The English Department is proud to announce that Megan Heise, a PhD student in Composition and Applied Linguistics, has been recommended as a semi-finalist for the 2021-22 Fulbright US Student Program.
The US Fulbright Student Program is a prestigious and world-renowned cultural exchange program. It grants support for distinguished students and scholars to conduct their graduate work in foreign countries.
In her graduate studies, Heise is focusing on critical feminist pedagogies, translanguaging and transmodal frameworks, community literacy contexts, and refugee literacies, while also serving as an editor and writing coach in her spare time.
Her proposed Fulbright project involves facilitating creative storytelling workshops with refugee youth living in Northern Jordan, in partnership with Yarmouk University in the city of Irbid. She seeks to share multimodal storytelling tools with linguistically-diverse young refugees in order to augment their strengths and amplify their voices to a global audience through digital magazines and podcasts. Heise seeks not only to provide expressive storytelling outlets for refugee youth in order to uphold their agency and strengthen their resilience, but also to share their multilingual and multimodal works with a global audience. She hopes such work will contribute to changing global rhetorics and policies that impact refugees' lives, to be more hospitable, equitable, and just.