Educators planning trip to Cambodia to learn on location

Lowell has an estimated 30,000 Cambodian-Americans living in the city, but few who teach in the region’s schools and colleges are well-versed in the unique culture and traditions of the Southeast Asian nation.

To help narrow that knowledge gap, Middlesex Community College and the Lowell public schools are partnering to send 14 educators to Cambodia in summer 2023 through a $110,000 Fulbright-Hays grant awarded to the college, according to Middlesex English professor Lara Kradinova, co-leader of the trip.

“Lowell is the second-largest Cambodian diaspora community in the United States, and we have a lot of Cambodian-American students at Middlesex Community College and the Lowell public schools,” she said. “So we felt it’s important to have a better understanding of this community represented in our classes.”

The 2023 trip follows three others — in 2003, 2011, and 2016 — Middlesex and Lowell school educators made to Cambodia through federally-funded Fulbright-Hays grants, which support research and training overseas for professionals and students in the education field. The 2016 participants included Kradinova and Kerri Gamache, her co-chair for the 2023 trip.

“It was life-changing for us personally and professionally,” Kradinova said of herself and Gamache, a fellow Middlesex English professor. “We still use a lot of things we learned from that trip in our classes now.”

Five faculty members from both Middlesex and the Lowell schools will be selected through an application process for the 2023 trip. In addition to Kradinova and Gamache, they will be joined by Phala Chea, coordinator of the English language education program in the Lowell schools, and Middlesex ceramics professor Yary Livan, both of whom are Cambodian-Americans.

Chea, who helped manage the 2016 trip and participated in the 2011 one, is excited the schools and college are teaming up again to send educators to her native country.

“We have a lot of Cambodian students attending our schools,” she said. “It’s essential for our educators to learn about the history, culture, and language of Cambodia on location.”

“Our goal is to be able to research and learn, and then to bring that knowledge back into the classroom,” Chea added. “We hope to improve the engagement between teachers and students and families and also to be able to impact curriculum and instruction.”

The 2023 trip will focus on how access to education, health, arts, and culture affects communities and young people in Cambodia — and in Lowell’s Cambodian immigrant and refugee community. All the trip participants will research different aspects of that topic.

Kradinova said the theme is timely “because our whole society was fractured by the pandemic and other events. A lot of community organizations in the US are trying to promote healing and bringing people together and we wondered how that was happening in Cambodia.”

Traveling to four different Cambodian provinces, trip participants will meet with the US ambassador to Cambodia and the Cambodian Minister of Education; and visit secondary education schools, including the Royal University of Fine Arts, and American University — both in Phnom Penh.

The group will also meet traditional dance performers, contemporary artists, leaders of nonprofits that provide educational access to women and rural communities, and a conservation organization. They will even visit an elephant sanctuary whose employees are local Indigenous people.

In addition to the trip, which runs from early July to early August, participants will take part in pre- and post-trip educational programs funded through $22,000 provided by the college. Among them is a Cambodian arts and culture weekend in April 2023 which will be open to the community.

“I hope we get a really enthusiastic group of fearless educators,” Kradinova said of the overseas initiative, “and that our students get some exciting classes out of it. And I hope it can contribute to a more inclusive approach for all K-12 and college education.”

John Laidler can be reached at laidler@globe.com.