Two Haines residents have been awarded prestigious Fulbright scholarships.
Elementary school teacher Jeanne Kitayama will travel to Japan this summer through the program that provides grants for international education exchange. Iris Holmes received a scholarship to study diseases in frogs and will travel to Jamaica.
A participant in the Japan-U.S. Teacher Exchange Program, Kitayama will travel June 21 to Toubetsu, a city of 21,000 on the northern island of Hokkaido. Forty-eight teachers were competitively selected from each country.
All met in San Francisco earlier this month for workshops, discussions and presentations by experts on Education for Sustainable Development, the theme of the program.
The theme asks teachers to consider integrating topics of study such as food and nutrition, energy and resources, culture, and international understanding in their curriculum.
“I think all the U.S. and Japanese teachers are excited to have this common focus that affects us all,” Kitayama said. “And with a group you feel like you can really make things happen. It’s a perfect focus for international exchange, as these natural resources affect us all, directly and indirectly. One professor (in San Francisco) ended his talk with a photo of the Earth, titled ‘Good Planets are Hard to Find.”
As part of the application process, Kitayama had to propose a project she would implement in her own classroom during the coming school year. She chose salmon, teaching students about the fish lifecycle, but also how people in Alaska and Japan harvest and prepare the food. In the spring, her class will study seaweed from a similar perspective, considering culture in the exploration of the topic.
Kitayama has Japanese parents but has never been to Japan. “My only fear is that people will expect me to speak Japanese since I look the part,” she said.
Kitayama will stay with a family in Toubetsu, learn about Japanese culture, and visit local schools. She will also spend time in Tokyo collaborating with teachers about Education for Sustainable Development.
Iris Holmes will travel to Jamaica in September to work with two labs in the Department of Life Sciences at the University of the West Indies in Mona.
She’ll be looking to see if two diseases – a fungal disease called chytrid and a virus called ranavirus – are present in Jamaican frogs, as well as if correlations exist between the habitat and the disease itself.
A 2006 Haines High School graduate, Holmes will be awarded a bachelor’s degree in evolutionary biology Sunday at Cornell University. Her honors thesis at Cornell was a population genetics study on toads in Haines and Skagway.
Holmes also has submitted a paper on the topic to the Journal of Evolutionary Biology.
The Fulbright program was created as a exchange aimed at peace and understanding. About 7,000 grants are made each year in a range of disciplines spanning from science to humanities. Forty former recipients have gone on to win Nobel Prizes.