By: JOSEPH KELLARD
This summer, as some of her students head to the
beach, Jennifer Wolf will don a headscarf and skirt in a turbulent part of the world. Wolf, a social studies teacher for the past seven years at Oceanside High School, will leave for Turkey and Cyprus come June, an adventure made possible by her second Fulbright Scholarship.
Wolf and 14 other Americans, including professors from various universities, will spend three weeks in each country studying their cultures, and bring their findings back to their classrooms and lecture halls. In Turkey, Wolf will focus her study on the nation's history, including the ancient Hittites, the Ottoman Empire and the current secular government, which is under threat from theocratic Muslims. While there Wolf plans to visit religious sites that require women to wear the traditional headscarf and skirt.
"I'm going to be visiting a Muslim country at a time when Muslims around the world may not be particularly fond of Americans," Wolf said. "I want to bring back information about the Turks and the Sunni Muslims for my students that maybe can dispel some of the misunderstandings about them."
While in Cyprus, she will study the long-running clashes between the Turks and the Greeks over the island,
and how this history ties into the present struggles there between Turkish and Greek citizens.
This is Wolf's second Fulbright Scholarship. Her first afforded her the opportunity to study in South Africa for five weeks in 2000. To win a Fulbright, applicants must write three essays that explain what international experience can give them that they otherwise cannot get from library research, and how this experience can be related to their work. Wolf wanted to visit South Africa at the time because she was teaching global studies, which covered apartheid.
"While in South Africa, I liked that I was talking to a real person telling me a real story -- something that's not from a dry textbook," Wolf explained. "When I came home I had tons of slides, stories and documents, posters and newspapers. Things that show what life is really like there."
Wolf became a social studies teacher because she's interested in people, the choices they make, and the similar circumstances that reappear over the course of history. She sees teaching history as a means of tapping into endless opportunities to correct past and present mistakes or injustices, and of creating something new. "I like teaching my students how they are responsible for the history that they make," she said.
In her class, she tries to help students become historians, and believes that to do this, it's important to take trips to foreign lands and return with materials students otherwise couldn't find, such as the slides,
documents, newspapers and posters she brought home from South Africa. "I think it makes the students
feel as if they have some ownership of [history or these places]," she said, "instead of the teacher droning on and their just memorizing things."
Next on Wolf's horizon is her doctoral degree, which she plans to earn by studying conflict resolution in relation to education and how schools can shape our world. "In any area of the world where there has been a lot of hatred, Rwanda or South Africa," she said, "schools can be the agents for hatred, as well as, when it's over, the agents for fixing that hatred. There's been very little study of the roles of schools in truth and reconciliation. I'd be interested in pursuing that aspect of education."
