Before coming to CIE, I spent five years introducing a newly developed Humanities Curriculum specifically designed for Central Asian undergraduate students at the University of Central Asia’s Aga Khan Humanities Project. This Curriculum consisted of eight interdisciplinary courses and was intended to be taught using student-centered teaching methods, and develop students’ critical reading, thinking, and writing skills. While this kind of curriculum and teaching methods were fairly common in other countries, for the post-soviet Central Asian region it was new.
Feeling like I needed to explore these new methods and notions and implement them wider in the country, I decided to apply to the Edmund S. Muskie Fellowship Program, funded by the U.S. Department of State. I was fortunate to be selected and to come to the CIE with my family.
After graduating from the CIE, I worked for a year as the Monitoring and Evaluation Coordinator with USAID's "Reading Together" project implemented by the American Institutes for Research. My main task with the project was to travel to the remote regions of the Kyrgyz Republic and train local early educators in conducting EGRA (Early Grade Reading Assessment) tests at schools, and then preparing collected data for analysis. I joined the project team for its first phase, and was able to participate in the baseline data collection. That is when Rebecca Paulson Stone visited Bishkek on this project, and we had a CIE meet-up in Bishkek.
For the last eight years I have been working as an Educational Specialist in the U.S. Embassy in Bishkek, mainly managing the Fulbright Program, and a few education-related projects supported by the Embassy.
While fulfilling my responsibilities, I constantly refer to my experience at CIE, be it an issue around social or development theories, or M&E area, or just intercultural communication. My experience at CIE/UMass now helps me immensely, as I conduct pre-departure orientations for the Fulbright Fellows from the Kyrgyz Republic. I am so grateful to the dedicated CIE faculty, who helped to shape my views in the area of international education. [10-23]
Email: gulzat.kochorova@gmail.com