Lalage Bown (corr. sp), Emeritus Professor of Adult and Continuing Education of the University’s School of Education, was interviewed on Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour last week.

Image of Emeritus Professor Lalage BownThe interview was part of Woman’s Hour’s series “The Chain”, in which leading women nominate the woman who has inspired them most for the next interview.

Professor Bown was nominated for her work in African women’s education by Elizabeth Hodgkin, a teacher in the Sudan, Amnesty International campaigner and daughter of Nobel science prizewinner Dorothy Hodgkin.

Now nearly 90, Professor Bown talked about the impact of helping women in Africa to read and write, and the joys of fostering twin daughters from Nigeria.

Professor Bown was Director of the Department of Adult & Continuing Education at the University of Glasgow for 11 years until 1992. Prior to that she worked in Africa for more than 30 years, pioneering adult education programmes in a number of countries. In 1966, she became the first woman Professor of Adult Education in the Commonwealth.

On Woman’s Hour she described how African women had been empowered by learning to read and write – and also to speak English. She was also instrumental in ending the reliance in African schools upon standard English texts, talking about how Wordsworth’s daffodils poem, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”, had been a main school text in parts of Africa where daffodils were completely unknown. Instead, she sourced English texts written by Africans spanning 200 years and covering various literary genres – the “Africanisation of education”, as she called it.

The University conferred the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters on Professor Bown in 2002.

Listen to Lalage Bown on The Chain, 16 January

First published: 24 January 2017

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