After reading about the Paraná Delta, Uruguay, national holidays, running, the Catholic Church, and the economic crisis, and nothing of my classes for my first three months here some of you may be begining to wonder if I am studying abroad or if I am just abroad. Well, after finishing my first round of parciales (or midterms) here in Buenos Aires I felt its due time to give an update on the academic side of this incredible experience.
To give a general overview, I’m taking classes at two different universities; the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO), which offers classes solely for international students, and the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), the large public university here in Buenos Aires. All my classes are taught by Argentine professors, and yes, everything is in Spanish. Throughout the week you’ll find me at FLACSO taking Argentine Economic Development in the Context of Latin America, and an Advanced Spanish Grammar Workshop, and at UBA taking Public Finance and Social History of Latin America.
Very different from anything I’ve experienced in my prior schooling, the UBA classes are the reason why I’m studying abroad here. As the largest university in Argentina, it has over 300,000 students-though I must mention that number may be inflated some by figures that include people who are only taking one course, or who have taken some classes and had to stop their studies to go back to work. Regardless, the university is huge. It doesn’t have a campus like traditional universities in the United States, but rather is made up of 13 facultades (faculty or department roughly translated) that are spread all throughout the city. Generally each facultad has one building where they hold their respective classes. My two UBA courses fall in the Facultad de Economicas and the Facultdad de Ciencias Sociales. So instead of waking up 10 minutes before class and walking across campus to my class, I take a combination of walking, subway and buses to get from class to class.
My Latin American Social History class is a 6 credit class that includes a two hour discussion session and a four hour lecture(!!) each week. The smaller class size of the discussion section has been really helpful because its given me the opportunity to befriend some of the Argentine students in the class. Organization is minimal-there’s no syllabus, the teacher announces the readings a week in advance and the dates of the tests a few weeks in advance. Overall, the structure of the lectures aren’t too different than a class I would take at Georgetown-however the atmosphere is another story. The class is held in a rundown high school-sized building, littered with political posters and graffitti at almost every turn. It gives the building some character, but is really inadequately prepared for the majority of the 30,000+ students in the Facultad de Ciencias Sociales that take classes there. Its a very lively class, where students don’t hesitate to challenge the professors and its quite common to have a few interruptions during a class where a student group will come in to make an announcement about a political issue facing the university.
It’s been really interesting to learn about Latin American history from teachers and students that actually live in Latin America. Seeing that nearly all of Latin America shares some important historical characteristics-occupation by colonial powers, periods of military dictatorship and authoritarian rule, and resentment towards the United States-there is much more comparing and contrasting than in any other history course I’ve taken. Often things will be explained in Mexico, Brazil or Bolivia with an Argentine example. By far this is the class where the anti-US sentiment can be felt the strongest. Teachers and students alike are constantly critiquing the US for meddling in their domestic politics and economics. It’s fascinating to get another perspective on our country’s actions. Sometimes the claims are far too radical, like one fellow student who insisted that the main motive behind Plan Colombia was the form an alliance with FARC to create a profitable monopoly on cocaine exports back to the US. I think my professor summed it up best saying that some problems in Latin America can be tied back to US actions however to say that Latin America is where it is in the world solely because of the US is going to far and overlooking some of the region’s own mistakes.
The Public Finance class is a standard four credit class with a two hour lecture that takes place twice a week. It’s the only class in which I’m the only extranjero (foreigner), but overall its more similar to my economic classes back at Georgetown. There is a clearly laid out syllabus with all of the readings, dates of the exams and grading criteria and the class is less drama filled. The facultad is extremely different-clean, free of political propaganda, an amazing building (more to come on these differences in a later blog post). There are fewer interruptions in class, however this is the only class where an individual has come into the classroom, telling of his hardships and going around the class asking for money, all with the teacher’s permission (this is not as uncommon here as it sounds).
Both classes are UBA are extremely challenging for me, because the teachers don’t approach the class any different just because there might be one or two foreigners in the class. The pace is fast, the reading demandings, and the fact that office hours don’t exist make professors very hard to reach for clarifications outside of the short time their still in class after the lecture packing up their bags.
The other two courses at FLACSO are more managable, while they are all in Spanish, there are only foreign students in the class so there is always an opportunity to stop the class and ask questions. I really enjoy my Argentine Economic Development class, because its fascinating to see how many different economic models the country has gone through in so few years. For example if you take the last 60 years of history-the US has more or less been following the same economic model (with a few variations demending on the current administration) while one could argue that Argentina has gone through five distinct economic periods in that same period of time. It’s really a great class to get a perspective on which economic perscriptions did and didn’t work and what the consequences were of certain policy changes. As I’ve heard from a lot of people here-Argentina is a great place to study economics-they’ve seen it all.
Of course there’s no way to cover everything on academics in one blog post, and since this one is getting rather long I think I’ll end it here. I hope that at the very least this will serve as a basic overview of some of the things going on in the classroom. Some of the academic themes that I’m looking to cover in future posts is the vast difference between the facultades within UBA, the grading system here in Argentina, and the joys and hardships of studying in a foreign languange. Stay tuned!
3 Comments to "Yes, I’m Studying Too"
hey david,
after reading this i have a better understanding of your classes, subject material, and schedule. as i get older, i am not sure what to believe about history. you know “history of an event” is actually someone’s version of what occurred and why it occurred. history is so subjective. if you were not there how do you know it actually happened that way? the saying used to be something to the effect “the victorious get to write the history”: with revisionist history it is swinging the other way. a social studies professor in college told us that teachers were going to start teaching social studies and history in a different way: it was to be taught from the perspective of each group of people involved in an event. an historical event would be viewed from the pilgrims perspective and then from the native americans perspective. ask your siblings if they do in fact teach this way. even one’s family stories are different depending on who is telling it (ask Jimmo – he likes to say “let’s hear your version”). just some thoughts when i read about your studies in latin american history. take care,
David,
It’s very enjoyable to read about your experiences. I admire your courage to learn complicated subjects like economics, public finance and social history in a foreign language! The international perspectives that you are exposed sound broadening and enlightning. It’ll be interesting to hear more on the perception of USA – for example, when does “foreign aid” become meddling?
This has to be a great period to be studying public finance. When you look at the bailout of companies, banks and Wall Street; the financial rescue of Greece; the budget shortfalls in so many of our states; the shaking financial foundation of Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Spain; the cutbacks of social programs in Western Europe due to unaffordability; the unfunded liabilities that arise from social programs, et al – the current events alone offer a smorgasbord of discussion tpics – and then do discuss how we got into this indebtedness is even richer!
Be safe, enjoy, learn lots!
May God be with you always and everywhere,
Uncle Brian
Mom, I think you make some good points on history. That’s why I think it’s really important to incorporate primary documents when studying history-as they are actual accounts of what took place-if you can incorporate historical documents from different parties involved, all the better. However, that being said secondary accounts can be very valuable as they can really tie it all together, referencing primary documents, statistics and the like.
Uncle Brian, the subjects can definitely be challenging but I’m surviving so far! It is indeed a great time to be studying public finance, though the class I’m taking is more rooted in the theoretical and the Argentine case, however we do talk about many of the things you mentioned in my Argentine Economic Development class. It’s really interesting to study the Argentine case which basically didn’t have the option of bailing itself out of its financial crisis and had to suffer some really painful consequences in 2002-2003. Also really interesting to study their remarkable recovery since then. In terms of perception of the USA-most of the criticism comes from the US protecting its citizens’ capital and interests at the expense of Latin American countries autonomy and sometimes democracy in the case of supporting some of the military dictatorships. We’ve recently started studying Cuba, which is really interesting as the perception here is that Cuba was the only Latin American country to really go strongly against the US, and while their country and people have suffered dearly, there’s a lot of respect for that here. Haven’t heard too much in the way of foreign aid and meddling-but I know that is something that we talk about a lot at Georgetown.