Diving & Learning With a Purpose

When the pandemic grounded our 2020 grant recipients’ plans, we wrestled with ways to continue honoring their passion and professionalism. The spaces normally filled with updates from teachers actively pursuing self-designed fellowships fell silent. That is, until we handed our Fellows a microphone.

Almost thirty FFT Fellows have since shared their stories on Fund for Teachers – The Podcast. By first talking about their backgrounds and then their fellowship plans and/or impact, these teachers are elevated as the inspiring architects of their careers, classrooms and school communities.

In this episode we visit with Veronica Wylie, high school science teacher at Wylie is a high school chemistry and physical science teacher in Hazlehurst High School. She designed a Fund for Teachers fellowship to earn a diving certification to complete archaeology and marine life trainings with the organization Diving With a Purpose, a nonprofit that partners with the National Association of Black Scuba Divers on submerged heritage preservation and conservation projects worldwide with a focus on the African Diaspora.

She is also a Ph.D. candidate in education leadership and administration at Jackson State University in Jackson, Mississippi. Her latest of three graduate degrees is a Master of Arts in Teaching chemistry student at Illinois State University. She interned this summer with NASA’s Office of STEM Engagement in Houston and also started collaborating with teams as a Fellow at Harvard’s Antiracist Science Education Project through the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology. One of our first questions to her was, “When do you have time to teach?” to which she replied, “I teach whenever I can, wherever I can, about whatever is relevant.”