Amirah Cummings, MSEd

*Photo credit: Maya McClean (Los Angeles, CA)*

Hometown & early Education

Newark, NJ, USA

I grew up in Newark, NJ where my mother gave me an incredible foundation before I turned five years old that essentially labeled me “gifted” in my early years of school. While I did excel in school, the education I most attribute to who I am today extends beyond the walls of any classroom and outside the mere boundaries of my intellect. I am a product of my local community, my global perspective, and my universal imagination. I am an urban-raised, Quaker-educated, female African American leader who believes that every child has the potential to excel if given a solid foundation in their earliest years and has parents, guardians and communities who feel confident in their active roles to provide it. I want to help lay that foundation for global communities and children.

*Photo credit: Maya McClean (Danang, Vietnam)*

Multilingualism and global education

Earth, Milky Way

Languages are my passion. I grew up pretending to read Arabic in the Qu’ran in my home and my favorite question to my bilingual neighborhood friends was, “How do you say…?”. I officially began learning Spanish in middle school, continued through college, and took part in my high school’s Mexican Exchange program in Guanajuato, Mexico. I also fell in love with Japanese in high school, continued through college where I learned to speak, read and write, and studied at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan. I’ve traveled to more than 15 countries, discovering the mutual interplay and affect of language on cultural perspectives and beliefs and am confident that learning to speak someone’s language is the absolute key to tolerance and understanding and will inevitably open doors of opportunities.

Universidad Lasallista Benevente Bachillerato

Celaya, Guanajuato, México

A beautiful exchange of friendship and lifelong learning between friends in Celaya, Guanajuato.

Tohoku Gakuin Daigaku

Sendai, Japan

Studied Japanese language, culture and business and fell in love with the many islands of Japan.

Community & Entrepreneurship, Westtown School

West Chester, PA

I attended a private Quaker boarding school in rural Pennsylvania that placed high value on community and leadership. Although I received a great academic education, my most significant culture shock happened when I was introduced to the idea of a “soccer mom”, which then led to my obsession with and passion for entrepreneurship. (I’ll write a post on that later :).

Westtown School - Learning Campus

Africana Studies, Franklin & Marshall College

Lancaster, PA

I loved many disciplines and originally thought I’d study business or linguistics in college, but I ultimately found myself immersed in understanding the African diaspora, the history of European colonization in Africa, anthropological origins of matriarch societies in the motherland, and the plight of African slave culture into the birth of the American Negro and the identity as African American.

Franklin & Marshall College - Africana Studies

Global Education Model, University of Pennsylvania GSE

Philadelphia, PA

My graduate studies focused on developing the pieces to a locally controlled, globally-connected, and universally accessible language-independent school system that begins in early childhood. I refined my philosophy of education, studied the economics of education, and developed the skeletal concept of the Cummings learning environment.

Penn GSE - MSEd, Education Entrepreneurship

Building sustainable subscription Models, Stanford University

Stanford, CA

I enrolled to study how to create a sustainable business model from Ajay Arora - Director of Product Innovation at Netflix. My goal is to build a model that provides high-quality global education to children and families regardless of their social, economic, or geographic backgrounds - a model that allows them to subscribe to curriculum that helps them achieve the lives they want to live.