The Pivot: Singapore Bound

I'm writing this at the start of my third week of living and learning in Singapore. It is raining out. Seriously, I marvel at the ferocity of the rain here. Now that I'm stuck indoors I figured I'd get started on something I've been wanting to get off the ground for some time now. Welcome to my blog. In future posts I plan to document what I'm seeing, doing, and thinking on my wanderings. I hope that someone out there finds this at least a bit interesting.

I've been an educator in Brooklyn charter schools for the better part of a decade. I entered the profession, as many do, as an idealistic and underprepared twenty-something. No work has been as challenging and exhausting and rewarding as this. As my twenties came to a close, I became more aware of the fact that the first act of my career was ending, that my path forward was coming into focus, and that to continue meant to enact a change. In short, I needed to pivot. Education is and will be my life's work. But there's an itch I need to scratch, and it is to carry me away from my classroom and my students and my home country, at least for a while.

I first learned about the Fulbright Distinguished Awards in Teaching Semester Research Program in January 2018, three days after the 2018–19 application deadline had passed. An hour or two of research was all I needed to decide that I would apply the following year. In the months that followed I decided on the questions I would pursue and the country in which I would pursue them. In April 2019, I received word that I had been selected for the 2019–2020 cohort. I'd be heading to Singapore. The J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board and the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs had granted me the opportunity to conduct a project there in which I'd explore ways to create learning environments that encouraged teamwork and creative problem solving. In the process I'd engage with researchers, leaders, scholars, and practitioners from around the world in the exchange of ideas and best practices, leaving after five months having developed resources to be used and shared with the education community. I hadn't wanted something this badly in a long time.

Within weeks I was hard at work on a to-do list a mile (or should I say several kilometers) long. There was a host of forms and email exchanges with IREX, the organization that administers the program, and with my host country. I slogged through lengthy clearance processes to secure approval for my inquiry project and admission to the National Institute of Education in Singapore. There was a three-day orientation in Washington, DC to attend and a travel itinerary to finalize. But most trying, I'd find, would be the wait. January 3rd could not come quickly enough.