Fulbright award recipients, seniors Grace Pyo and Morgan Kinsinger, will both be traveling abroad this summer to work as English Teaching Assistants (ETA) with the year-long Fulbright ETA program.
Pyo will travel to Taiwan and Kinsinger will teach in South Korea.
ETAs are “placed in classrooms abroad to provide assistance to the local English teachers” and to “teach English while serving as cultural ambassadors for the U.S.” according to the U.S. Fulbright website.
As part of the application process, Fulbright candidates submit proposals detailing a specific project they hope to enact at their school placement to further English language learning.
For Kinsinger, this meant bringing her theater and improv experience to the classroom to make learning exciting. Last summer, Kinsinger taught at a summer school for Korean exchange students. “I used a lot of charades and improv games to teach vocabulary,” Kinsinger said. “And to me it was just really cool how learning about a word in a scene that’s fun and funny and with your peers can help you contextualize vocabulary in a way that was a lot more fun … than memorizing lists of words.”
Pyo’s project builds off her high school and college speech and debate experience. Pyo plans to establish a speech and debate club to benefit her future students’ English learning experience. “Speech and debate equips you with skills to be able to communicate and I think it will hopefully be a really helpful thing for the students that I’m working with,” Pyo said.
Both Pyo and Kinsinger are thankful and excited for their Fulbright opportunities.
“I’m really excited. It’s definitely been something that’s been a dream of mine to spend a year abroad,” Pyo said.
Kinsinger credits her opportunities at Wheaton for bringing her to this point. “It’s cool for me to see not only how much I have grown personally by being at Wheaton, but also so many tangible things that I’ve learned and things that I can bring to the table that I have gained since being here,” Kinsinger said.