Fulbright Reality Czech

Lenka Slavíková is an Associate  Professor of Public Economics at the Faculty of Social and Economic Studies of Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem, North Bohemia. She has just finished her 9-month stay at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst as a senior research Fulbright-Masaryk grantee. Passionate about the environment, Lenka focuses her research on the role of landowners in adopting flood and drought risk mitigation measures on their land. As Lenka reflects at the end of her stay in the U.S., one of the greatest challenges of her international experience was the same thing that originally sparked the idea to submit her Fulbright application - the integration of her three sons, ages 7, 10, and 12, into a foreign language environment.  The idea to experience life in a foreign country came to us about three years ago. We wanted to expose our three kids to a foreign language and environment. To make it happen, there had to be, of course, eligibility for fu...

Michelle Devereaux is an Associate Professor of English and English Education at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. Her work is heavily influenced by her five years as a high school English teacher. In 2018/2019, Michelle was a Fulbright Scholar at Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem. Passionate about excellence in teaching, Michelle helped to train American Fulbright English Teaching Assistants in the Czech Republic and their local colleagues while on her grant. In this blog post, Michelle reflects on the past year of teaching mostly in the virtual world and on the lessons of critical empathy that she has learned from her students.     We had done everything right. We had researched, planned, drafted, and then researched again. We had received permissions and signed forms. Our academic unit was done. The 10th grade classroom and its teacher were both ready to go. The curricular unit on Global Englishes was our brain child. We hadn’t found any previous...