Montana Fullbrighters go around the globe

Two Montana teachers, Ashley Pankratz of Dodson and Steven Riccio of Bozeman, have received the Fullbright Distinguished Awards in Teaching Research and will be traveling to other countries to complete research projects they hope will help improve schooling in Montana

Pankratz and Riccio said they were humbled by being given this award along with 18 other teachers throughout the U.S., and are honored to stand among such distinguished education researchers.

"I think everyone had a little bit of impostor syndrome at orientation," Riccio said.

Pankratz said she was honored to be among this group as one of the few teachers from rural schools, whose students she hopes to help with her research project.

Pankratz will be traveling to Finland, likely early next year, to research the country's professional development practices, with a specific focus on middle and high school teachers and how they network with other professionals within their fields to improve education.

She said this kind of exchange represents an incredibly opportunity for her as a researcher and a chance to bring something back that can really help her profession.

"This is once in a lifetime, as cliche as that sounds," she said.

Pankratz said its not uncommon for small school districts in rural Montana to have only one teacher in any given subject, which can lead to a sense of professional isolation, and she wants to see how teachers in Finland, a country where education is funded and emphasized more heavily, connect and help each other develop and evolve and how their school system facilitates that.

She said her goals with the project are to help close the achievement gap in Montana schools and, hopefully, find ways to address the ongoing teacher shortage that continues to hit rural schools especially hard.

She said Finland has a very different education system, and a very different culture when it comes to how teachers are regarded, and those differences will inevitably shape her research, but she's sure she will be able to find things that can be used or at least tried back home.

She said teaching is a much more competitive and well-respected field in Finland compared to the U.S., with higher educational requirements for potential teachers, along with higher pay and more trust and autonomy.

Pankratz said she's certain a system like that will have its own unique challenges, but she's hoping her research might reveal ways to help teachers in the U.S. and Montana specifically, many of whom have faced a serious morale problem in the past few years, one that isn't helped by the sense of professional isolation that often comes with rural teaching.

She said the shortage is a massive motivator for her, having seen how many teachers in Montana are close to retiring and how many positions across the state are already open, the picture the numbers paint is very dire.

She said people in power at the national and state level need to start taking action to address this problem or these schools are going to have to make some very hard decisions about staffing, perhaps even consolidation, which is something very few people want to do.

Pankratz said there have been proposals to lower some standards for incoming teachers, and as bad as the situation is, she fears this may be a slippery slope.

She said she can speak from personal experience when she says it can be extremely difficult to find people to agree to work in rural districts.

"It's just hard to get people to come to rural Montana unless they have ties," she said.

However, Pankratz said, she also wants to use this trip as an opportunity to show students the value of travel and the value of cultural exchange.

She said other countries have different ways of doing things and it's valuable to learn about them and to see if they have ideas that can help improve the way the U.S. does those things.

Pankratz said she wants to encourage students to think outside their immediate area and see a world that has so much to offer them.

She said a substantial amount of her school district is made up of students from a Native American background and they don't necessarily have a lot of representation in programs like this either, so she's hoping she will be able to bring their perspective to this program as well.

Ideally, she said, she wants to find a way to get her students and the students she'll be interacting with in Finland to be able to communicate directly with each other at some point, but she's not sure if that's something that can be done.

Regardless, she said, she will be uploading videos to Google Classroom for her students and sharing blog posts via Twitter at @Explore_Ed.

Pankratz said she hopes that when she gets back she can meet with teachers' groups, schools administrator organizations and politicians to review her findings and see if they can help the state.

She said she also wanted to extend her gratitude to her colleagues at her school district, as well as administrators and school board members who have worked hard to make sure she can do this.

Montana's other Fullbright exchange teacher Steven Riccio has already left for Vietnam to study their school system's methods for teaching students about climate change.

Riccio said in an interview before departing that Vietnam, as a coastal country that can already see some extreme weather during monsoon seasons, is uniquely vulnerable to the effects of climate change and he wants to see how the country's teachers communicate and navigate that subject with their students, and if the U.S. can learn anything from them, not just to build students' knowledge on the subject, but also to inspire them to action.

He said Vietnam is an economically developing nation and, because of that, people don't always have access to things like electric vehicles or other things that Americans do that can help reduce carbon emissions. He said he wonders if that lack of access makes people feel differently about the issue of climate change.

From a more systemic point of view, he said, Vietnam's government also has a lot more direct control over its industry than the U.S. and how that manifests in the form of standards and regulations relating to climate change is also something he'd like to examine.

He said he's been to Europe and South America but he's never been to this part of the world, so he's sure there will be some culture shock, but those kinds of challenges can inspire.

"I'm excited," Riccio said. "There is a little bit of anxiety about the unknown, but ... we grow the most when we are pushing the bounds of our comfort."

He said the Fullbright Exchange Program has different relationships with different countries, with some allowing fairly seamless access to Fullbrighters and others being a bit less open.

From what he's heard, he said, Vietnam is closer to the latter category, so he may need to offer some of his own services in exchange for access, and he's interested to see how that might work.

Regardless, Riccio said, he hopes to bring his experiences back to his colleagues back home, and to his students.

Because he will be returning in the middle of the school year, he said, he's set up an Instagram account to document some of his travels so he can introduce himself to this year's students and let them see what he is doing.

He said teachers are often role models for their students and he wants to be able to build a relationship with those students throughout the first half of their school year before he returns.