Six recent graduates of St. Olaf College were awarded Fulbright Scholarships for 2023-24, and a current student was selected to participate in the Fulbright Canada MITACS-Globalink Summer Program.
Marlee Anderson ’23, Angelina Gasparov ’23, Emily Johnson ’20, Rachel Beran ’19, Laila Amini ’14 and Jeffrey Carlisle ’10 have been awarded Fulbright Scholarships for next year. The Rising St. Olaf senior Lydia Hill ’24 has been selected to participate in the Fulbright Canada MITACS-Globalink Summer Program.
The Fulbright Program offers opportunities for graduating seniors, students, and young professionals from all academic disciplines to conduct research, teach English, or pursue graduate study abroad. The program is designed to broaden perspectives through intercultural dialogue and create connections in a complex and changing world.
The US Fulbright Student Program is sponsored by the State Department and operates in more than 140 countries. Program participants are selected based on many factors, including leadership potential and academic merit.
Marlee Anderson ’23who studied mathematics and education at St. Olaf, it will be works as an English language assistant in a small school in Nova Paka, Czech Republic. The school is focused on pedagogy, and many of the students will either go on to teach at the university or go straight into teaching, allowing Anderson to be involved in teaching education. She is particularly interested in teaching middle school in a rural setting, where she can experience the customs and traditions of the country and work with students in the age group she plans to teach after completing her Fulbright scholarship. As a music enthusiast, Anderson is particularly moved by the life and work in the country of Antonin Dvořák and other Czech composers, and hopes to join a choir during her year. By placing herself in an entirely new environment, she hopes to prepare herself to be a more experienced and empathetic teacher serving diverse populations across the United States.
Angelina Gasparova ’23 will teach English to secondary school students in Bulgaria. After majoring in social work with an emphasis in race and ethnic studies and German studies at St. Olaf, she is particularly interested in how learning languages opens up the world for people, creating opportunities for work, friendships and education. She will teach grades 8 through 12, and also plans to participate in Fulbright Bulgaria’s BEST program, which gives students opportunities for debate and public speaking. She hopes to both emphasize the fun of language learning and help students learn life skills like wellness and financial literacy in an academic setting. As a Bulgarian American, Gasparov is especially excited to spend a year in the country of her parents and grandparents and looks forward to deepening her connection to Bulgaria and its people.
“I hope that I can present creative and engaging topics to the students and that my time in Vidin will allow the Bulgarian youth to see how important it is to invest in our people so that we as a collective group remain strong and connected to our roots , regardless of where we end up settling. I hope that the students I work with will feel confident in their work in class, in who they are as people, and proud of where they come from,” she says.
Emily Johnson ’20 will explore how Norwegian nature-based preschools promote social and emotional development. During her time at St. Olaf, she majored in Norwegian and Biology with a concentration in Educational and Scandinavian Studies. She also studied abroad in Norway and Denmark, where she had an internship at a forest preschool. Johnson believes that more attention should be focused on early education and is particularly interested in the way some Norwegian preschools encourage relatively unsupervised playtime outside, regardless of weather conditions.
“After comparing how the US and Norway view early childhood as part of my Rand Scholar Award at St. Olaf, I was drawn to the Norwegian principle of whole-person development through play in nature,” says Johnson. “I spent the last three years as a teacher at a nature-based and farm-based preschool in Minnesota, so I’m looking forward to exploring the structures and inner workings of nature-based preschools in Norway. Early childhood is such an important period in a person’s life!”
Johnson is well equipped to interview children, parents and teachers to learn how these schools are organized, in addition to having other hands-on experience in a Norwegian forest kindergarten. She plans to identify best practices regarding the relationship between social-emotional learning and nature-based early childhood education and then work to employ them in the United States.
Rachel Beran ’19 will spend his Fulbright year teaching English at a university in Morocco. After studying French, political science and Middle Eastern studies at St. Olaf, she earned a master’s degree in education and taught English in Belgium and France. She hopes to use her time in Morocco to encourage language learners to take risks through lessons that allow students to make mistakes and learn in a low-pressure way.
“Often the focus in language classrooms is on perfection, which means students can be very hesitant to speak. I will be teaching in the School of Medicine and I plan to use simulations, role plays and adapted theater games so that my students can practice the communication skills they will need for their post-graduate careers,” she says.
In Morocco, Beran will primarily use French and English with students and others in the community, but he also plans to study Darija, the Moroccan dialect of Arabic, to better connect with his students and colleagues in Marrakech. She looks forward to making connections that will give her insight into Moroccan culture and further prepare her for a career in international education.
Laila Amini ’14 will explore climate change-resilient agriculture as the link between climate impacts, adaptive capacity and community-level resilience in two valleys in northern Tajikistan. After graduating in Environmental Studies and Sociology/Anthropology with a concentration in Middle Eastern Studies at St. Olaf, Amini served in the Peace Corps in Morocco and then worked on organic farms and with climate organizations in both the United States and Tajikistan. She plans to explore the potential to create greater climate resilience through increased circulation of native seeds. By focusing on local perceptions, she hopes to identify the opportunities and challenges of using local seeds instead of non-local and imported varieties.
Jeffrey Carlisle ’10 will travel to Norway to conduct a case study on how recent policies reforming teacher education institutions (TEIs) are affecting teacher recruitment, attrition and preparedness. He studied music and environmental science at St. Olaf and Public Policy at the University of Texas at Austin. He spent most of his career teaching eighth-grade science and sex education in Texas, where a recent statewide survey found that 77 percent of teachers are seriously considering leaving the profession. Although Norway and Texas face similar problems with teacher recruitment, attrition and preparedness, the two have radically different policy approaches to finding solutions.
“While Norway faces similar teacher shortages, its recent reforms to teacher training take a significantly different approach, doubling down on high-quality university teacher training and raising the professional status of teaching.” The first teachers to complete their training under the new reforms entered the classroom this year. This presents an incredible opportunity to study how these reforms affect the preparation, attrition and retention of new teachers,” he says.
Carlyle hopes to use his work in Norway to help inform policy recommendations for Texas, and plans to use data analysis as well as personal interviews to better understand the Norwegian system.
Lydia Hill ’24 has also been accepted into the Fulbright Canada MITACS-Globalink program, which provides opportunities for students to spend a summer conducting research in Canada. She will work on a project studying the effects of prenatal cannabis exposure on fetal brain development using third-trimester fetal brain MRI. She is excited about the opportunity to spend a summer researching obstetrics and gynecology, an area of medicine she is interested in after graduation. She was also drawn to the program because of the French language requirement.
“As a French major planning to enter the medical field, my dream was to be able to use my French in a professional setting after graduation—but I wasn’t sure if that would ever be possible or a reality. Needless to say, I was over the moon to have the opportunity to bring these two parts of myself, French and science, together this summer,” she says.