Final Project

Cultural Influences on Higher Education in Nicaragua’s Autonomous Regions

Background

Below is a link to the final project that Lucy Luong and I worked together to create. It gives some background about the general higher education system in Nicaragua (in a bit more detail than the “About Nicaragua” page on this site), talks a bit about the unique aspects of the mission, vision, and curriculum of the URACCAN, and proposes ways that we can help increase access to education in Nicaragua.

This project is still a work in progress, as we have only scratched the surface in collecting the ethnographic information that we are looking to obtain. So far, we have collected responses to some key questions about the URACCAN experience in Nicaragua’s autonomous regions via email and Skype interviews, and this information has been incorporated into the presentation below. Going forward, we hope to collect more email responses and to conduct some oral interviews with other URACCAN students during our visit to Siuna. These responses will provide us with a clearer picture of the impact that URACCAN has on Nicaragua’s autonomous regions and it’s unique culture.

The responses will also inform the structure and content of the cultural-exchange trip, in which URACCAN students will have the opportunity to visit Dartmouth, that is proposed near the end of the presentation. Ideally, we will be able to help URACCAN students have a similar experience to that which we will be having on our CCESP service trip to Nicaragua by inviting them for a cultural immersion educational experience at Dartmouth College, in the spirit of true “cultural exchange.” A program like this, however, has not yet been approved, and the next step for our project is to put together a proposal to various funding sources on our campus in order to make this program a reality.

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