faculty Fellow.

“My advice is for all of us to take advantage of how the world is so connected in order to extend our awareness about others in the world. Find someone at Bread Loaf who does not come from your worldview and culture. Learn from them. Let the learning be deeply transcultural and let this immerse you in a sea of self-reflexive wonder and questioning. “

You came to the States from Kenya. Tell us about how that came to be.  

Yes. Kenya is a multilingual, multiethnic, and multicultural country in Sub-Saharan Africa. My coming to the USA from Kenya is a long story…the very shortened version is that I first heard about the Andover Bread Loaf (ABL) program from the head teacher at a private school in Nairobi, Kenya, where I had just been employed as a teacher of English and literature. He mentioned that one of my colleagues in the English Department had been to the USA the previous year for the ABL program and he wondered whether I was interested in going that year. I was excited about it. At that time, Phillips Academy, which was the home base for the ABL program, and the private School, Aga Khan Academy, had a collaborative agreement where such teacher travels happened during the summer. This was the start of my career and migration trajectory at BLSE and in the USA. Actually, in addition to my sense of wonder from watching televised programs from the USA from when I was very young, my curiosity about travelling to the USA might have started when I was in early middle school. At that time, I was being home-schooled. My tutor, a friend of my mother, originally from Hawaii, had taken residence in the Kenyan coastal town of Kilifi, where we lived.  

You are credited with saying “What happens at Bread Loaf doesn’t stay at Bread Loaf.” What do you mean by that? 

This saying is not my original saying…it was very popular at Bread Loaf, VT, in the summer of 2011. I heard several people use it and I liked it because it captured my transcultural identity. On a personal level, I noticed how my exposure to life in the USA, specifically BLSE, and in NYC, where I would transit into and out of the USA, expanded my global exposure. Pedagogically, during my MA program, I would come to BLSE and learn about some interesting concepts in pedagogy, English, and literature and then return to Kenya where I would teach some of these to my students. For me, what happened at Bread Loaf needed to not stay at Bread Loaf to go into fruition. With other Kenyans who were attending Bread Loaf, we developed what we referred to as a “Nairobi slice,” in harmony with the “bread” metaphor, where we undertook teacher and student workshops in Nairobi. This culminated in an international workshop in 2009, where we had 13 BLSE educators, two from Mumbai, India, and several schools in Nairobi undertaking a week-long collegial teaching, teacher workshop, and student writing retreat. After taking a class on the poetry of Robert Frost, yet another example of my taking what happens at Bread Loaf to my students in Kenya, the coursework became the subject of a self-reflexive academic paper that I authored in 2016, titled “Teaching Poetry Through Collaborative Art: An Analysis of Multimodal Ensembles for transformative Learning,” published in the Journal of Transformative Education, where I reflected on text-image ensembles that my Nairobi-based students and I deployed cross-culturally to access the world of Robert Frost’s poetry.  

Wandera, D. (2016). Teaching Poetry Through Collaborative Art: An Analysis of Multimodal Ensembles for transformative Learning. Journal of Transformative Education, 14, p. 305 – 326. http://jtd.sagepub.com/content/14/4/305 

What will you be doing with BLTN this summer? 

I will be learning with the BLTN group about meaning making and sharing across culture, as we unpack communication across difference and explore the kinds of self-work needed to position educators to facilitate learning in our diverse globalizing world.  

Last year, your Transcultural Literacies class was very popular among BLTN members. How does its content relate to the work of BLTN? 

I am honored that this class resonated with those in class as well as others who heard about it. I think the popularity of this class came from how we constantly held space for authentic conversations about self-and-other in the world. The course covered a range of topics related to the intersection of language and culture. Students found that they had experiences through which they connected to our course coverage. I think that Transcultural Literacies is the kind of class whereby the learning is as much about the students bringing themselves to the space as it is about the instructor curating opportunities for productive discomfort.  

What advice do you have for this year’s BLTN fellows? 

My advice is for all of us to take advantage of how the world is so connected in order to extend our awareness about others in the world. Find someone at Bread Loaf who does not come from your worldview and culture. Learn from them. Let the learning be deeply transcultural and let this immerse you in a sea of self-reflexive wonder and questioning.  

What’s one thing most people don’t know about you?  

The Swahili word for coffee is “kahawa.” I am particular about my coffee. I like to buy whole grain medium roast Kenyan coffee, Kahawa brand, and I grind it myself to make each cup. I also enjoy the rich aroma of coffee.