Experience Fulbright

If you have been following along with this blog, you know that I’ve approached this entire Fulbright experience with an attitude of openness and agreeableness. From the beginning, my mantra has been, “Sure! Why not?” and that has so far served me well.

I finished the last of the teacher trainings at the end of March. In all I trained 75 teachers from four schools here in Tashkent, over the course of a month, in stress management and positive psychology techniques. The teachers were from a variety of subjects across grades 7-11. The teachers were then to start using these techniques with their students at the beginning of April. I’m optimistic in nature but I recognize that not all the teachers really embraced the activities I taught them. Realistically, I think about 20 of them really “got it” and were excited to introduce this material to their students. Perhaps anther 30 or seemed interested and may gradually include some of the activities that they are the most comfortable with, and finally about 20 or so probably didn’t really want to be there in the first place and won’t use anything I taught them in their classrooms. Still, I’m hoping that enough of them will see the value in what they learned and will pass it along to their students. We will be be doing check-ins with the schools in mid-April to see how things are going for the teachers so we will know more soon.

With the teacher training completed, I’ve had some open time in my schedule to engage in other activities that have come my way. I was asked my the Ministry of Public Education to participate in the first annual Empowering Girls summit held in Samarkand. I gave opening remarks along with other dignitaries and then later in the afternoon gave an hour long talk entitled, “I’m Just a Girl: Finding Your Voice in a Male Dominated World.” The girls responded really well to be talk and were surprisingly participatory. I don’t have any video of the talk but below are a few photos and my presentation slides for those interested in seeing my outline and visuals.

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I was also asked, repeatedly, for about a month, to agree to talk at the prosecutor’s college about the link between bullying and criminal behaviors. This was one opportunity that I was more reluctant to accept because I felt like talking at the law college was a bit outside of my comfort zone. I am not in any way an expert in the law or criminal behavior but I finally agreed to spend two hours with the lawyers having a discussion. I’m so glad that I did because they were the most engaged, thoughtful, and professional group that I have met with so far. We had a wonderful discussion.

Since then I have received invitations to talk to the Psychology faculty at the National University and the students in the School Psychology program at the Pedagogical University. I was also invited to work with the Ministry of Public Education and the US Embassy to plan an exciting upcoming event, which I can’t post about yet but watch for more info in a May blog post.

Speaking of the US Embassy, they have several programs with which I was also able to be involved the past two weeks. I spent one morning volunteering at the Education USA booth at the semi-annual international education fair here in Tashkent. I got to meet many high school and college students who are interested in furthering their education at am American university.

They also run an English conversation club for English Language Learners. I lead an information discussion on differences between the the educational systems in the US and Uzbekistan at the National Library and then gave a more formal, but interactive presentation on Personality Traits, using Marvel characters to illustrate each trait. The mainly teenage audience seemed to enjoy that and I have to give my own teenager credit for helping me with those examples. He has most of the Marvel movies memorized and knew just which examples to pull out for each trait.

Finally, I’m working on bringing my bullying prevention work to the regions of Uzbekistan. I am in the process of preparing to train psychologists in the more remote areas of Nukus and Khiva, as well as planning to trips to Bukhara, and the Fergana Valley. Of course, I’ll post details of those trips once I’m back from each of them.

So, I guess the moral of this post, is that when you are open to opportunities and willing to take a leap of faith and say “yes” to things that may at first seem uninteresting or just challenging, you may find yourself having some great experiences.