Alamo Teacher Wins Fulbright Award To Study In Finland

ALAMO, CA — Anyone grousing over the new 5 p.m. sunset time should talk to Teresa Butler-Doran, a science teacher at Stone Valley Middle School. In January, she’s heading to Finland, where it will be dark pretty much the entire day, and highs likely won’t reach over 30 degrees.

Regardless, this Concord native who lived in Hawaii for several years is still very excited. In June, Butler-Doran was named one of just two teachers from California to receive a Fulbright Distinguished Award in Teaching Research grant. From January until June 2024, Butler-Doran will travel across Finland developing a future program called “Global Citizens, Global Action: Students Taking Climate Action Across Borders” that will connect American and Finnish students through climate change education.

“I proposed that I would research best teaching practices in Finland regarding teaching climate change, climate action and sustainability, and then design a lesson unit for our district to link both the students there and here so they can communicate the kinds of climate effects we face here in California and what they face in Finland, and come up with climate action projects together,” explained Butler-Doran, who has been teaching science at Stone Valley for 25 years.

She’ll be affiliated with the University of Eastern Finland, where she will take classes and work with a professor who will advise her on a roughly 30-page research project, which will include several lesson plans. She will also travel the country observing how different schools teach climate science.

Butler-Doran will also take note of general education approaches in a country whose schools regularly rank best in the world according to several different metrics. “Children can just walk down the street and go to the playground and walk home, and here you really don’t see that,” she said. “People just trust each other. That’s also in the classroom….The focus is on the learning, and they also have this approach of every two hours or so they get a fifteen minute break where the kids get to go outside, they run around, they play, and then they come back, so they’re given a lot of time to rest and then come back and learn.”

Butler-Doran said she has long been interested in international teaching opportunities, but raising young children, the timing was never right. When her children were older, a simple Google search for “international teaching opportunities” led her to a Fulbright program that included Finland, somewhere she’d been interested in ever since she learned about its celebrated education system. She decided to apply, and also took an online course from the State Department called “STEM Innovations and Global Competence.”

She applied in February 2022, and June 13 at 2:25 p.m., she checked her email in the dentist’s office, learned that she was one 20 out of 200 applicants to receive the award. “I literally had to walk out of the dentist’s office and call everybody - super super excited,” she said.

In addition to teaching climate action, Butler-Doran is excited to expand her students’ horizons. “All kids are going to need to know how to be empathetic to different ways of life, and they have to have those experiences with learners around the world,” she said. “My whole program is trying to get that started.”