Teacher Dan Dudley Provides AI Guidance to Malawi Girls’ School
When math teacher Dan Dudley arrived in Malawi as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1994, he couldn’t have predicted how deeply rooted he would become in the country. Thirty-two years into his teaching career — and in his second year at Albuquerque Academy teaching Geometry, Algebra II, and AP Statistics — Dan remains closely tied to the country where he lived for five years, met his wife, and started raising his family.
Recently, that connection came full circle. A former student reached out to Dan about establishing Good Soil Academy, a new all-girls boarding school in Malawi focused on academic rigor and entrepreneurship for grades 9-12. Dan jumped at the chance to help. Leveraging 30 years of residential life experience, he advised leadership on startup timelines and joined interview panels to help hire founding faculty — even successfully advocating for a young teacher who has since become a student favorite.
Over the summer, Dan returned to Malawi to lead workshops introducing teachers to AI tools like Gemini and Claude as “thought partners” for lesson planning. He shared web-based tracking apps he built for his own classroom, inspiring teachers to adapt some of the latest technology, including helping the librarian prototype a book checkout system.
For Dan, the teachers’ curiosity was deeply inspiring — a motivation he brings back to Academy students, whether in the classroom or coaching golf. As he guides students to use AI responsibly and purposefully, he models transparency: “I’m using this as a tool. The AI is not teaching you — I’m teaching you,” he tells his students. “I’m using AI to build my materials so that I can be more organized.”
