DJ Kaiser Awarded Fulbright Grant to Help Train Remote Teachers of English in South America

Professor DJ Kaiser, Webster's assistant vice president for Academic Affairs and director of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), received a Fulbright Grant to help develop and deliver training for English language teachers in Uruguay’s Ceibal en Inglés (CEI) project. Under the program, he will work with the CEI team in Montevideo and remote teachers of English, who teach from remote teaching centers across South America.

Ceibal en Inglés provides high-quality English language instruction through videoconference to the majority of public primary schools in Uruguay. 

“I am honored to return to Uruguay as part of the Fulbright Specialist Program to support the Ceibal en Inglés project,” Kaiser said. “This project provides high-quality English language instruction that reaches areas of Uruguay that otherwise might not have access to English instruction.” 

Under the program, Kaiser will spend two weeks in Montevideo, Uruguay, in early 2026, working directly with representatives from CEI to develop and deliver training for about 300 teachers who teach English through videoconference to primary school students. The teachers who will participate in this training are based in Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, and Peru. 

Photo: DJ Kaiser teaching during a previous visit to Uruguay.

This visit is an extension to visits by Kaiser to the region in 2015, 2016 and earlier this year, when he outlined six recommended “adaptive pedagogical routines” (or APRs) designed to increase students’ oral participation during class sessions and empower remote teachers with more formative feedback on student learning. These APRs were based on two months of observations and interviews that Kaiser conducted in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay earlier this year. A small group of eight remote teachers working in three South American countries is currently piloting these six APRs and participating in a research project. 

The future visit will allow Kaiser to update his initial training materials based on feedback from this pilot study. He will then collaborate with the CEI team to develop training that can be delivered to teachers en-masse before March, which is when the Uruguay school year begins. 

Besides this current grant and the previous grants for the South American study, Kaiser was named a Fulbright Scholar in 2016. In 2020, 2021 and 2024, he was selected by the U.S. State Department as an English Language Specialist for projects to support professional development for teachers in Honduras and Brazil. Additionally, he conducted research in Brazil that was funded by a Faculty Research Grant in 2016.  

To learn more about Webster’s TESOL program or to apply, visit the TESOL website.