History professor stresses importance of fieldwork, leads trips overseas
By Rachel Kimbrough
First step: traditional upbringing. Second step: Christian church involvement. Third step: private school education.
Those factors in childhood may lay a path for an adult who will perpetuate that cycle, but for one professor, it pushed him to veer off in a totally different direction.
“I knew there was more than just, you know, Kansas City,” said Eddie Bushey, adjunct professor of History and Religious Studies. “I really became disillusioned with this worldview… I realized there is a much broader world, a much older world, a much different world but with some very similar undertones. There’s common denominators, but I wanted to explore that sort of thing.”
Bushey studied at the University of Missouri Kansas City (UMKC) and at the University of California, Berkeley (UC-Berkeley). He earned his undergraduate degrees in both History and English Literature, but had acquired a taste for a different educational direction in the process.
“I got to UMKC and just the concepts, the ideas, my philosophy classes, my history classes, English lit…I took classes on the beat poets and they were so influenced by Buddhism and Hinduism and these sorts of things, my mind was reeling,” he said. “I was like, ‘This is so cool,’ because at the private school that stuff is taboo.”
Between UMKC and UC-Berkeley, Bushey studied both formally and informally in India, being dissatisfied with UMKC’s language education offerings.
“My trip to India was academic, I was doing fieldwork, but it was also just like a hippie journey,” Bushey said. “I’m not gonna call it a spiritual journey, but I’m from the Midwest, this was an amazing time in my life to get away in be somewhere so foreign. It was life-changing both academically as well as personally.”
Bushey now has master’s degrees in both History and South Asian Language and Literature. In addition to helping create new courses in South Asian studied, he has also organized and led trips to India.
“Do you need the books? Yeah. But you gotta be there, you gotta feel it, you gotta smell it you gotta taste it,” he said. “And even that’s just one layer. You might get more out of a textbook or a 16-week semester.
“But, on the other hand, I can never ever ever explain what it means to walk into the Delhi Sultan Monument or mosques with a picture, but if you go there and you see this stuff and you touch it, it’ll change your life. This is history alive, this is the real deal, this is the primary source. So I really think you’d have to go. I think as a student it’s a great opportunity.”
Rhonda Barlow, professor of Mathematics, met Bushey while helping him to rewrite the course description for his History of India course. She joined him and the accompanying students to the India trip last spring.
“He’s awesome,” she said. “He is a boatload of knowledge. He is a very fast-paced, he talks very fast. He has so many ideas going on in his head…he’s just so knowledgeable.”
Administrative assistant Kay Rozell lauded Bushey’s integrity and open-mindedness.
“Talk about enthusiasm,” Rozell said. “He’s open-minded, but will listen and if he needs to he’ll say, ‘I need to think about that and come back,’ he will. He doesn’t just pretend to be perfect.”
Outside of the classroom, Bushey raises three children, renovates his home, teaches at the WordWorks Learning Center in Leawood, Kan., and sails on his sailboat named “Junk in the Trunk.”
Rozell said Bushey’s success on campus lies both in his interpersonal communications skills and his ability to make students want more.
“He’s got a really good heart for people,” she said. “From the get-go, he was enthusiastic but careful with his enthusiasm coming into a new situation.
Some people just cause you to want to learn more things even if you’re not in their class. Those people are friends, and Ed’s like that.”
Bushey will be leading another trip to India in Jan. 2013. He attested to the importance of fieldwork to teaching as well as learning.
“Teaching about Asian religions is one thing that anybody can do. Anybody can learn the stuff and prepare a PowerPoint presentation, and even over time acquire some sort of authority by reading from secondary sources,” he said. “But if somebody’s going to teach you about the history of Buddhism or Indian history or some such thing, who are you more likely to invest in as an authority, someone who read it from a textbook or someone who’s been there?”
For more information about the 2013 India trip, contact Eddie Bushey at dbushey@jccc.edu.
Contact Rachel Kimbrough, editor-in-chief, at rkimbrou@jccc.edu.