Levitov, Betty. Africa on Six Wheels: A Semester on Safari. University of Nebraska Press, 2007.
Reason read: Even though Betty and her students did not venture into Chad I chose to read Africa on Six Wheels to recognize Chad’s independence gained in December.
Betty Levitov took thirteen college students from Nebraska on a three month trek around the southern portion of Africa. By her own calculations they covered seven countries: Nambia, Botswana, Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania, Kenya, and South Africa. She wanted to transform the classroom into a “place of possibility” (p x). That in itself is an interesting topic for a book. Unfortunately, I found the continuity of Levitov’s story to be chaotic and sometimes hard to follow. At one point she is reliving her childhood, college years, and life with her husband. Without warning she switches to traveling with her students. Because she had taken several, shorter, trips with students there were times when I wasn’t sure which trip she was describing. There was the trip in 1998 (a semester in Zimbabwe) that she often contrasted with the 2022 trip. Plenty of flat tires and wrong turns!
As someone in the education field I appreciate Levitov’s focus on the curriculum and the attention afford to the learning outcomes. I just wonder what assessments she had in place to ensure success of the program.
As an aside, I learned a few things about Africa. For example, I never considered there would be a German population in Nambia or that there are specific names for the patterns of sand created by the wind in the dunes.
As an aside, one reviewer was pretty harsh about Africa on Six Wheels and said that the trip around Africa was not going to make Betty’s students into better people. Their trip was not going to change the world or have a profound impact on anyone.
Line I liked, “They owned their learning and claimed their territory” (p 180).
Book trivia: there are no photographs to this little short book. Too bad. Levitov mentioned Lonely Planet so many times that I wondered if their trip had been sponsored by the publisher.
Music: Beatles, Bob Marley, “Buffalo Soldier,” “Day O,” “Frere Jacques,” “Jambo,” “Jingle Bells,” John Denver’s “Country Roads,” and “My bonny Lies Over the Ocean.”
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “Africa: the Greenest Continent” (p 7).
~*LunaSea*~ 