By Pat Jenkins The Dispatch Jade Graddy, a University of Washington student who says she takes a little bit of Eatonville with her wherever she goes, has been offered a Fulbright U.S. Student Program grant to Jordan for an English teaching assistantship,. Graddy is among about 1,900 Americans who will travel and live abroad for the 2015-16 academic year, the U.S. Department of State and the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board announced. Fulbright grants are awarded based on academic and professional achievement and demonstrated leadership potential. The program is considered the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government. It is intended to increase mutual understanding between citizens of the United States and the people of 160 other countries that participate. The primary funding for the program is an annual appropriation by Congress to the State Department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Since its start in 1946 under legislation introduced by then-U.S. Sen. J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, the Fulbright Program has given approximately 360,000 students, scholars, teachers, artists and scientists the opportunity to study, teach and conduct research and exchange ideas toward shared international concerns. Past Fulbright recipients include 53 from 12 countries who have been awarded the Nobel Prize. The alumni also include Colombia President Juan Manuel Santos, John Hope Franklin, a noted American historian and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient, and Amar Gopal Bose, an electrical engineering professor at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) founded Bose Corporation, an innovator of stereo speaker technology. Graddy worked as an AmeriCorps literacy tutor in the Rainier Beach neighborhood of Seattle. That motivated her to study linguistics with a minor in human rights at UW. After earning her degree, Graddy was selected as an international intern with Tomorrow's Youth Organization in Nablus, Palestine. Now she's returning to the Middle East. While in Jordan, she will teach English and volunteer with refugee communities in Amman. "I'm so happy to represent Eatonville in this venture," said Graddy, who talked more about it in a Q-and-A with The Dispatch.
Dispatch: When will you leave for Jordan, and what are you doing in preparation for the move? Graddy: I will arrive in Jordan on Aug. 30th for my in-country orientation. Prior to that, I had an in-country Middle East and North Africa pre-departure orientation in Washington, D.C. from June 11-14. For the rest of the summer, my focus is on spending time with my family and honing my Jordanian Arabic skills via online software and Skype sessions with native speakers.
Have you been previously to Jordan or any other Middle Eastern countries?
Graddy: While I was an undergraduate at the University of Washington, I left the United States for the first time to study abroad for four months in Rabat, Morocco, studying language, culture and human rights in the MENA region. While there, I lived with a host family who helped me to pick up the local dialect of Arabic and conducted a research project on Amazigh, an indigenous language of North Africa. Following my graduation from the UW, I spent two and a half months in a city called Nablus in the West Bank of Palestine, where I taught English and psychosocial development classes to children living in UN refugee camps ,as well as professional development seminars for students around my own age at An-Najah National University.
What are you looking forward to the most about this next experience?
Jordan is in a really interesting political situation right now, with borders touching Iraq, Syria, the West Bank and Israel. Though many of its neighbors have faced incredible conflict over decades, Jordan has remained politically stable and has an open-door policy toward refugees from surrounding areas. I am really interested to not only learn more about the language and culture of my host country, but also to gain insight on all that is going on in the region from a Jordanian perspective. Further, I hope to spend time working directly with some of the refugee communities within Jordan in some capacity.
oes having roots in a small community like the Eatonville area mean anything extra to you as you embark on this new adventure?
In previous travels in the MENA region, I've found that many of the communities I've encountered have a small-town vibe similar to Eatonville. The thing that I've appreciated most about growing up in my community is the sense of interconnectedness that I still feel when I visit town. In the same way, communities in the MENA region are deeply interconnected, supportive and tight-knit. To be welcomed into these communities abroad is at once new and unique, but in ways it is also familiar because of what I experienced growing up in my own small town of Eatonville.
What draws you to the study of linguistics? And how many languages do you speak?
I have always been incredibly interested in language - not only learning new languages, but also understanding the inherent structures at play within them. As a kid I was able to pick up bits and pieces of languages, whether counting to 10 in Vietnamese, greeting someone in Norwegian, or swearing in German. And I believed that a linguistics degree might be a useful tool to garnering experience abroad following undergrad through teaching ventures, and this has proved true thus far. While in college I studied Spanish and Arabic as part of my degree, with the majority of my focus being on the latter. At this point, I'm conversational in three very different dialects of Arabic. Eventually I hope to speak a total of five languages including my native tongue of English.
What are your career or life goals?
Following my time with Fulbright, I hope to spend another year either abroad or working in D.C. After that, I plan on returning to graduate school to study international affairs. My ideal job would have something to do with addressing issues of educational access for communities displaced by conflict.
Tell us something about yourself GÇô family, hobbies, special interests, etc.
This is always the hardest part. My family is deeply tied to the Eatonville community. My sisters Machaela and Alexa and I have grown up here from kindergarten to high school. For fun, I like to sing, play guitar and write poetry. I'm getting published this fall!. Additionally, I spend a great deal of time volunteering and suspect I have over 2,000 lifetime hours of community service at this point after a year in AmeriCorps and volunteer activities in college.
Comments
Use the comment form below to begin a discussion about this content.
Sign in to comment