Dr. Caryn Caruso, assistant professor of education at Lander University, has been selected for the Fulbright U.S. Scholar award and will be teaching in Latvia for the 2024 fall semester.
The Fulbright Program is an educational exchange program that sends college seniors, graduate students and professionals to institutions around the world.
Caruso will join the more than 400,000 people who have participated in the program since 1946 and will teach two courses (undergraduate and graduate) on classroom motivation in English classes.
She said she is excited and honored to receive the award and to be able to represent the United States and Lander in Latvia.
International work is not new to Caruso, who has lived and worked overseas in the United Arab Emirates and Bali, Indonesia. She has also taken study tour groups from Lander to Costa Rica.
Caruso specifically reached out to Latvia, Hungary and Austria – all in an area of the world she has never explored - and a university in Latvia was the first to respond.
The rigorous application process involved a proposal where Caruso designed two courses with proposed syllabi, including course readings and assignments. She also answered several short essays about her career experiences and trajectory. The project was peer reviewed and then submitted to the country embassy. After that, Caruso interviewed with three members of the U.S. Embassy in Latvia.
“I'm looking forward to meeting the people and working with the students and just seeing how their education system runs, how the university system runs,” Caruso said.
She will be working at Liepaja University in Liepaja and plans to visit schools in the area, as well.
“I’m honored to do this,” she said of the Fulbright award.
She talks to her students at Lander about career paths and the variety of options people in education can explore, she said, adding it’s important to know how other cultures view the world and various values and beliefs, especially for educators who work with people who are different from themselves.
Caruso would like to introduce Lander students to Fulbright’s English Teaching Assistant program and hopefully have some of them apply.