Matt McClure '16 is currently in Tuscany, Italy, interning at Siena Italian Studies. He is among Geneseo's latest Fulbright award winners, an honor that will take him to South Korea.
GENESEO, N.Y. - SUNY Geneseo alumnus Matthew McClure ’16 is among Geneseo’s latest 2018-19 U.S. Student Fulbright award winners. McClure won an award as an English Teaching Assistant (ETA) for South Korea. Sarah Phillips ’18 also has been notified that she is an alternate candidate for Colombia.
McClure is believed to be the first Village of Geneseo resident to ever win an ETA Fulbright award and joins Simon and Belgium-bound Leandra Griffith ’16 as the third Geneseo graduate this cycle to claim one of these highly coveted and competitive grants sponsored by the U.S. State Department. Geneseo had a record eight semi-finalists in the Fulbright competition this year, and with the winning notification of McClure and Sarah Simon '17 and Phillips’ alternate status, that leaves four more applications pending as notification will continue into April, country by country.
Geneseo has a long history of success with the Fulbright program dating back to the first award in 1985 by geological sciences alumnus Andrew Fox, who won a research grant for New Zealand. McClure and Simon’s awards brings the College’s total to 23 Fulbright award winners with 18 awards coming since 2010. McClure’s family is well known at Geneseo as his mother, Paula McClure ’92, works as the College’s community outreach assistant and student employment service coordinator in the Center for Community. His father, Glenn ’86, and his uncle, Wes Kennison ’79, are adjunct Geneseo faculty members in English and Wes is the Interim Director of Study Abroad.
“I grew up around SUNY Geneseo professors and townspeople who introduced me to global, community-to-community friendships based on the exchange of culture and language,” said Matt. “I chose to stay in my hometown for my undergraduate studies because Geneseo is a window to the world. Faculty and staff across campus have supported me when I came to them with new ideas and projects. The success of Geneseo students in programs like Fulbright is a testament to the openness and dedication of the Geneseo community to its students.”
Earlier in the year and for the first time in the College’s history, SUNY Geneseo was named a Top Producer of U.S. Student Fulbright awards for 2017-18, a recognition the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs announced in its annual article in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Six Geneseo alumni won U.S. Student Fulbright awards for 2017-2018, placing the College third among all 742 Carnegie classification master’s degree institutions. Geneseo was the only dedicated SUNY institution to be named a Top Producer of U.S. Student Awards in any category-- bachelors, master’s, research, or special-focus 4-year.
At Geneseo, McClure was a double major in Comparative Literature and French, and has a remarkable ability with languages as he also speaks Spanish, Italian, and Haitian Creole at the intermediate level, and has learned some Vietnamese. He is undertaking Korean language training in preparation for his placement as an English Teaching Assistant in either an elementary or secondary school. The Fulbright experience is meant to be immersive, so McClure will live in a community and most likely be housed with a host family to facilitate language acquisition and cultural understanding and exchange.
McClure’s childhood home teemed with visitors from all over the world who brought with them their cultures and languages. Italian and English were interchangeably spoken in the household as his family founded a long-term community-to-community friendship between the Village of Geneseo, N.Y., and Siena, Italy. McClure remembers,
“I was raised to see myself as a global citizen, and as a result of my family’s travels, guests from all over the world filled our home with new foods, languages, music, and friendship,” said McClure.
Throughout his life and especially in college through study abroad, McClure travelled the world and experienced how language, especially English, could facilitate connections as a “lingua franca.” Never was this more evident than during fall semester of 2014 during his study abroad in Vietnam at the Ho Chi Minh City University of Social Sciences and Humanities. McClure was the only student in a class who was not from East Asia and found the point of connection with his classmates from other countries to be language, especially with a classmate from North Korea named Kim.
“Despite political tensions between our governments, we chatted like regular classmates, talking about where we were from, where we studied, and what we liked to do,” said McClure. “Several times, he even gingerly discussed the politics of his country. These exchanges would not be possible without the common language of English.”
McClure’s international experiences, besides his semester in Vietnam, are numerous as he managed to study abroad in Canada at the Université Sainte-Anne in 2015, spent time in Au Borgne, Haiti working for the Haiti Outreach Pwoje Espwa in 2015, worked as an ESOL Volunteer at Instituto Católico, in El Sauce, Nicaragua in 2017, and is presently interning at Siena Italian Studies.
At Geneseo, McClure won a number of distinguished awards including a grant from the Killam Fellows Program (administered by Fulbright Canada), the Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship, and the College’s own Gérard Gouvernet Geneseo Student Ambassadorship in French Language and Culture. He credits much of his success to SUNY Geneseo and its international partners in Italy, Nicaragua, and Haiti who “invited me into their work, homes, languages and lives. Back on campus, their spirit of hospitality inspired me to contribute to the language-learning community by studying ESOL in support of international students.”
McClure plans to incorporate the lessons he has learned from his international adventures and Geneseo education into his teaching and his own ESOL education.
“I am excited to work with students who will use English when they travel or speak with a foreigner,” he said. “In the Nicaraguan classrooms, my students were more willing to engage in activities that strayed from the traditional teaching methods since I was a new teacher from another country. The dynamic resources and strategies I used in Nicaragua seem to be complementary to the Communicative Language Teaching approach mandated by the Korean government, allowing me to show students the power of language learning for intercultural partnership and friendship.”
One of the hallmarks of the Fulbright program is that “Fulbrighters” serve as ambassadors of the United States, bringing with them their culture but also hobbies and interests. For McClure, swing dancing has been a long time passion, and in Vietnam, he found commonality with a group named the Saigon Swing Cats, who provided him with a unique opportunity for linguistic and cultural experiences to complement his intensive Vietnamese language study. McClure learned that the common languages of English and swing dance helped bind the tight-knit, international community that included Koreans.
“I danced, learned to speak, and ate with my Korean friends after dances,” he said. “As I spent more time with my new friends, I learned that Seoul is the city with the most swing dancers in the world and how dance style, teaching, and event culture in Korea differed from communities in the U.S. Their stories sparked my interest in going to Korea, learning Korean, and studying Korean swing dance communities from a cultural perspective.”
So in addition to teaching English, McClure will be researching how American and South Korean culture have intertwined South Korea’s unique swing dance tradition.
“Artistic activities, like dance, allow people from different backgrounds to create together and learn from one another,” he said. “I look forward to learning how to leverage these activities toward intercultural development between Americans and South Koreans.”
Ultimately, McClure’s goal is to do what he can as a teacher and dancer to form bonds between citizens of different countries that support larger international relations.
“I want to teach English so my students can have a common language with foreigners to help break down preconceptions through personal communication,” he said. “In my research, I want to study the role that cultural exchange like swing dancing can play in international partnerships and diplomacy. If leaders can learn to not step on each other’s feet on the dance floor, they may be able to better address current geopolitical issues.”
The Fulbright Program is the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government and aims to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries. Fulbright alumni have become heads of state, judges, ambassadors, cabinet ministers, CEOs, and university presidents, as well as leading journalists, artists, scientists, and teachers. They include 59 Nobel Laureates, 82 Pulitzer Prize winners, 71 MacArthur Fellows, 16 Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients, and thousands of leaders across the private, public and non-profit sectors. Since its inception in 1946, more than 380,000 “Fulbrighters” have participated in the Program.
After his Fulbright year in South Korea, McClure plans to apply to graduate programs around the world in international education and related academic fields, including applying for the Korean Government Scholarship so that he can continue his research in intercultural exchange within dance communities in the country as part of a post-graduate program. His preference would be to extend his time in Korea teaching English or to look for job opportunities in international education and TESOL, especially in higher education where he can work with Korean students.
The U.S. Student Fulbright 2019-2020 competition, which is open to students and recent alumni, is administered at Geneseo by the Director of National Fellowships and Scholarships, Michael Mills, who can be reached at millsm@geneseo.edu and 585-245-6002. More information about the Fulbright and other nationally and internationally competitive scholarship and fellowship programs can be found online.