DW: They’re just regular Hoosiers. My dad was from Madison, Indiana, a very small town. He was the first black baseball player at Indiana University, and I think he just had an amazing perspective about people, about relationships across racial lines. He had that experience of being the only, and the first on the team, and all of the challenges he faced when they went to the South. They had the ‘gentleman’s agreement,’ and the Southern teams wouldn’t play if they had a colored player — the word of the day at the time — it really just gave him this perspective that people are people, not that there aren’t differences and we don’t acknowledge those differences, but that people are people and we treat people equitably. He experienced that, and he knew that that was not the way to be.
My mother was from Indiana as well. She went to an integrated high school in Indianapolis, a pretty well-known high school. She was a nurse, and she just cultivated our interest. My grandmother was the same. You know how every generation wants their children to do better, not just better in a financial sense, but just do better? You know better, you do better. My mom appreciated those opportunities. She was the one who said, “The choir’s going to Europe? You should go!” I sold Girl Scout cookies. I sold enough cookies to go to Canada, and both my parents were like, “You want to go? Okay, great!” They just were those kinds of parents that realized that there was a bigger world out there, and that I needed to be prepared for it by engaging.
IA: Tell us about your work with interfaith education, why it’s needed and how you’ve seen it evolve over time.
DW: I taught for a few years, and then I went back to graduate school, and I did my PhD in International and Comparative Education and African Studies. I did my dissertation research in Ghana, and spent most summers of grad school in Ghana, and then I went to Indiana University, Purdue University, Indianapolis, to serve as the Director of Curriculum Internationalization, and I also taught some courses in Global and International Studies. You just find that it’s important that you understand and are connected to interfaith cooperation and interfaith agreement. My students would marvel, many of them. I had a summer study abroad program in Ghana. I remember one year, I was there with students, and Ghana is mostly Christian, especially in the South, and they have a sizable Muslim population in the north. And so every day on one of the main TV channels, they would say, “It’s time to break your fast,” as part of Ramadan, and the students were like, “This is so odd, because at the school, all they do is sing Christian songs!” I was helping them understand coexistence, and this is something that’s important to our whole society. No, I’m not a practicing Muslim, but I can acknowledge it, and it’s important that our society recognizes this is something to respect.
In the work that I do now at AAC&U, most of my work is focused on global learning and integrating global perspectives, global experiences, for students, and civic engagement. You can’t do that work if you don’t have an interfaith understanding or interfaith underpinning. That’s, for me, what is most important because I think if we’re talking about engaging communities, if we’re talking about engaging the world — and I’m a proponent of global learning happening locally, as well as internationally — the interfaith dimensions are so important. As we prepare students in the classroom, and we prepare students from a diversity, equity, inclusion perspective, we are finding ways for students to have these conversations and see the commonalities that they have.
IA: When you talk about bringing that global perspective locally, can you give an example of what that looks like?
DW: Absolutely. One is simply letting students know that global does not equate international. Sometimes when we have students thinking about international experiences, it limits and it means only those that can be mobile, only those that can leave the country. But when we look at things from a global perspective, we’re able to look at those global implications and to look at the ways that we’re connected, whether or not we leave the country. So, we may talk about the issue of child poverty, and that’s an issue that affects children all over the world. It may look different in different places, but because it impacts all of us, we should look at different examples in different places to understand how we combat these issues.
Another example, students in one of my Global and International Studies classes, they worked with a local organization that worked with resettlement of refugees, and so my students were working with high school students, the children of refugee families, as they were seeking to apply for college. My students would talk them through the process of applying for school, and they were able to learn about folks from different parts of the world. Some people would say they really needed to go and have an experience in Ghana, or they really need to go and have an experience somewhere else, but they could have a global experience in their local community. We’re seeing more and more institutions that are doing this type of work. They’re working with global communities in their local communities, or they’re using interactive video conferencing to make those connections.
IA: How did you first connect with IFYC? This project each year has invited interest from more universities and colleges who say this is something we want to learn from and implement.
DW: There has been a longstanding relationship between AAC&U and IFYC for many years. We’ve had those connections as institutions. And then when Lynn Pasquerella, our president, and Eboo (Patel, IFYC president and founder) had conversations, and we were thinking about ways that we could really work together more intentionally, this idea of working on a summer institute that aligned with an existing summer institute came about. We started working together to figure out what would this look like? How can we do this? How can we build on an infrastructure that we already have in place, but enhance it, and make sure we are able to focus on the interfaith pieces?
IA: It’s been five years now, and what progress have you seen? We hear a lot about the divisions on college campuses, but please tell me what you see.
DW: We are seeing such a counter narrative, if you will, and seeing students intentionally coming together to look at these issues. I think one of the things that for me made it even clearer why this is important, as a number of our institutions, as they were finally — and I say “finally” depending on the context — addressing the racial reckoning that we were having in society, you saw this coming about from interfaith organizations on campus, and students on campus from different faith traditions, saying, “Yeah, this is not okay. Why is this happening? We need to come together and help push our campuses to reconcile and to make sure that we are doing the right thing in terms of this horrible racial history, and the discrimination, and the systemic issues that we’ve seen.”