In this book Sonja Krause Goodwin recounts her experience joining the Peace Corps in 1964 and describes the training she underwent to teach in Nigeria at Columbia Teachers College in New York City. Goodwin tells readers about her service as a University teacher in physics while also serving as head of the Physics Department at Lagos University in Nigeria. She also describes her vacation travels during that time, mostly in Nigeria— including an attempt to climb Mt. Cameroon. She writes about her interactions with her students, her fellow University teachers and other University employees, her fellow Peace Corps volunteers and other expatriates, and Nigerians whom she met under during her travels. Goodwin also delves into the politically motivated “university crisis” that led to the exodus from the university and Nigeria of almost all the expatriate teaching staff of the university including the Peace Corps volunteers. She also discusses some of her work for the West African Examinations Council and the Aptitude Testing Unit in Lagos while waiting to be sent to another assignment for her second year in the Peace Corps.

Until the early twentieth century, teachers went abroad with assumptions of their own superiority. But by the mid-twentieth century, they became far more self-questioning about their social assumptions, their educational theories, and the complexity of their role in a foreign society. Drawing on extensive archives of teachers' letters and accounts, Zimmerman's narrative explores the teachers' shifting attitudes about their country and themselves, in a world that was more unexpected than they could have imagined.

"Looking at Ourselves and Others contains lesson plans, activities, and readings that help students understand components of their own culture and leads them to appreciate and understand differences between their culture and that of others."--Home page.