Denfeld Teacher Receives Fellowship To Learn In Greece

DULUTH, Minn. — A teacher within Duluth Schools has just received news that she’ll be away from the classroom in the Spring, but for a good reason.

“I’ll be based in Athens, and then, darn, I might have to go out to the islands in Greece to go visit schools that are doing awesome outdoor activities there as well.”

Come January, Denfeld High School Science Teacher Alison Wood is off to Greece as one of only 14 pre-college teachers in the U.S to be granted the international fellowship from the Fulbright Program.

“The Fulbright Program can be college level programming, or it can be K-12 programming, and a lot of people are not aware of the K-12 part of it, so I encourage anybody to go interested in it, go to the K-12 part, ” said Wood.

“But when you’re a K-12 educator, the Distinguished Teaching Award is a research fellowship, so you do not exchange and teach, you come up with a research proposal,”

While she’s looking forward to some new scenery, Wood is ready to learn new things in order to bring back new and cool ideas to the Twin Ports.

“One of the things I’m most excited about, besides getting to just get into schools and meet people, is when you’re in your own little world, you get used to what seems normal, or what is the normal day to day routine,” said Wood.

“I’m just really excited to get somewhere where it is going to be so different. How do they do their school day? How do they organize their lessons?”

With the time ready to fly by in the blink of an eye, Wood hasn’t yet told her students that she’ll be away from the classroom in the Spring.

“I wanted to let everybody know, but I also wanted to get the school year rolling before I said, and by the way, I’m leaving you for second semester.”

Wood will be accompanied by her daughter to Greece, which is an 8-hour time difference to the Twin Ports.