SPANNING BORDERS THROUGH ART

Ceramics Teacher

Sasha Bergmann Gets Global

BYSHARONKRAUSS

Walking among the jacaranda and flame trees at St. Constantine’s International School in Arusha, Tanzania, Middle School art teacher Sasha Bergmann felt completely out of her element. Beyond sprawling coffee plantations edging the campus, majestic Mount Meru—second highest in the country only to Kilimanjaro—provided a stunning backdrop, and nearby, female facilities-crew workers carried huge baskets on their heads. Voices chattered in Swahili, while monkeys peered down from rooftops and scampered across her path. There, just south of the Equator, on a chilly day in June 2022, she was acutely aware that she wasn’t in Cambridge anymore. Then a student voice familiarly called, “Hi, Ms. Bergmann,” momentarily confounding her and blurring her sense of otherness with a sense of belonging.

That friendly student recognized Bergmann from Zoom calls she and her BB&N students had for more than two years with the Tanzanian students and their teacher, St. Constantine’s head of creative arts Geoffrey Namulala. Now that she was finally on campus and meeting them in person, Bergmann felt the world had become headspinningly smaller.

expert guidance. “There was a lot that I didn't know,” he says, “and I got to learn it from Sasha, so it was a very rich experience for me.” Furthermore, they envisioned his students making tile murals to be installed at St. Constantine’s, a project they would plan over Zoom before Bergmann flew in to help with final steps in the summer of 2020. Well, that was the plan, anyway. “Then, boom! COVID happens,” Bergmann explains. “But instead of throwing in the towel, we thought, what can we do with this?”

So, Bergmann and Namulala performed an inspired pandemic pivot; they expanded their teacher collaboration to include their students, and over the next two and a half years, they held joint seventh- and eighth-grade classes on Zoom. “We thought that we could bring these students together,” says Namulala, “and make Round Square come alive, break the distance and the barriers, and have these students collaborate and share ideas.” Despite the eight-hour time difference—the Tanzanians generously participated in the evening—the students met once a week for several eight-week-long sessions to play icebreaker games, talk in breakout rooms, and discuss photos of their artwork with one another. Bergmann’s students worked in clay, Namulala’s in paint and collage, “but they were still doing the same thing,” says Namulala. “We wanted them to think they are part of one big class. And, for me, that was very, very important.”

As hoped, it was for the students, too. “I think it was important for my whole class,” says Aubrielle Amaral ’26, “because we kind of live in this bubble, and it was cool to talk with kids outside that bubble and learn more about not just the world but about kids our age and what they're doing in different parts of the world. Normally when you learn most stuff like that, it’s from an article or an adult, so it was cool to meet with just the kids [in Zoom breakout rooms] and talk with them.”

Introduced online in January 2020 through their respectives schools’ memberships in Round Square, a global consortium of like-minded and -valued schools that connects teachers interested in collaborating, the two art educators immediately hit it off. “It was easy,” Bergmann says. “Geoffrey is a lovely human who wanted to collaborate, to lean in, to learn about clay, which is my specialty.” In the process of adding ceramics to his department’s offerings, Namulala sought Bergmann’s

Meeting additionally by themselves once a week, Bergmann and Namulala crafted a curriculum to amplify the structure and purpose of their combined classes. In those planning sessions, Namulala greatly appreciated not only Bergmann’s “love for art but also her rich experience in working with students for a very long time; she is very focused and very organized, so that really helped,” he says. At first they used the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals broadly as a framework for art projects and discussions; then in the second year they focused on two Goals pertaining to water, which also became the topic of the Tanzanians’ tile murals.

“Because pollution is very close to most of my students, they looked at the problem of dumping plastic in the oceans and how it affects marine life,” Namulala says. “Sasha’s students told us about the U.S. pollution problem and the legislations in place to control the dumping of plastics in the oceans. On this side, the government has banned the use of one-way [singleuse] plastics; even when you come in at the airport, if you have things wrapped in plastic, they’re confiscated,” he explains. “The ideas and the information that the students shared informed the art that they created.”

For instance, Lauren Pond ’26 made a bowl, divided by a painted line into two scenes: one depicted “a clean ocean with thriving animals and the other half was polluted with trash,” she says.

“We would ask the students to give each other feedback on their pottery projects or paintings,” Bergmann says, “with such prompts as, ‘What is it communicating? What aspect of sustainability and water and cleanliness? How does this relate to your culture and my culture? What are the commonalities, the differences?’”

To further facilitate connection among their students, Bergmann and Namulala also had them post photos of foods and heritage objects representing their family cultures or religions, which provided more fodder for both discussion and stereotype-dispelling. Bergmann says that, defying some expectations, “We saw Jewish, Italian, Korean food among the American posts, Chinese and Indian and Kenyan foods in the Tanzanian posts.” During another cultural exchange, students from both continents posted photos of Muslim prayer rugs, “so we talked about windows and mirrors in our lives,” continues Bergmann. With those “mirrors,” “students saw that we are similar even though we’re across the whole entire globe from one another.”

Her student Aubrielle confesses, “When we first heard we were going to talk with kids from Tanzania, we thought we were going to be really different and it would be hard to connect over things, but we found that that actually wasn’t true.” She notes, among other commonalities, that they all liked to play sports and enjoyed their art classes.

“It opened up my eyes, my understanding of the world— that something so far away can also be so similar,” agrees Lauren, who enjoyed learning, too, about the differences in the Tanzanian students’ lives. “On their walk to school, for example, they had to watch out for monkeys because monkeys had stolen their lunches before. I thought that was funny,” she says with a smile.

Careful not to project her bias about the experience onto her students, Bergmann interviewed each of them following one season of combined classes and found that “their reaction was even more positive than I imagined,” she says.

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The students were well on their way to fulfilling her hopes for the collaboration. “I want my students to feel the same way I do—that there’s somebody I know in Africa who’s real, that I have a connection with, that I care about.” She would like this experience to spark students’ interest in African current events, in traveling, in making further alliances. “I want them to go out into the world thinking globally,” she says.

Bergmann speaks with the passion of her own experience, finally realized in June 2022, when, with COVID restrictions easing, she was able to make the delayed journey, get through Customs with the paints and glazes needed to complete the original murals project, and meet the people she had come to know in little Zoom boxes. She went bearing gifts—some ceramic vases she had made for Namulala, as well as clay rattles, in the shapes of New England birds, made by her students for their Tanzanian classmates. When she suggested to Namulala that his students then reciprocate by making birds of Tanzania, “he looked at me like I was crazy,” she says, laughing. “He said that they have wild animals here; why would we make birds? Of course, I said. Why would you make birds?” Instead, she returned to her students with clay rattles in the forms of the Tanzanians’ indigenous elephants, giraffes, and campus-sharing monkeys.

The far more significant gift for Bergmann, of course, was having her perspective on culture and identity shift in the eye-opening light of a foreign land. Aware of her whiteness in a way she never had been before, she enjoyed being in a place where she was in the minority—in more ways than one. “Geoffrey and his family had never met a Jew, but they got a small window into being Jewish through Sasha, and they shared their experience as Christians,” she says. “Basically, we met with our hearts, and it was beautiful.” While she had a living space and her own little kitchen at the school, she ate dinner at the Namulalas’ campus house every night of the four weeks she was there. “I think the best part was that Geoffrey and his whole family—his wife, Sylvia, and their three daughters— completely embraced me. I found my second family on the other side of the world,” she says.

Also lasting, Namulala feels, was the statement they made with the murals just as he was leaving St. Constantine’s for a new position at Morogoro International School, a ten-hours’ drive south. “Sasha came in, and we installed the murals,” says Namulala, “the culmination of what we’d been doing for over two years. It was very, very special. Looking at the outcome, we felt that we really helped this generation to understand that it’s their responsibility to take care of their environment and their water resource.” Now, he sees the murals in photos on the distant school’s website, “and, you know,” he says, “I feel so good.”

As Namulala settles into his new job, establishes relationships with his students, and builds yet another ceramics program, he can still rely on his now very good friend in their biweekly Zoom calls. Unsurprisingly, the two are plotting again—for Namulala’s visit to BB&N sometime in the future and, more immediately, for a spring resumption of their combined online classes. “Now that we’ve met and worked so well together in person, we’re choosing to go back to the Zoom,” Bergmann says with a

While discussing the United Nations Global Goals with their students, Bergmann and Namulala also produced two books in a collaboration spearheaded by former LS art teacher Saskia Van Vactor. Taking the Earth into Our Own Hands, published in 2021, addresses the UN Goals through students’ artwork and their statements printed in English, Swahili, Navajo, and Haitian Creole. Teachers and students at the Rock Point Community School in the Navajo Nation in Rock Point, Arizona, and The Matenwa Community Learning Center in Haiti also participated via Zoom in this project. In 2022, Bergmann’s and Van Vactor’s MS and LS students, as well as Lizzie Rosenberger’s LS science students, Namulala’s Tanzanian students, and Mary Rodriquez’s Navajo students collaborated to produce a companion volume—Global Voices, Global Goals: Tó Water Maji—focused on two Goals pertaining to clean-water access and marine life.