Sheffield — Mount Everett Regional School teacher Stephanie Graham was recently awarded a Fulbright U.S. Student Award from the U.S. Department of State and the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board.
Graham has been teaching in Berkshire County for the past 15 years.
As part of the award, Graham will study in New Zealand, joining the Museum and Heritage Practice master’s program at Victoria University in Wellington. There she will explore how the museum sector supports education from kindergarten through 12th grade.
Graham told The Berkshire Edge that she has had a long-standing love affair with art, having dreamed of being an art teacher since high school. “I have always loved art so much, and I always thought it was a good career direction,” she said. “By the time I graduated high school, I went into geology, so my career trajectory changed a little bit. I have many varied interests, including science. But eventually, I went back to art education because I felt like it was more of my calling.”
“Art is everywhere and it is everything,” Graham added. “We use art to express ourselves, to understand the world, to see beauty, and to communicate. I love everything about it, and I see art in everything.”
Graham will specifically study the Māori history curriculum that has recently been implemented in New Zealand schools. The Māori people are the Indigenous Polynesian people of mainland New Zealand and are the second-largest ethnic group in the country.
Graham was previously awarded the Fulbright Distinguished Award in Teaching back in 2020. “The award brought me to New Zealand, but it was during the pandemic year,” Graham said. “While the Fulbright program ended worldwide, New Zealand was a special place that eradicated the COVID virus in two months or so. Despite everything in America being in lockdown, in New Zealand, everything was locked down for about seven weeks, and I was permitted to stay. While the program ended, I got more out of the experience.”
Graham said that, during her time back in America, she has worked with various local institutions, including the Sheffield Historical Society. “I was able to curate exhibits [at the society] and learn more about the overlap between education and museums,” she said. “Being a museum-goer, I’ve always valued museums. To me, museums have always been vessels of knowledge and history. My museum experiences are giving me time to immerse myself in the knowledge of whatever I am looking at, whether it be in an art museum, natural history museum, or anything about culture. I feel like objects have a sacred intrinsic value. Looking at an object, touching it, or holding it teaches me so much.”
Back in May, Graham was selected as a Grosvenor Teacher Fellow by the National Geographic Society. Next month, Graham will join other teachers and explorers on a research vessel circumnavigating Iceland. The trip is part of a two-year professional development fellowship that teaches teachers how to apply geographic thinking skills and an explorer mindset in the teaching of environmental stewardship. “It’s about the connection to the land and the Earth, and it relates to everything I do in art,” Graham said. “I often use art to address environmental and social issues. As I developed this sort of Indigenous mindset awareness, I wanted to overlap those things. My focus for the past couple of years has been on using art to address environmental issues and through the Indigenous mindset, I feel like everybody can do that because once we find that in ourselves, we might find a stronger connection to the land and caring for the Earth.”
Graham will be traveling to New Zealand to participate in the Fulbright program starting this January.
Visit Graham’s website, “Shire Hopping: Thoughts and Reflections of Global Education from Berkshire County to New Zealand,” here.
