Experience Fulbright

It’s been nearly four years since my Fulbright ended and I concluded this blog. A lot has happened in that time, including a global pandemic that brought nearly all travel to a complete halt for months upon months, upon 1,000 years. Despite the two years of being trapped at home, I have still managed three trips back to Uzbekistan in that time. Let me take a moment to recap before getting to the real reason I’ve decided to revive this blog. I’ll get to that in a minute.

I returned home to the States in June 2019 honestly thinking that it was unlikely that I would ever return to Uzbekistan. Then in the fall of that year, the Uzbek Ministry of Public Education reached out to me to invite me to return to Tashkent for a few weeks to do a bit of a press tour in order to promote the fact that the bullying prevention program I designed had been approved as part of the national curriculum. I spent 3 weeks there in January 2020 completly unaware that this was the last time I’d be able to travel anywhere for almost 2 years. It is only 2 months later that the COVID pandemic hit with full force.

Fast forward to April 2021. The COVID vaccine has recently become available in the US and travel has slowly started to return. I was fortunate to receive a grant from the US Embassy in Tashkent to return for 2 months to conduct a series of active learning workshops for faculty at Tashkent Pedagogical Univesity. While there, I also traveled to Jizzakh to spend one week with English teachers at Jizzakh State Pedagogical Univesrity and another week with Psychology faculty and students at the Jizzakh branch of National Univeristy.

It was sometime during the COVID lockdown that I decided I wanted more of this international development type of work, specifically related to education. However, I’m a psychologist who focuses on education and not a specialist in the field of education itself. Without an advanced degree in directly in education, I was finding many opportunies were not open to me.

So I did what any reasonable person would do in this situation. I decided to return to school and get my Doctorate in Education. I’m just finishing up with my second (and final) year of coursework as I write this post. Last year, for my quantitative methods course, I returned to Uzbkestan for two short weeks in April to conduct a survey on the relationship between mindfulness, self-efficacy, and stress among English language students (currently in press).

At the moment, I am preparing to return to Tashkent once again to conduct my dissertation research, a quasi-experimental study of the impact of mindfulness training on perceived stress and academic performance in Uzbek English language students.

Which brings me to the reason for reviving my blog now. At the suggestion of my doctoral committee, I’ll be blogging about my experience over the next 2 month conducting this research study. In order to protect the confidentiality of my participants, I won’t be talking about the specific location of the study or revealing other details, but don’t worry. There’s still going to be plenty of interesting happening for you to follow along with me on this latest adventure in Uzbekistan.

Stay tuned . . .