How We Got Here

Now would probably be a good time to explain how this adventure started in the first place. Let me start by saying it involves academics and kids, so you can imagine the planning process was a significant one. Almost two years ago, my interim Dean at Transylvania University, Kathleen Jagger, forwarded to me a Dean’s listserv posting for a visiting teaching fellowship at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. For almost 20 years, Georgetown has run a fall semester abroad for its students within Alanya, Turkey. Two Georgetown faculty apply to go, and one visiting faculty member is always invited. With Kelly’s blessing, I applied for that position for three main reasons: 1) I had never been to Turkey and that’s where an adventure starts; 2) it’s a living-and-learning community where the students and faculty interact regularly and a lot during classes, lunches and dinners and weekend travel tours and that really interested me; and 3) I knew that I would interact with high-performing Georgetown students and that was necessary for me for committing to an entire semester abroad.

I applied through a teaching packet and several interviews and found out five months later in February 2013 that I was chosen as the teaching fellow! What that meant was that I would still be considered a full-time faculty member at Transy during this semester, but Georgetown would fund my replacement through an endowment while I taught in Turkey. This was great news, but also bittersweet because I would be gone from the US and my family for four months. Later that year, in September, I applied for a semester-long sabbatical from Transy to continue my curricular and research work with service learning. I found out in March 2014 that I had received approval and funding for that research starting in January 2015. So now I would not officially be teaching at Transy for the entire 2014-2015 year. By May of this year, after enough Georgetown students had signed up for the semester abroad to know that it would not be cancelled, Kelly and I took a little time to decide that this would be an opportunity that we could not pass up as a family. So we withdrew the kids from their preschool and daycare programs, and Kelly gave her notice at work that she would be using a one-year hiatus to travel with me and the kids as part of my combined fellowship and sabbatical. And now the four of us are into our second week in Turkey – to return home right before Christmas!

Alan