Experience Fulbright

Our last week of the treatment phase of the project was the week of May 15th. Things went more smoothly this week. The teachers all showed up for their classes (yay!) but student attendance was low. It feels like everyone is just ready for the end of the school year. Students have 2 more weeks before they have to take their end of year exams but it feels like the students and teachers alike are done. We pushed through and tried to include some fun activities for this last week. We read Fox in Sox aloud in the reading classes so the students could practice pronunciation. In the Listening and Speaking classes we played Pictionary which the students really seemed to enjoy.

The 5th and final week was post treatment data collection. We repeated all the same measurements that we did the week prior to starting the 4 weeks of mindfulness training. One of the problems that I was thinking about this week was attrition. Attendance among the students in these final weeks was low, as I noted in the previous paragraph. This was an issue for the post data collection so I contacted the Dean’s assistant and asked her if she could “encourage” the students to attend their classes this week. This turned out to be a good strategy as most of the students were in class at least one of the three days of the week so we were able to get their post-test data collected. As soon as we had the data, my research assistant and i sat down and immediately starting entering everything into an Excel spreadsheet, which automatically backs up to the cloud when I save it. This turned out to be a fortuitous choice, as you will realize after reading my next blog post.

I also presented at a conference hosted by the university during this last week. The conference was on innovations in Foreign Language teaching and included two local faculty members, one woman from India who presented via Zoom, one English Language Fellow, and myself. One common theme here at conferences is that presenters generally disregard any time guidelines and end up running way over time. I was presenting last and was pleasantly surprised when we only ended up 30 minutes over the scheduled time when it came my turn to present.

Finally, I was happy to be able to meet our FLEX exchange student from last year here in Tashkent to celebrate his birthday with him. I have not seen him in about a year, since he left Minnesota to return to Uzbekistan in June 2022. We enjoyed a lovely dinner at one of my favorite places here in Tashkent (Cafe Kafe, which I recently learned has been renamed Kafe Loft).