DEBAMEETA BHATTACHARYA FINDS OUT WHAT IT IS LIKE TO BE AMERICAN, TEACH IN KOLKATA ~ HOWEVER BRIEFLY ~ LEARN THE LANGUAGE AND GO ‘NATIVE’

hat would you say about American “young adults”, four dressed in salwaar-kameez and ethnic jewellery, talking about their experience in Kolkata with so much enthusiam and energy? Around nine months ago, Adizah Afua Eghan, Christine Zographia Purdy, Ryan Michael Corrigan, Stacia Mikaela Koster and Rachel Marie Glogowski came to the city to teach English (the regular syllabus) and American literature at five different schools. They arrived last year in June and will remain till the end of the month under the aegis of the United States-India Educational Foundation&’s “Fulbright-Nehru English Teaching Assistant Programme”.
This programme is an exchange opportunity for graduating seniors, recent graduates or Masters’ students to teach conversational English and composition to middle and high school students and they can be regarded as cultural ambassadors offering an opportunity to establish a “native speaker” presence in the classroom. Sponsored and managed by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, US Department of State, the programme aims at enhancing cross-cultural communication opportunities in a host country&’s elementary/secondary schools, universities, teacher training institutions, culture/language centres, and vocational institutions.
Eghan, born and raised in San Jose, California, earned her BA in Political Science with a minor in French from Boston College, where she received the Amanda V Houston Travelling Fellowship to volunteer in India with an NGO with the focus on the prevention and awareness of sexually transmitted infections. She spent her junior year studying in Paris and volunteered as a tutor to Somali refugees in the Boston area and as a camp counsellor and teacher in Jamaica for middle school students. She also interned for senator John Kerry, US representative Michael Capuano and The World, a radio programme co-produced by PRI, WGBH and BBC. Her interests include international affairs, gender equality, public health and yoga and, as of now, she teaches in Ballygunge Shiksha Sadan School.
“I was overwhelmed by the response of the students. I was primarily given the middle school classes to handle. I was given the liberty to teach students the way I wanted to. The only problem I had was classroom sizes. We were told to move in between the rows and columns while teaching but it seemed I could never go beyond the first two as the rows would narrow down due to a space crunch.”
To that Glogowski added, “ I felt like the Pied Piper with a trail of mice behind me. The idea of a foreigner coming to school regularly to take classes in Indian attire was not a ‘cultural’ but ‘celebrity shock’. Initially, it was difficult for both of us and there were term breaks, vacations, but gradually things worked out well.”
Working at Dolna Day School, she earned a BA in Political Science and Humanities from Villanova University. Growing up in Bristol, Connecticut, she joined Youth Journalism International in 2006 and as a senior editor for the institution her involvement allowed her to collaborate with teenagers from around the world at an early age and first sparked her interest in learning about the global cultures. As a sophomore in college, Glogowski taught English to young Polish students at a summer camp in rural Poland as part of the Kosciuszko Foundation&’s Teaching English programme. She later returned to Poland for another summer through a similar foundation scholarship to study the Polish language at Jagiellonian University in Krakow. Though she loved the experience in Poland, she was eager to continue travelling and with the help of a Connelly-Delouvrier Scholarship for international studies she participated in Duke University&’s Global Semester Abroad in Beijing, China, and Udaipur in India during the spring of 2012. Although she enjoyed her studies in Beijing, she particularly loved taking classes and conducting health-related research in both rural and urban Rajasthan. She hopes to pursue a graduate degree in public health or public policy upon her return to the USA.
This interactive session was moderated by Joanne Joria, director of the American Center in Kolkata and she is perhaps one of the most easy-going and witty moderators one can hope to come across.
Corrigan the only male “young adult” as introduced by Joria got a BA in Spanish and Environmental Science with was a biology minor from Doane College. As a student, he researched algae-based biofuels for two years under a $20-million National Science Foundation grant and presented findings at numerous venues. He also studied for three weeks in Chennai and three months in Heredia, Costa Rica. In addition, he served as managing photo editor and editorialist for The Doane Owl campus newspaper and won regional and national awards for his work, which also appeared in Nebraska Life, TheDailyGreen.com and The Doane Mag. He was also an English teaching assistant and a substitute English language learner-teacher for adult classrooms. In addition to his on-campus involvement, Corrigan founded and coordinated Crete Community Gardens, which aims at building healthier communities by helping at-risk families grow healthy food at low cost. His passion is sustainable development: assisting families to pull themselves out of poverty in a way that is least damaging to the environment. His other interests include microfinance, hiking, rock climbing and music and he is serving St Joseph & Mary&’s School. He said, “ Since I’ve a journalism background, I tried teaching students to write profile stories. It has been extremely interesting.”
The principal of the school also added, “We have student coordinators of Voices, a supplement of The Statesman, where they always get to write and be a part of this genre.”
Purdy is an Honours graduate of Binghamton University where she earned her BA in Cinema and English Literature. As an undergraduate, she was inducted into numerous Honours societies, such as Phi Beta Kappa and Phi Kappa Phi. She worked as a teaching assistant for three years and as a tutor, mostly in writing, for two years. During the summer of 2012, she was a tutor-counsellor at Upward Bound, a programme that helps at-risk high school students graduate and attend college.
She also volunteered with the English Conversation Pairs programme for English as a Second Language. While she enjoys teaching, Purdy has a passion for cinema and women&’s studies and received a scholarship from the university&’s Independent Undergraduate Research in the Humanities Programme, funded by the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities, to conduct research on women establishing an identity and independence within the work and social world, for which she did her thesis. After completing her Fulbright grant, she plans to pursue a doctoral degree in film studies.
In her early 20s, when she spoke about her association with St John&’s Diocesan Girls’ Higher Secondary School, she had a sparkle in her eyes when she talked of her experience. Koster received a BA in International Studies from John Hopkins University, where she minored in French cultural studies and is rather reserved. Throughout her undergraduate career, she worked with the John Hopkins Tutorial Project, the Baltimore Community School in Remington and, most recently, the Refugee Action Project, a group that tutors elementary-aged refugees whose families have been relocated to Baltimore. She spent her junior year abroad in Paris, where she studied at the Sciences Po Journalism School. She wrote her final reporting project, “Mastering Foreign Tongues: The Diverse Inhabitants of Little Jaffna”, on Tamil refugees living in Paris and has spent the past year researching her senior honours’ thesis, “The Politics of Slum Redevelopment”, which analyses the evolving relationship between slum-dweller organisations and the Indian government. In her spare time, she enjoys watching old films, creative writing and hiking in the mountains of Colorado where she grew up.
She is with Abhinav Bharati School, which she joined from 1 August last year and had to undergo intensive Bengali spoken language training for two months, like the others. She talked about her involvement with various school activities and how she enjoyed every bit of it. Koster and Glogowski shared their experiences with weak students who, they said, required a little more attention. None of the five plan to become teachers in the near future but their experiences with the little ones — good, bad or shocking — will be engraved in their hearts, never to fade with time.

debameeta.bhattacharya@gmail.com