CID’s faculty affiliates embody the breadth and depth of international development research at Harvard. Faculty affiliates hail from across Harvard and work in every region of the world, on every topic in development.
By Diana King
Assistant Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and CID Faculty Affiliate has long been fascinated by social life in rural villages, places whose economies and social structures do not fit neatly into narratives of development. A semester-long stay with farming households in Uganda during college led him to wonder why, despite its inherent richness, community life is often compromised to advance broader development agendas.
“There were many material struggles…but also a tacit wealth in the connections people had to one another, to the land, to their heritage and culture,” says Nourani. “I couldn’t help but wonder why there weren’t any frameworks or narratives that allowed us to imagine community building alongside material prosperity.”
Too often, frameworks of progress treat rural communities as “anachronous, and in the worst formulation, backwards,” he says. They tend to focus on larger units, such as the nation, and “advance processes that force people from the places they live,” displacing rural populations in pursuit of industrial productivity. But, Nourani believes, it’s not inevitable for development processes to uplift some people and places at the expense of others.
In Uganda, he found a promising alternative. A local NGO, the , had just implemented a rural school program created by the (FUNDAEC, Fundación para la Aplicación y Enseñanza de la Ciencia). The curriculum centered learning on village life and brought traditional knowledge into dialogue with scientific approaches, empowering local communities to discover and advance their own processes of development.
Since FUNDAEC’s founding in 1974, its programs have spread in Latin America and developing countries around the world — yet, until Nourani, received little attention in mainstream development narratives.
Narratives of development are shaped by economic frameworks, Nourani reflects. These frames provide a useful “way of thinking about human capital development and what it means to develop a country,” but can “blind us to the potential of alternative approaches.”
Nourani’s capacity to see outside the frame stems from, on the one hand, an outsider’s perspective fostered by living abroad at a formative age, and on the other, a belief in the unity of humankind inspired by the Baháʼí faith.
Born in Wisconsin to Iranian Baháʼí parents, he immigrated at the age of 10 to Slovakia, where he spent six years with the same group of school peers, befriending people of diverse interests and personalities. Upon his return to the U.S., he had to navigate the self-sorting cliques of a North Carolina high school. Nourani grew curious about how communities are formed in different contexts. Throughout college and graduate school, he began thinking more deeply about how to advance society in a way that preserved the diversity and dignity of different regional communities. (FUNDAEC, it turned out, shared similar principles; it too had been inspired by the Baháʼí faith of some of its founders).
Nourani’s early work as he pursued a PhD in economics at Cornell focused on using economic frameworks to understand social networks: ; ; ; and .
Towards the end of his doctorate, an opportunity arose to return to Uganda, where a new training program for primary school teachers (FUNDAEC’s Preparation for Social Action, PSA), had been adopted. In a region largely reliant on rote “chalk and talk” methods that provide teachers assumed to be low-skilled with precise scripts, including what and when to write on the board, PSA trains teachers to reflect on how learning happens. Teachers are engaged in the same process of accurately observing and describing reality, posing keen questions, framing hypotheses, and using evidence gathered from everyday life that they then immerse their students in. For instance, during a lesson on plants, instead of having students memorize a blackboard drawing, they are taken into the community to observe different plants and record variations in plant structure.
“Everyone who experienced this approach has very powerful things to say about it,” says Nourani. What they didn’t have was data.
Ten years after he first came across the work of FUNDAEC, Nourani secured National Science Foundation funding for a post-doc at MIT, and ran in collaboration with Nava Ashraf and Abhijit Banerjee.
The results show dramatic improvements in learning across several social and academic measures (teacher-student relationships, changes in gender attitudes, willingness to ask questions, pass rates on national exams, critical thinking, scientific capacity, and creativity); moreover, the benefits continued through secondary school. The program’s effectiveness — and cost-effectiveness (an additional $100 of funding increases learning-adjusted years of schooling by nearly 10 years) — places it in the top five percentile of rigorously studied educational interventions
Teachers come to “see the act of knowledge production, and the application of knowledge to improve one’s life, as the chief aim of education,” says Nourani. It’s a mindset shift crucial to addressing increasingly complex global challenges, such as changing demographics, high unemployment, and climate-related crises, that are all the more acute in developing countries.
Working closely with policymakers, local organizations, researchers, and graduate students, Nourani has ambitious plans to scale up the intervention: to implement it more broadly across the country (via a 5-year research project with a government-run Ugandan college); to evaluate and expand its effects in other sectors (such as technology and agriculture); and to explore its impact in other regional contexts (Nourani is delving into the history of the program and its effectiveness in Colombia, where it launched as a secondary education program and was later defunded).
Ultimately, Nourani seeks to provide policymakers and practitioners with evidence-based tools to create a self-sustaining culture of learning, “where even teachers who haven’t gone through the training can make careful observations, and ask questions as they coordinate with leadership to determine what to do.
Creating such a culture of learning, he believes, may chart the way to a new narrative, one that “empowers all the diverse places of the earth” to grow their talents and resources in an interconnected way. In this yet-to-be-written narrative, “it’s not just anonymous market forces that dictate how resources flow, but a conscious conversation between communities that allows us to discover new and sustainable development solutions.”
Image Credits
Zach Wear on Unsplash
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