A/Prof Daniela Gachago

Rickett Glenn Waterfalls with my Women's Adventure Club of Centre County, PA hiking buddies      My colleague Alexandra Mihai, an academic staff developer at Maastricht University, who is also doing a Fulbright in the US at the moment, and is also based at the Porvoo Center for Teaching and Learning at Yale, r ecently reflected on her stay . When reading her words, it resonated so much. She listed the following five points as the most important learnings from her stay in the US so far: the power of keeping an open mind the power of connections the power of  changing perspectives the power of a bird's eye view the power of kindness and gratitude I so agree. My stay at PennState was my first sabbatical since becoming an academic, my first break from the South African higher education context in more than 10 years. It reminded me about the importance of moving out of your comfort zone, how refreshing it is to start somewhere new, to discover a new place, new people, new practices.

The Schreyer Center for Teaching Excellence Its been nearly a month now since I have come back from my three months stint at PennState, where I spent my Fulbright from February - May 2022.  It was such a treat to spend three months in a new environment, on my own. I will reflect in a different post on what I learnt for and about myself during this time, but here I would like to share some of the insights I gained by being embedded in a Centre for Learning and Teaching at a large state-funded College in the States. I have been thinking about this for a while, people have asked me what my observations were, but it took me a while to settle into this process. This morning I woke up and somehow the list was here. So here it is, in no particular order:  The Higher Education Landscape in the US is changing I must admit before joining the Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence at PennState I didn't know much about the US Higher Education system. What I have learnt, is that it is fas