BY STEVEN JUPITER
BRANDON—Monica McEnerny has spent much of her career teaching teachers. As an Associate Professor of Education at Castleton University, she has helped train aspiring educators in Vermont for years. And now she’s going to help train the educators of Kazakhstan, as she’s about to embark on her second stint as a Fulbright Specialist in the Central Asian country of 19 million people.
The Fulbright Specialist Program is run by the U.S. Department of State and allows American educators to engage in short-term projects at foreign educational institutions across the globe. Ms. McEnerny will be working at KIMEP University in Almaty, Kazakhstan, teaching classes on ethical perspectives on equity and designing curricula for middle-school students. She also helped them during COVID with best practices regarding educational technology.
“They’re struggling with the same social and emotional pandemic issues we are,” said McEnerny at her home in Brandon, where she and her husband, Harry, have lived since 2016. “The impact of the social isolation on kids was very similar.”
McEnerny first went to Kazakhstan as a Fulbright Specialist in 2016, to teach educational technology and applied linguistics. She reapplied in 2019 but was unable to return because of the pandemic. The Fulbright program allowed recipients of awards to postpone their trips, but the extension is set to expire in September of this year. McEnerny will conduct several weeks of online classes from the U.S. and then spend June 15 – 30 in Kazakhstan.
“Castleton has been very accommodating. I’m going to take a sabbatical and write some articles about my experiences in Kazakhstan that I hope to present at the Fulbright conference in Denver,” McEnerny said.
McEnerny became involved with Kazakhstan through her brother, who is raising a family there with his Russian-born wife. Though, KIMEP is primarily an English-speaking university, McEnerny does speak some Russian as a result of time spent living in Russia as a child: her father was a diplomat in the U.S. Foreign Service. In fact, they were stationed in Prague during the Russian Invasion of 1968 and her father was given an award for his service during the conflict.
When asked about similarities between the U.S. and Kazakhstan, McEnerny said, “We’re more alike than different. We all put our families first. We all have a lot of the same challenges.”
“Most of the information they get is more from a Russian perspective than a Western one. They don’t seem to realize how big and diverse the U.S. actually is. They seem to think of it as a very privileged place.”
A former Soviet Republic, Kazakhstan is the world’s ninth-largest country by area but has a population of only 19 million. It stretches from the Caspian Sea in the west almost to Mongolia in the east. In many ways, both literal and figurative, it bridges Europe and Asia.
“The food is really spicy,” McEnerny added. “Very peppery but delicious. Their version of borscht (beet soup) is amazing.”
Almaty, where KIMEP University is located, is a cosmopolitan city of two million people. “It sort of has a New York feel,” said McEnerny. “The people are very sophisticated. They prove that a lot of our assumptions about that part of the world are wrong.”
And the whole point of the Fulbright programs is to build the international connections that allow us to correct our false impressions. Congratulations, Monica!
