“Hi Dr. Cohen,” the email begins.
“I am SO EXCITED to tell you that I have been selected as a Fulbright Luxembourg English Teaching Assistant for the 2024-2025 school year!! I’M TEACHING IN EUROPE!!!”
The message came to James Cohen from Kristal Angeles, who in May 2022 earned her B.S.Ed. in Elementary Education with an ESL endorsement.
Angeles, who teaches fifth-grade ESL at WJ Murphy Elementary School in her hometown of Round Lake, credits Cohen and the College of Education for stoking her interest in the world beyond the United States.
“Because I went to Indonesia through the NIU College of Education with the Educate Global program, and after connecting with Dr. Wasonga, Dr. Nieto and Dr. Cohen, I realized that international education holds a lot of value,” Angeles says.
“You just learn so much and gain so many insights and knowledge about how to deal with people who have different backgrounds and the best way to educate them,” she adds. “And so, after that, I knew I had to make my way back into international education.”
Cohen offered her many suggestions to accomplish that, including Fulbright.
Established in 1946, the Fulbright Program has given hundreds of thousands of passionate and accomplished students, scholars, teachers, artists and professionals of all backgrounds and fields the opportunity to study, teach and conduct research, exchange ideas and contribute to finding solutions to important international problems.
“So I put my application in, and I put in specifically for the country of Luxembourg,” Angeles says. “I kind of threw everything into the wind, and I was surprised to see that I got it.”
Unsurprised is Cohen, who first met Angeles when she enrolled in his multicultural education class during the pandemic.
“Despite online classes frequently being less energetic, Kristal had an energy to her that seemed to jump through the computer screen. She motivated the whole class with her passion and ability to get people thinking and talking,” says Cohen, who in 2018 was named a Fulbright Scholar to Uruguay.
NIU’s 2021 Outstanding International Educator glimpsed that again – this time in person – in Indonesia.
“Our 15 NIU pre-service teachers were charged with teaching Indonesian high school students with critical thinking skills and global competencies while introducing them to themselves as cultural beings, as opposed to the ‘single story’ of what an American is,” Cohen says. “Kristal could be seen leading the Indonesian students in dance and song, acting on the stage in the auditorium and having a group of kids following her everywhere she went like a rock star.”
For Angeles, the return overseas will advance another goal.
“I have this lifelong dream of teaching on, or at least visiting, every continent, and I was able to check off North America and Asia through NIU, and Europe just seemed like a good next step,” she says. “I chose Luxembourg because, one, I really want to develop my skills in French – I have an intermediate level, or I would say a beginner level, of French, and that’s one of the national languages – and, two, it’s a very diverse country.”
Students in Luxembourg are multilingual, she says, learning Luxembourgish, French, German and English at school.
Witnessing, and helping with, that curriculum for nine months should positively inform and impact her work in Illinois, she adds.
“As an ESL teacher, I was like, ‘Wow, I need to explore and see how they’re able to manage all four language domains in four different languages so successfully,’ and then take that learning back to my practice here in the states because I feel very strongly about teaching kids who are learning English as a second language,” Angeles says.
“I’m also hoping to gain a more globally competent view. I’m not very familiar with European culture – I’m Southeast Asian and American – so experiencing it myself is going to be a new cultural lens for me,” she adds. “I’m also hoping to gain a big network to make my way into international education a bit more.”
Her enthusiasm for teaching, and her early triumph with Fulbright, began in an unlikely manner.
During her years at Round Lake High School, she says, “I was very heavily involved with leadership positions, most of which included the music program and honor societies, and I really got a lot of joy facilitating growth and learning from my peers.”
Nonetheless, she came to NIU as an engineering major.
“I just thought engineering was the right path for me, so I did that,” Angeles says, “but after a while, I was like, ‘I am missing being in front of people.’ It wasn’t a fulfilling thing for me, so I switched over to education, and elementary education is what was able to get me to my degree the fastest.”
Good decision: “I love it so much,” she says, “especially the connections that you can make with students.”
“At the end of the day, students might not always remember what you taught them material-wise, but they’re always going to remember how you made them feel, and if you can facilitate good habits and a good work ethic within your students, then they can really believe in themselves and see that they can achieve difficult things, difficult tasks and learn the difficult material themselves,” Angeles says.
“For me, it’s building those connections and inspiring students to that,” she adds, “because we can see the potential in students when sometimes they can’t see it themselves.”
