"I Da Nam Zemlju Zapale, I Da Nam Nebo Izgore, Sinovi Drine Zivjece, Il Ko Heroji Umrijece" (from the siege of Gorazde).
I am a social studies educator and, at present, coordinator of the Social Studies Education program in teacher education. My primary interests concern cross-cultural perspectives on social studies education viewed through the lens of teaching and learning in both international and cross-cultural settings. In recent years, my travels have taken me to Balkan combat zones where teaching becomes a form of "pedagogical patriotism," to use a Bosnian phrase, performed by "teacher-heroes," to use a Kosovar phrase, and where perspectives of the Other are seen across frontlines as well as in textbooks.
I am now CoDirector of the Kosovo Civic Education Project, one part of the Balkan Educational Partnerships Program, and plan on returning to Prishtina over the next year to work with Kosovar colleagues involved in curriculum development and teacher training. "What do you do with heroes and teacher-heroes?" they ask, in the aftermath of a Kosovar parallel educational system that operated under siege conditions for almost a decade prior to the war and the ethnic cleansing. In addition to collaborative work with my Kosovar colleagues, I am also involved in research that will attempt to answer their very question.
I will be returning to Bosnia during 2006 as well, to the University of Sarajevo, under a second Fulbright Scholar Award, to conduct research on postwar Bosnian education. The Fulbright is a continuation of my research on schooling and "pedagogical patriotism" in Bosnia during the war and, in particular, the war schools of Sarajevo during the siege of the city. My book,
The Heroes of Treca Gimnazija: A War School in Sarajevo, 1992-1995 (2001), is a case study of one war school under siege conditions; it was recently translated from the English by Jasmina Hadzic as
Heroji Trece Gimnazije: Ratna Skola u Sarajevu, 1992-1995 (2004), and published by the Institute for History in Sarajevo. I am presently working on another book,
The War Schools of Dobrinja: Reading, Writing, and Resistance During the Siege of Sarajevo , a case study of neighborhood schools dead on the Sarajevo frontlines. This research was supported by my first Fulbright Scholar Award, at the University of Sarajevo, where I had previously taught as a Visiting Scholar several years earlier.
For a number of years prior to my involvement in Bosnia, I wrote about America's Vietnam War, about our perspectives of that war viewed through an American social education, and about Vietnam's American War, and Vietnamese perspectives of the war viewed through a Vietnamese social education. I was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Ho Chi Minh City (once the University of Saigon) during 1992, 23 years after I first returned from Viet Nam where I served with the US Army in the Vietnamese Central Highlands during 1968-1969. It was this experience as a young man walking through Vietnamese and Montagnard hamlets and villages that shaped my interest in cross-cultural perspectives of the Other amidst the extremity of wartime conditions. In the words of a Vietnamese phrase, "Di Mot Quang Dang, Hoc Mot Sang Khon" (Go a Distant Road, and Learn a Basketful of Wisdom), my own road has taken me some distance from the Vietnamese Central Highlands to now walk the highlands of the Bosnian Krajina and the Drenica Valley of Kosovo/a, and any baskets of wisdom I might have learned are found in the writings of my journey.
