Local teachers this summer will row on lakes in Italy to engage in personal trauma recovery, visit sites where William Shakespeare and Charlotte Brontë worked and meet with scholars to "improve anti-racist teaching by adding counternarratives" to white-centered texts, and research music in Trinidad and Tobago.

They are among 98 in Connecticut, out of 295 nationwide, chosen to receive a 2022 fellowship from Fund for Teachers. The nonprofit has a strong presence in the state thanks to a partnership with the Dalio Education, which funded all the grants in Connecticut. Individuals could apply for up to $5,000 while teams can get up to $10,000, and FFT awarded $428,968 in grants this year.

For Kim Buckley, an Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition teacher at East Lyme High School, it's been a longtime dream to visit Shakespeare's Globe and Stratford-Upon-Avon. This will be her first time traveling to Europe.

Buckley said she will be seeing two performances that have an anti-racist lens and getting a private tour of the Brontë Parsonage Museum, and she's hoping to connect with poet Jenny Mitchell, who is writing a series of poems that retell the story of Jane Eyre from the perspective of a free Black woman in the 19th century.

Buckley said of canonical writings, "I think it's important for students to understand that while these texts are certainly important and certainly valuable, that there were other voices at the time who were silenced." She opens each school year with the TED Talk "The Danger of a Single Story," in which Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talks about the danger of people only looking at the world through their own lens.

In Groton, middle school teacher Kathryn Morse is getting her second grant, a few years after visiting Russia. She and fellow Groton Middle School music teacher Karen Mitchill are going to Trinidad and Tobago this year.

They will be researching music rooted in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade "to create strong historical connections and deeper cultural understanding for students, teachers and parents alike," the project description states.

Mitchill, who teaches a world drumming course, said the school got steel drums through a grant, "and we want to incorporate the steel drums in a really authentic way."

Northeast Academy Arts Magnet School fifth grade teacher Ryan O'Connell will be staying in the U.S. but using his grant for a global mission: world peace. He will be taking a master class from the World Peace Game Foundation to become a certified game facilitator.

"The World Peace Game is a political science simulation where students work together as countries to resolve 50 interlocking crises that range from wildfires to water rights, and in order to win the game, they have to compromise and evaluate and prioritize to reach world peace," O'Connell explained.

Getting in nature for social-emotional learning and social studies

Nancee Terracciano and Patricia Biekert, teachers at the Friendship School, will travel to England to engage in "forest bathing," from the Japanese word and practice shinrin-yoku, which involves meditatively taking in the forest through one's senses.

"We've been in the pandemic for a while now, and kids are having mental health issues, they have depression, they have anxiety," Terracciano said. She noted that there are woods right around the school in Waterford, and there are natural places in southeastern Connecticut that people don't even know about.

Michelle Moyer, a second-grade teacher at Mohegan Elementary School in Uncasville, also said teachers have seen emotional and social changes with students since the start of the pandemic.

This summer, she will be learning to row a single shell — a very narrow scull — on lakes in Italy, to engage in personal trauma recovery as a role model for students with trauma and revise a social-emotional learning curriculum.

Moyer said she started rowing after leaving a bad marriage, and it helped her with resocialization, accepting constructive criticism, and learning to dream again. It also helped her become physically stronger, after diagnoses with multiple sclerosis and breast cancer.

Three other Mohegan teachers are fellows this year: Drew Bicknell-Gates is exploring Key West's influence on Ernest Hemingway's writing and doing a writing retreat aboard a train, Lexis Foster is doing farm stays across Spain to help students build awareness of where food comes from, and Krista Peltier is investigating the differences in Italian, French, British and Dutch fashion culture.

Megan McNabney, a fourth-grade teacher at Juliet W. Long School in Gales Ferry, is camping and driving by car along the entirety of the 4,900-mile Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail.

She and other fourth-grade teachers rewrote the social studies curriculum a few years ago to mostly focus on the 1800s and westward expansion. McNabney said reading the journals of Lewis and Clark, she was struck by the respect shown in their descriptions of Native American cultures, compared to other public thinking around that time.

This is her second Fund for Teachers fellowship, after going to Iceland five years ago to study geothermal energy and volcanic activity.

"It's an incredible program, because it forces teachers to go out and learn on their own, in most cases," McNabney said. "It's not like you're going to a conference."

Tricia DeLapp, a fourth-grade teacher at West Vine Street School in Stonington, said she knew she wanted to do a project related to science, considering so much of the school's focus has been on math and language arts, especially with the pandemic.

She is going to national parks in Colorado, Arizona and Utah to learn about sustainability measures and the environmental impacts of global warming. DeLapp said she is going to run an after-school club focused on conservation.

Fund for Teachers has awarded $35 million to more than 9,100 educators since its founding in 2001. Dalio Education founder and director Barbara Dalio said in a news release, "To the extent we can help teachers experience things outside the classroom and thrive as professionals, it is rewarding to see them bring their experiences back into the classroom for their student."

e.moser@theday.com