As a high school English teacher in Brooklyn for the last three years , I have learned a great deal about myself, my students and the power of education.  My name is Samantha Love and I am excited to be one of the three fellows participating in the Modern Story for the 20011 semester.  As my third year of teaching was coming to a close, I began to think about transitioning schools and carrying out another of my goals – to live and work abroad with students in another culture.  I have been fortunate in my life to have had the opportunity to travel and learn in other countries and these experiences have opened my eyes to the world and shaped me indelibly as a person.   This desire brought me to the Modern Story fellowship and I am so excited to embark on this journey with them.

As an inner-city teacher, I realized how lucky I was to have been exposed to these different peoples, places and cultures, and I truly believe that traveling has an enormous impact on our education and development as citizens of a global community.  All too often, however, these opportunities to learn from different cultures are not available to the youth I’ve worked with.  As an educator, I hope to work to create opportunities to learn and travel for my students and to constantly open their eyes to the myriad possibilities of the world around them.   I am committed to the ideals of experiential education, social justice, and travel and I’ve tried to introduce my students to different peoples and places as a teacher.  We traveled to Washington DC in 2010 and have recently started a project to learn more about the culture of India. Our first excursion was an Indian lunch which was a huge success.  For these reasons I am setting up a virtual exchange between my students in Brooklyn and the students in Hyderabad in hopes that they can learn about each other’s cultures and use the technologies that we must embrace in the 21^st century.  I am so excited to bridge these two very different worlds as I maintain my connections with my former students and foster new bonds with students in India.  I can’t wait to begin this project!

Samantha Love’s Digital Story from The Modern Story on Vimeo.