King's student gains skills and global connections from transformative Ghana Field Course

At King’s, our educational experience extends far beyond our campus. King’s continues to be big on internationalization and intercultural learning, offering numerous experiential learning opportunities.

Two years ago, Kaygen Dache, a fourth-year Politics & International Relations (PIR) student, attended the Ghana Field Course. He is still reaping the benefits today.

The Ghana Field Course explores the chocolate supply chain (i.e., production of cocoa in Ghana to the consumption of chocolate around the world) as well as traces key global governance issues including conflict prevention, peacebuilding, counterterrorism, human security, human rights, pandemic governance, and informal governance from the local level to the global level. Students conduct original field research and produce major research papers on a range of topics including conflict prevention, peacemaking, political governance, informal economy, sustainable development, gender, race, climate change, trade, financial inclusion, poverty reduction, food, hunger, NGOs, and the impacts of COVID-19. Learn more on our website.

Dache admits he wasn’t sure what to expect when he embarked on the course, but he and the other students in the course received support from Dr. Thomas Tieku, Professor of PIR, and Dr. Erin Hannah, Professor of PIR and Associate Dean of Research.

While the King’s faculty members helped students through the long days and with interviewing high-level government officials, Drs. Tieku and Hannah encouraged the students to lean on each other, share ideas, and collaborate in their research and problem-solving activities. Dache says his time management, academic writing, and professional conversational skills were “revolutionized” during the trip.

“To say Ghana taught endurance, resilience, and resourcefulness is an understatement,” says Dache, who added that the trip to Ghana marked a complete shift in his personal and professional perspectives. His interest in international relations and global development has grown exponentially. But more than that, his connections to the King’s community have become much closer.

“I’ve developed deep and valuable connections with students and faculty at King’s and at other universities. The students I met on the trip became the classmates I’d bond with in almost all the other courses I took in my department,” Dache says.

Dache says it was King’s small class sizes that made his involvement in the trip possible. After making a connection with Dr. Tieku during a second-year class, which had approximately 25 students, Dache had several conversations with Dr. Tieku about the Ghana Field Course that intrigued him but, more importantly, made him feel comfortable and confident enough to attend. Dache says in a larger class environment, he might not have approached his professor in the same way.

Even after the trip, Dache has continued to enjoy the opportunities that these close connections to King’s faculty presented to him. He works in the Informality in International Relations Lab at King’s alongside Dr. Tieku and with Dr. Hannah in King’s Academic Research Office.

Thanks to the connections he made during the trip, Dache also works with professors from the University of Ghana and York University as a research assistant for a textbook on African politics.

“The trip allowed me to get the most out of my interests by handing me the opportunity to connect with the students and faculty of my department,” says Dache.

 

Learn more about experiential learning opportunities at our upcoming Open House on November 2, 2024.