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With Meena
With Olivia
July 20, 2025
Sunday has arrived, and with it, the end of the TGC field experience. Today was a day of processing, presenting, and debriefing our two weeks in India before boarding planes bound for Paris and then our home destinations later this evening.
Our morning began in our host community teams. Kim, Olivia, and I worked with two of our Indian Fulbright colleagues to reflect on our guiding questions and prepare a short presentation on our host community takeaways and future plans.
We took a short break to dress up—for the ladies, this meant getting draped in sarees. Meena helped me into the saree I purchased in Kolkata with Sharmila. After some group photos, we reconvened to share our presentations.
Each team reflected on different aspects of India’s diverse educational landscape: the lasting impact of colonization; how caste and class continue to perpetuate inequality; supports for multilingualism; the gap between national policies and local realities; the pressures of the competitive examination culture; and the hierarchical valuing of the English language. Many of us also felt inspired to bring more holistic educational practices into our classrooms, from arts and crafts to incorporating quiet, centering practices in our often hectic, noisy U.S. school environments.
Team Kolkata
Lindsey, Anne, Amy, Aiman, Tracy, & Kim
After a brief Q&A and our final lunch together, we said goodbye to our new Fulbright alumni friends and the USIEF staff. Our IREX coordinator then led us through a debrief session, prompting us to begin thinking about how to articulate our experiences and integrate what we’ve learned into our teaching back home. I’m a bit of a slow processor, and I’m still working through many of these questions.
With about four hours of free time after our programming, I packed up and made one last visit to the Dilli Haat market with a couple of friends, picking up some last-minute souvenirs.
By 8:30 p.m., we boarded the bus one final time for our trip to the airport. Along the way, we caught glimpses of Delhi’s evening life—devotees of Lord Shiva carrying water from the Ganges for worship among them. While I’m excited to return home, I will certainly miss this beautifully diverse and vibrant country, and I can’t wait to come back someday.
Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be processing and unpacking the many layers of this experience: combing through fieldnotes, re-reading blog posts, organizing photos, and preparing for the upcoming school year. I’ll be sharing a final reflection here soon—though I know the learning will continue long after the last post.
Thanks for following along. Dhanyavaad (Hindi) / Dhonnobad (Bengali).
Some henna from Dilli Haat. The artist has been doing henna for 34 years. The peacock design she chose is Rajasthani. "This is the time of the peacock," she noted. "They love the rainy season and come out to dance."
One last visit to Dilli Haat - a vendor paints an elephant on Kim's thumbnail
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