Akosua Addo
addo@unixg.ubc.ca

PhD. Student
Curriculum Studies
Faculty of Education
University of British Columbia

Dr. Addo's doctoral dissertation is an analysis and description of children's singing games. To collect her data, Addo returned to her homeland, Ghana, and studied singing games in three different school cultures. One of those schools was the school she attended at a child! Imagine going back to one's school to conduct an ethnography and re-encounter that culture as an outsider who was an insider!

Through her video portraits, Addo shows us the children responding to her as "insider/outsider" with curiosity and trust. The gestural language that the children use in their communication with Addo shows us how she was able to move inside her culture with a curiousity of the outsider.

Included in her analysis is a cultural critique of life in Ghana, as shown through the performance of the games. Her results inform anthropologists and music educators about the relationship between what children do "naturally" as they play and how cultures change over time.

Addo represents a new breed of interdisciplinary ethnomusicologists and ethnographers. She uses one field of study to inform the other. She has also contributed to the understanding of how using video as a tool encourages researchers to become participant recorders and then, a collaborative recorders.

Check out her theory about learning as mid-wifery in the abstract of her dissertation.