May 13, 2022: Teresa Nowalk has served as a Leadership Resident (LR) at Harpswell’s Boeng Trabek dorm since July 2021. Leadership Residents are young women in their mid-twenties and older who volunteer to teach, mentor and live with Cambodian university students in Harpswell’s dormitories and leadership centers in Phnom Penh. Learn more about the LR program here.

As a Harpswell Leadership Resident, one of my main responsibilities is to equip the girls with critical thinking skills. This is most obvious in weekly “CD Discussions,” where students are tasked with digging deep into current events. This could mean untangling complex diplomatic relationships or making sense of stock market trends. After researching on their own, the students come together in groups  to develop endnotes. This is where they show how they processed their research by developing future scenarios and strategies that might make those futures possible. Usually, this involves calls-to-action for governments, individuals, and/ or the international community as a whole.

Even within Harpswell’s core curriculum, there is ample opportunity for the girls to consider information within broader, global themes. From the first core class of Health and Nutrition, for example, students are prompted to consider where they learned about emotions and the cultural contexts of mental health.

However, one of the best parts of being an LR is finding moments to provoke critical thinking beyond the required classes. This often happens during the various clubs and individual meetings that fill up my days. And it is here that a rather simple question has become a powerful tool of inquiry: why? 

By asking why, the girls have to pause and think… well why? When facilitating reading club, this is especially important as the texts we interact with are typically within Western,  or non-Asian, contexts. So why is how I move that content to broader themes that can then be more easily applied to their own experiences. 

For instance, this was particularly useful when a handful of students and I read Trevor Noah’s It’s Trevor Noah:  Born a Crime. To help them make sense of apartheid and concepts like segregation, I asked why to both have them voice their opinions and consider the implications of such history. My favorite way to encourage such reflection is by adding “agree or disagree” in front of a quote that I particularly like.  Unprompted, the girls often simply answer yes (agree) or no (disagree); but, increasingly, they know– with a little push– to go deeper and explain themselves.

Asking why is not just a way to encourage critical thinking though, is also my way to better understand the students and their backgrounds. For example, on a recent outing one student quipped, “Soon there will be no mountains in Cambodia…” Struck by this statement, I asked why she thought that. In hearing her response, I saw into my student’s understanding of environmental issues and development in her province. Asking why might even unlock a personal story– why a student chose her major might become a map of their upbringing and views on education. Sometimes it can be surprising to see the reasonings that emerge, such as a student’s perspective on the role of girls and what they can accomplish. 

It is those surprising moments where I find myself all the more impressed by my students and all that they have accomplished and continue to aspire to. Listening and learning about the girls is truly the best part of being an LR at Harpswell. Indeed, asking why is really my way of flipping the classroom, letting them teach me for as long as they choose.