University of Illinois Springfield online political science graduate student Isaac Farhadian has received a Fulbright Teachers for Global Classrooms (TGC) Program award from the U.S. Department of State and the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board. He teaches government and economics at John H. Pitman High School in Turlock, California.

Farhadian was one of 56 awardees across the nation in the fall of 2021. The Fulbright TGC program is a year-long program that consists of a graduate course, a symposium in D.C. and an international field experience where he will teach abroad.

He has been selected to teach abroad in Finland in November 2022 as part of his international site experience. He will take what he has learned and incorporate it into his school and district curricula.

“The Fulbright TGC award has provided me with an excellent opportunity to learn more about internalizing my curriculum,” Farhadian said. “The graduate course I took from the State Department allowed me to explore and learn best practices about incorporating global competencies into my content area by teaching my students about the four domains of global competence: investigating the world, recognizing perspectives, taking action and communicating ideas.”

The goal of the Fulbright program is to help internationalize and globalize the curriculum with special attention given to the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

“I created lesson plans, collaborated with other teachers across the nation, immersed my students in interdisciplinary studies by having them research and connect the U.N. SDGs to ‘Glocal’ problems facing our town, state and country in relation to other countries. As a capstone project, I had my students create legislative bills on topics of ‘Glocal’ importance to them, present and defend those in a congressional simulation and connect their bill topics to the rest of the world.”

Note: “Glocal” is a term meaning "reflecting or characterized by both local and global considerations."