Fulbright winner Daniela Jimenez BA ’14 is Brazil-bound
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Daniela Jimenez BA ’14
Award: Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship (ETA) in Brazil
Major: History
Hometown: Los Angeles, California
From February to December 2016, I will be supporting educators in English language learning classrooms, and more broadly serving as a cultural educational ambassador between Brazil and the United States.
I often joke, “Lewis & Clark gave me almost every good thing in my life.” I found my intellectual home in the comfort of the humanities and social sciences departments, and in particular under the mentorship and tutelage of the history faculty.
Because of the support and encouragement of [history] professors like Elliott Young, Reiko Hillyer, David Campion, and Rishona Zimring, professor of English, I left the college feeling confident in my ability to cultivate an educational experience that made me feel free in my own being, and perhaps helped to inspire that sentiment in my peers and colleagues as well. I aspire to continue sharing all of the gifts that they have shared with me at every opportunity for learning that I encounter.
My dreams for the future right now are general and amorphous. I hope to have a career wherein I will be paid to go to school, teach, perform music, and travel the world. I am currently finishing up a year as a bilingual educational assistant, and more recently as an ESL and art teacher for the 2015 summer session. I love engaging with youth, and am fascinated by the idea of extending my work into a higher-education setting.
[Though] the ETA program does not require a research component, I am very excited to study the Afro-Brazilian martial art of capoeira throughout my stay. My hope is to bring some elements of contemporary capoeira practice back to the United States someday. I think this Fulbright opportunity will open doors for me in terms of achieving fluency in Portuguese, learning new musical textures and techniques, and exposing me to a lot of capoeira. It will also give me the chance to experience my long-term dreams firsthand. I am thrilled to continue building upon them, and further extending my capabilities and my reach as an educator.
