The Fulbright program brings educators from around the world to Greensboro prompting learning in and out of the classroom

Featured photo: Teachers involved in the Fulbright program in 2024 gather for a photo. (photo by William Zimmerman)

It feels, at first, like a sort of multicultural middle school dance. American-born, Greensboro-based teachers to this side and, to that side, the teachers from everywhere else in the world: 20 educators representing 18 countries and six continents, all of whom have come to the United States, many for the first time, to learn the ways of the American classroom and the teachers who lead them.

There’s Zainab Gambo, biology teacher from Nigeria, whose first name means “sweet smelling flower.” Sarawut Saichan, from Thailand, whose name pays homage to the arrow of Rama, the Hindu deity. Ragaa, from Egypt, said her name means “hope.”

The Fulbright Teaching and Excellence and Achievement Program shortened to Fulbright-TEA, is a collaboration, an opportunity to build global competence and to foster mutual understanding. It’s funded by the Educational and Cultural Affairs unit of the US Dept. of State and managed by the International Research and Exchanges Board, a nonprofit organization that specializes in global education and development. Its beneficiaries are the young minds spread all throughout the Guilford County School District and those a few years older at UNCG. And, of course, the international teachers and their Greensboro-based counterparts.

As part of the program, which began on Sept. 11, the teachers, who hail from the farthest corners of the globe — Papua New Guinea, Sri Lanka, Iraq — to closer corners like Haiti, Barbados, the Dominican Republic — and 12 countries in between — are placed into classrooms within Guilford County and immerse themselves into the fabric of the UNCG campus. In previous years, the partnerships formed here have extended long beyond the program’s six-weeks, with teachers’ connecting their classrooms across mountains and deserts and oceans through Skype or through Zoom.

Though the program only lasts about a month and a half, the goal and the aftereffects of the partnership are long-lasting. For the visiting educators, it’s an opportunity to learn about the American education system. For the local teachers, it gives a global perspective, and to their students, a sort of study-abroad experience from the comfort of their classrooms.

“It’s an exchange,” said Keisha Brown, principal of the Middle College at UNCG, one of the three participating public schools. “Going out and learning from other people that our way is not the only way, about being compassionate and good citizens — that’s it, that’s education.”

Bringing the study abroad experience to Greensboro students

Dr. Maria Anastasiou, from Cyprus, acts as an educator, though not a participant in this year’s program. If this were indeed a middle-school dance, then she would be something between chaperone and their mother.

As the Associate Provost in the Global Engagement Office at UNCG — a public-funded university where 50 percent of undergraduates self-identify as first-generation students and 46 percent receive need-based financial aid in the form of Pell grants — the support Anastasiou provides to Greensboro’s students studying abroad, as well as those from international backgrounds studying in Greensboro, is rarely just academic.

Anastasiou, who first came to America on an international scholarship herself, knows how daunting this landscape can be; that’s what drew her here.

“This is a place where I feel I could make a difference,” said Anastasiou, who has led the program all three of its years at UNCG.

In 2024, the program is taking place at UNCG as well as at four other American universities. Sponsored by the US Government and administered by the non-profit International Research & Exchanges Board, visiting educators are placed at one of these host institutions at random, then matched with teachers in one of several pre-selected public schools who teaches a similar subject matter. Bringing these perspectives is like extending a pseudo-abroad experience, which research has shown to foster intercultural understanding, increase patience and self-awareness and boost career and employability outcomes for students who might not have the opportunity to travel.

“We have 18,000 students on campus and we send about 400 to study abroad every year,” Anastasiou said. “This program is an opportunity for us to bring global learning to students who may not be able to [travel internationally].”

This year, Latino teachers join a conversational Spanish class; a student researching economic investment in Africa meets with two educators from opposite sides of Nigeria; and the Thai participant, Sarawut, sits down with a soon-to-be graduate applying to spend a year teaching English in his homeland.

But as Anastasiou said, “Global learning shouldn’t start at the university, it should start in our public schools.”

‘A mirrors and windows experience’ in public schools

In choosing the three schools that will co-participate with UNCG this year, Anastasiou sought to present her Fulbrighters with the variety of secondary education options available to students in America. For this year’s program, the Middle College at UNCG, the Doris Henderson Newcomers school and Western Guilford High School were chosen as partners.

In choosing the schools, Anastasiou felt she needed to find institutions that would reflect the international makeup of her cohort. Over the years, participants who practice a “foreign” religion or intend to wear traditional garb have expressed trepidation about their placement in what they perceive as a relatively small and homogenous city as opposed to a larger, more metropolitan area.

There are other expectations about Greensboro and America at large: that English is the only language spoken in public and that political turmoil ensnares every interaction. And in the schools, that every student has their own laptop and every teacher a boundless budget. But also, that those teachers should never touch their students for fear of legal action, that the metal detectors take up entire lobbies and that firearms might be hidden in any locker.

One of Anastasiou’s main goals for the program is to give educators firsthand experiences so they can see past the media’s representations of America and gain their own understanding of what the country is really like. To this effect, she organizes homestay weekends, attendance at a school board meeting, a trip to Greensboro’s Civil Rights Museum and even a Halloween party. Across six weeks, the international teachers will see arguments over book bans in public schools and the homeless crisis outside their hotel window. But also, multiculturalism on Greensboro’s campus and in the hotel lobby.

As far as administrators at these public schools are concerned, the program sells itself.

“It’s so much of a mirrors and windows experience [for our students],” explained Newcomers Principal Sonia Marquez. “Sometimes I look at you, and you are my mirror — we affirm each other’s identity; sometimes we are windows into [a different] culture and experience.”

Built in the mid-2000s, the Doris Henderson Newcomers school, shortened to Newcomers, provides focused English as a Second Language training to elementary, middle and high-school-aged students who are newly arrived immigrants or refugees to America. Newcomers is intended as a place to ease the educational transition with students attending for one year before moving into a more traditional age-appropriate school.

The international educators who are placed at Newcomers as part of the TEA program are almost as fresh to America as the students. And for Newcomers’ students, to see someone from their own region of the world, perhaps even their own country, offers something to aspire towards.

At the three public schools, the participating educators spend their first days in the classroom sharing with students where they come from and their path to education. Marquez, who watched some of these presentations last year, said that when these teachers share their personal stories — particularly the challenges and obstacles they overcame to get to where they are today — it allows students to picture their own successes, even in the face of the adversities they and their families fled from in their home countries, or are now facing in America.

As Marquez put it, “You can’t be what you can’t see.”

Learning from each other

Opportunities to participate in the program are highly coveted among teachers at Greensboro’s participating public schools. According to one principal, nearly half the educators in her school expressed interest this year.

Teachers who spoke to Triad City Beat reveled in the opportunity to expose their students to a perspective they themselves lacked, to pick up new teaching strategies from other cultures and to see the world. As one science teacher put it, for an educator without the opportunity to travel abroad, this program is the next best thing.

“It’s almost like built-in professional development for our own teachers,” said Brown, the principal at the Middle College. “We can’t globally prepare our students if we’re not globally prepared ourselves.”

After familiarizing themselves with the American classroom experience and presenting on their personal journeys, the participating educators spend the remainder of their classroom days co-teaching lessons with the partner teacher.

Co-teaching takes a different shape in each classroom across the county. Nate Sutton, who teaches at Newcomers but is not an ESL instructor by trade, said it was enriching to see what English language instruction looks like in other parts of the world.

“All of their training comes from within their country,” Sutton said of the participating educators from Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan he was matched with, both of whom are dedicated ESL instructors. “[They’ve equipped me] with more tips and tools to add to my repertoire. [They’ve] made me revisit my purpose in teaching.”

Coincidentally, one of the students in Sutton’s classes was born in Turkey and has family from Uzbekistan. Because Uzbek is a relative of the Turkic language, the two were able to communicate with each other in a native-tongue.

The added help of an additional educator in the classroom goes a long way, too. Like other schools across the district, Newcomers is contending with the diminishment of public funding. However, unlike at other schools, at Newcomers, class sizes tend to swell as new families continuously arrive in the Triad and enroll their children. By the year’s end, the student to teacher ratio can double or triple. As such, teaching ESL and content simultaneously — in a school that isn’t as well-resourced, staff-wise or otherwise, as its peer institutions to begin with — becomes an even greater challenge.

But the teachers in these classrooms have found creative ways to continue their work, often to the surprise of the visiting educators.

Luis Alvarez, a science teacher from Uruguay placed at Newcomers, told TCB that he expected to see more technology in the classrooms but was impressed by the intentionality with which his partner teacher employed what he had. Not all lessons included laptops. And the projector, when used, served to kickstart the lesson. On one day, a clip from CNN about an impending storm set the stage for the partner teachers to lead a conversation about geography with an emphasis on incorporating new vocabulary. The next day, for a lesson on friction, Luis introduced the concept before his partner teacher used a video to provide visual examples. After that, the teachers worked together assisting students in their construction of ramps and food cans so they could see and feel the lesson in action.

Overall, the technological discernment was particularly compelling to Alvarez, who had bought a projector out of pocket a few years back but has since struggled to incorporate it in a way that effectively engaged his students.

In her home country of Nigeria, science teacher Zainab Gambo said that the technological limitations in classrooms have led to the near-ubiquitous adaptation of lecture-based teaching. As a result, “we [Nigerian teachers] are seen as the sole custodians of knowledge and our students have become the consumers of information,” Gambo said.

At Western Guilford High School Gambo saw her partner teacher promoting group work — encouraging students to learn with and from one another, not with computers but with Twizzlers.

The teacher had come into school with packs of licorice, also purchased with her own money, and a hands-on lesson plan: cut the ropes into successively smaller bites, then use your observations to demonstrate the half-life concept.

“Inquiry-based learning, with guided steps towards critical thinking and discovery and problem solving, these are all skills that we emphasize [in Nigeria],” Gambo said. And yet, because so much time was spent speaking about the material at hand, teachers often failed to follow through and actualize those skills. By contrast, the teacher at Western Guilford was focused on “the actual learning rather than just coverage of the syllabus,” Gambo reflected.

The Twizzler lesson was not a one-off, Gambo found, but instead emblematic of the ways Guilford County’s  educators and administrators embraced alternative educational strategies. That priority is perhaps best exemplified in the form of the Greensboro Apprenticeship Program. Shortened to GAP, it’s a paid opportunity for high-school students to earn a degree while also building in-demand skills with partnering local companies like FedEx and Amazon.

Before the program had even been fully explained, Gambo said, the wheels were spinning.

“We have all these companies in Nigeria….”

Speaking more broadly on their experiences with the program, Alvarez and Gambo said the six-weeks have challenged many of their assumptions about what a classroom on the other side of the world looks and feels like. About the role technology, for those who have all at their disposal, should play in education. About the challenges and concessions all teachers face. About what it means to be an educator.

“[Where I come from] teaching is like a sentence: there is a level that you can attend to, there is a mark you have already placed on yourself,” Gambo said. “I used to think that this is something that is particular to Nigeria, but having interacted with people from 18 different parts of the world, and the teachers from Guilford County, I know that teachers all around the world we have, we face, we feel the same things.”

The opportunities to find the universalities in the profession, in their humility, in their shared ambition to shape the minds of tomorrow, is the true strength of the Fulbright TEA Program, Anastasiou said. Next year’s contract has already been signed.

“That’s why I do it,” she said, “because I think it has a great impact on people. And to me, people-to-people connections is what makes this world a better place. That’s the bottom of everything.”

CORRECTIONS: The original version of this article contained some errors. The Global Engagement Office at UNCG was misnamed. Dr. Anastasiou’s title was erroneously omitted. And the number of educators and home countries was miscounted. Those misstatements of fact have been corrected in this online version. TCB regrets the errors.