Read Review Newsletter Spring 2024
Spring 2024 Issue
Happy Spring from the Director Dr. Amanda Johnson
Greetings Read Center Community Members,
We started the spring semester strong with some excellent news! First, we were awarded both of our Fulbright grants again – the Fulbright Pre-Academic Program and the Fulbright Teaching Excellence and Achievement (TEA) in General Pedagogy program. We are committed to providing engaging and academically rigorous programming for our Fulbright scholars and pleased to receive such excellent feedback on their experiences here at Kent State. I joined the Fulbright TEA scholars in Washington, D.C. last November to celebrate their accomplishments with other TEA scholars, IREX, Fulbright and the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs. Likewise, Kent State recognized our accomplishments by awarding the Staff International Innovator Award to me and my colleagues Neil Cooper and Sarah Schmidt for our summer 2023 conference in Rwanda.
Finally, we are proud to highlight receiving a new endowment. Our new endowment, the Mary Lou Pollak International Education Experience Fund, will support students in traveling or researching abroad. We are incredibly thankful to the family for helping us support international education in the College of Education, Health and Human Services. We look forward to providing awards starting January 2025.
Onward and upward!
The Mary Lou Pollak International Education Experience Endowment
The Read Center received a gift of $200,000 to support students in education abroad and international research in the College of Education, Health and Human Services (EHHS).
Mary Lou Pollak was a 1953 graduate of Kent State University, where she earned a Bachelor of Science in Elementary Education from EHHS. Always on the go, Mary Lou and her husband Hank spent their retirement exploring the world.
Mary Lou traveled to all seven continents and visited more than one hundred countries, many times sharing in their customs and always trying their cuisine. And, as someone who wouldn’t simply pass through a place, Mary Lou made time to take photos and wrote voluminously in journals to document her experiences in most locales. It is thus fitting that such a fund be created to honor her legacy. Students will be able to apply for funding for their study abroad experience or to conduct research abroad. Funding will be available beginning in 2025.
Fulbright Alumni Spotlight – Harish Yadav
Harish Yadav is an English language is an English language teaching facilitator and mentor teacher at Directorate of Education GNCT in Delhi, India. He is one of the Fulbright TEA scholars in the Fall 2023 Cohort at Kent State University. The program hosted at Kent State offered him the opportunity to develop his facilitating skills and allowed him to focus more on expanding teachers’ soft skills in his mentee schools. During the six weeks spent in Ohio, he interacted with both faculty members at Kent State and Fulbright exchange teachers from 20 different countries. He enjoyed the exchange of good practices during the program and workshops with his fellow Fulbright teachers at Kent State and, upon his return home, he started cascading his learnings to colleagues and other teachers at government schools in Delhi to introduce them to Developing Soft Skills for Effective Teaching, a workshop organized by State Council of Educational Research and Training in Delhi. The experience at Kent State became a defining moment in his career, as he is currently using all the knowledge accumulated while in the U.S. to create a positive environment in India.
Read Center and Embassy of Ecuador to Highlight Ecuadorian Culture in Virtual Events
After a productive meeting with the Embassy of Ecuador in November, the Read Center and the embassy will partner to provide a virtual event April 22 for Earth Day.
The virtual talk will highlight Ecuadorian culture, considering sustainable tourism and environmentalism. The event will be via Zoom, free and open to the public. More details to come!
New Read Center Professional Advisory Board Member, Kristie Prough
The Read Center benefits from having a group of engaged professionals supporting and helping to guide the work of the center. We are pleased to announce that we have voted in a new member, Kristie Prough, ’99, M.Ed. ’02, Ed.S. ’04, interim superintendent of Stow-Munroe Falls City Schools.
Stow-Munroe Falls High School has been a great partner in the Fulbright Teaching Excellence and Achievement grant, hosting many international secondary educators of the past 10 years. Kristie joined us in Rwanda last summer to participate in the Peace Education in an Era of Crisis Conference held in July. We welcome Kristie and look forward to closer collaboration!
To learn more about the Stow-Munroe Falls participation in the conference, click here.
CIIE in the News
International Presentation at Peace Education conference
International Educators Improvce Teaching Skills at Kent State