Local teachers to study peace in India

A Grayslake couple will soon go from teachers to students; their classroom will be the far corners of India, and their instructors experts in world culture.

Wendy Brown, an anthropology teacher at College of Lake County, and her husband, Ted Hazelgrove, an English teacher at McHenry County College, will begin their 39-day trip to India on Saturday to research peace studies, nonviolence and global sustainability.

"We both applied but then thought, what if only one of us gets it?" Hazelgrove said. "But we played up the fact that we are married and teach at different institutions. It will be nice traveling together. We can lean on each other during moments of exhaustion."

The couple will join 12 other Illinois post-secondary educators selected to take part in the $68,000 Fulbright-Hays Fellowship.

The fellowships are run by the U.S. Department of Education and administered through Oakton Community College.

Participants in the grant project, called "In Search of Gandhi's India: Teaching and Learning Non-Violence in a Globalized World," will trace Gandhi's footsteps and attend seminars by the world's leading authorities on the subject.

"As a faculty member, you don't often get the chance to get out of the classroom," Brown said. "There is a pleasure in absorbing someone else's knowledge. I think that is what I'm looking forward to most."

The group will begin in Delhi, where the opening lecturer will be Vinay Lal, the director of the University of California Indian Study Center in New Delhi.

Other stops on the five-week trip include the cities of Ahmedabad, Jambugoda, Dehra Dun, Sevagram, Pune Gamalapuram and Chennai -- taking the educators across the continent.

In addition to hearing from experts in everything from Indian film and television to political violence, Brown and Hazelgrove are looking forward to getting to know the culture of India.

"Five weeks really is nothing," Hazelgrove said. "A year really would be best for full immersion, but I think we will get some sense of being pulled into Indian culture."

One of the ways Brown and Hazelgrove plan on immersing themselves is by leaving the camera at home.

Brown started the practice when she coordinated archeological digs in Belize for CLC students.

"A camera distances a person from the people there," she said. "In Belize, we banned cameras for two weeks. After that, students were free to take pictures. It made a noticeable difference. After those two weeks, they didn't feel the need to take a picture of a chicken anymore."

Brown's travels have allowed her to not only unearth relics of the past but bring back personal stories that enhance her classroom teaching.

She is anticipating the same thing from her trip to India and plans to expand her already two weeks per semester of material on the continent.

"It's such a gift to be able to go," Brown said. "But the expectation is you come back and share."

As far as Hazelgrove's teaching, he hopes to put together a multimedia presentation on the trip and work with a colleague to expand his world literature and heroes and villains classes.

"We'll probably be surprised by what emerges from the trip," he said. "I'm hoping it will be a transformative and transcendent experience."