Laura Li '14

Laura Li ‘14 is a politics major from Silver Spring, Maryland. She has been awarded a 10-month English Teaching Assistantship in Brazil. She has taken Portuguese language courses at Oberlin. Last spring, she studied abroad in Ecuador, where she conducted an independent project with El Movimiento de Unidad Plurinacional Pachakutik, a political movement that was founded as a way to advance the interests of indigenous peoples' organizations throughout Ecuador.

She has played varsity field hockey for four years, serving as captain her senior year; she’s also involved in the Asian Pacific Islander American community on campus, and she has served as a tutor at Eastwood Elementary School in Oberlin.

During her Fulbright period, Li says she hopes to visit the state of Bahia and learn more about the Afro-Brazilian diaspora and art forms such as capoeira. In the future, Li says she wants to get involved with education reform and policy, specifically increasing access in music and arts electives in K-12 curriculum.

“It's in my educational philosophy that I teach in order to truly understand the needs of students in the classroom and to challenge my preconceptions about other teaching styles, which is why I decided to pursue a Fulbright,” Li says. “It gives me the opportunity to observe how other cultures teach and to bring back my experiences to classrooms in the United States.”