RUMFORD — Amanda Bryant, one of 12 teachers across the country who received the 2025 Pulitzer Center for Teacher Fellowship, recently completed a special interest project with her fifth-graders at Rumford Elementary School.

Bryant, from Bryant Pond, has been teaching since 2020. She has taught fifth grade for two years, taking on a lead teacher role, and previously taught third grade. In 2024, she graduated summa cum laude with a master’s in history and is passionate about teaching historical content in innovative and engaging ways.

“I had received an email about teacher education to get professional development hours because we have to do that for our licenses anyway. I thought this would be a good opportunity,” Bryant said. “So I went on the (Pulitzer Center) website and I saw they had teacher fellowships and grant opportunities. So I started looking into it and thought how would I be able to relate this to my fifth-graders.”

This year’s topic was examining interconnected health inequities through global reporting.

“Thinking about it, what global health issue would I see that may be related to my kiddos in Maine?” she said.

“Choices included long-term COVID, sexual abuse in third-world countries, and then going further down the list, I saw cholera. I said, ‘This is interesting because oftentimes, cholera is thought about as being something that happened in history and is no longer (something) that is happening currently.’ So that was my link in how it related to history and how it would relate to my (68) students.”

The nationwide application process includes a series of three cuts.

“It went from 90 applications to a cohort of 12 teachers, so that’s what I ended up getting picked for,” Bryant said.

Bryant applied in August and was notified on Oct. 10. She is also the first teacher in Maine selected for the fellowship.

“We did a Zoom every Wednesday for two hours over two months,” Bryant said. “Those conversations we had helped each other, as well as hearing from journalists who have written stories about health issues that are going on today in different parts of the world. I got so many different perspectives from other teachers what works for them and want doesn’t in their classes with their student base. That was real informative for me to try many different things in my classroom.”

She said it took some reworking to fit this special interest project in her teaching, “which isn’t too terrible for me because I have the flexibility in my subject field to do that. It was definitely more than I thought it was going to be, because I didn’t realize how much I was going to get out of it because there was so much more to it.

“What I did in my class was that I thought back to my student base, knowing their ages, how would they react to the story I was trying to present to them. So I talked about Dr. Qadri, a female in science in her 70s in Bangladesh, who’s been working for the last four decades trying to fight cholera.”

She said Qadri had been doing amazing work, and “I wanted my students to see that females in science are doing amazing things.”

“I did a huge portion on what is clean water, what is dirty water, and showing them pictures of water sources,” Bryant said. “If it looks clean, does it mean that it is clean, because cholera at its base is a germ that you can’t see. Here, where we live, we’re very fortunate because there’s a lot of places you can just go in the water, and just be in the water.”

She said students asked if cholera is a stomach bug.

“Kinda,” Bryant answered, “but it’s a super stomach bug because it dehydrates your body to the point where you can’t move, and you need to get to the hospital.”

“You could definitely see the lightbulbs turn on at times for them. Before, they’re sitting there kind of getting it but not really, but then ‘I understand’ and you could see it happening on their faces a lot of times,” she said.

“What I wanted them to be able to give back to me was a campaign, like a poster, for a call to action where they were going to either promote clean water access, cholera education or vaccines to prevent cholera. I also had a couple of students do a podcast (a script with graphics), which was a new experience for them.”

“I just think it’s great,” Principal Jim Hodgkin said of Bryant’s special interest project. “Amanda is a real go-getter, so she went after this.”

Bryant has completed her special interest project and had her final Pulitzer Zoom meeting on Dec. 15.

She said the $500 prize for being selected for this fellowship will go toward helping with the move when Rumford Elementary School students move to the new Mountain Valley Community School in Mexico in January.