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The nights are cold and the winters long in Belarus, where Caroline Linse has been teaching English as a foreign language since 2001. She wears layers of clothing and sits next to a space heater while reading or working at home. She has few luxuries from abroad, and her phone and e-mail are monitored, as a matter of course. But Linse so loves living in Eastern Europe and teaching at the Minsk State Language University that when she was invited to extend her Fulbright lectureship last spring, she jumped at the chance.
“I feel that teaching English in this part of the world is imperative to world peace,” she explains. “Eastern Europe was cordoned off for many years and has only recently been brought back,” says Linse, an assistant professor on leave from the University of North Carolina’s College of Education. “All of the former Soviet countries now face enormous challenges as they become independent entities,” she says. “I see English as an invaluable tool that can aid every single individual here.”
This is not the first time Linse has traveled to a foreign country to help people learn and teach English. In the summer of 1999, she set up a two-week program at a bilingual school in Mexico, where 15 graduate students assisted in the classroom and lived with Mexican families. She did the same the following year in Hungary. Both programs were so successful that the host countries asked to have them continue. They are still going strong. Linse also has taught in southwestern Alaska and spent three-and-a-half years in Latvia. “I have discovered that the most challenging and potentially the most difficult teaching responsibilities are also the most rewarding,” she says.
Linse is helping current and future teachers in Belarus develop and intensify their skills in English, as well as strengthen and increase the techniques they now use to teach it. As the author of numerous English-language children’s books and curriculum materials for speakers of other languages, Linse is serving as a guest editor as well. She is currently working with several textbook-writing teams in Belarus and will help them get their work published abroad. She has already helped one teacher get a book published in Poland. She was invited to speak and lead workshops in Slovenia and Tunisia, and most recently she conducted a workshop in the Gomel region of Belarus, an area that was very heavily damaged by the Chernobyl accident. “I was warmly welcomed and treated like royalty,” she says.
But her professional duties didn’t stop at that. Linse has worked with a colleague to help give teacher/authors without access to traditional publishers authentic copyrights for their books. She has written grant applications for teachers and arranged an affordable bus trip to an English-language conference in Britain for 11 teachers. In her zeal to build bridges to the West, she even helped a local Internet provider set up a bank account in the United States so he could start a business connecting people in the United States with their “un-wired” relatives in Minsk. He prints out e-mails for families without Internet access, and then delivers them.
Linse is also conducting research in three separate areas. First, she is looking at the characteristics that non-native speakers believe exist in people whom they perceive to be cross-culturally sensitive. That sensitivity, she explains, means being aware of, understanding and appreciating cultural differences. She cites the example of physical space among people. “In many Slovic cultures, for example, the required physical space among people is far less than that in many other cultures, including the United States. Most Americans hate to be crowded,” she explains. “A cross-culturally sensitive person would be aware of that and make sure he or she honored that when in that particular culture.”
The educator is using ethnographic qualitative approaches in her research. She conducts open-ended interviews and written surveys to collect information. “Gathering data isn’t at all difficult here,” she explains. “People are very generous with their ideas as well as their time. And the educational institutions here are filled with highly educated individuals.”
The second area Linse investigates are the experiences women have when they serve in diplomatic positions, compared with those of male diplomats. Lastly, she is looking at the reasons people of various ages in Belarus chose to study English, both before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union. “More and more teachers throughout the world are doing that, and it’s important to know why.”
As for the students in Belarus, Linse says they are no different than those in the United States. “There are hard-working students and lazy students everywhere,” she says. “The students at the university here are motivated by opportunities to work in embassies or international business. They are trained to teach English, Italian, German and a number of other foreign languages. Some of them even go to Germany to teach English.”
What Linse is enjoying most about her stay are the people with whom she works. “Whenever I leave to go to a conference or a workshop,” she says, “I get the same command: ‘Don’t forget to come back.’ And even though salaries are very low, everyone has a lot of books in their homes, and they go to the ballet, the symphony and the theater as often as they can. There is such intellect, literacy and culture hidden behind these tattered buildings.”
Winston, Linse’s wire-haired terrier, accompanied her to Belarus. The two often walk around the neighborhood together, and when Winston plays with other dogs, Linse says, she has an immediate bond with the owner. “We meet lots of people who are very kind to us,” she says. “They like the fact that I brought my dog with me, all the way from America. The only downside of her experience, she says, is being far from her elderly mother. However, they communicate regularly through e-mail.
“I love it here and I think it shows,” she says. “Being an educator as well as an ambassador is a wonderful experience.”
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"International education
exchange is the most significant current project
designed to continue the process of humanizing
mankind to the point, we would hope, that
nations can learn to live in peace"
--J. William Fulbright |
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