Laragh teacher completes Fulbright year in Milwaukee

- Róisín McManus -

Cavan teacher Eimear Coyle has recently returned home after completing a Fulbright year teaching Irish in Milwaukee in the United States.

The Laragh native and Home Economics and Irish teacher spent the past year teaching Irish to third-level and adult students in the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Eimear, who attended Loreto College Cavan before completing her teaching degree in St Angela's in Sligo in 2024, was encouraged to apply for the Fulbright Irish Foreign Language Teaching Assistantship (FLTA) Award for the 2025-2026 academic year as it gave her an opportunity to travel while using her Irish.

“I never thought an opportunity to go abroad teaching Irish existed,” Eimear told the Celt following her return to the Breffni county. “I thought, why not give it a go?”

Stateside, Eimear taught all levels of Irish, ranging from beginners to students who have been to the Gaeltacht in Glencolmcille, Co Donegal and have “amazing Irish”. The university allows retired people to take classes for free, and Eimear also taught some of these students.

“There’s a great sense of community, they all want to be part of it. A lot of them have Irish heritage that they want to acknowledge through learning the language,” Eimear praises her students, who she says are “second to none”.

Her students mainly wanted to learn conversational Irish.

“I’m used to students who have a bit of background knowledge so it was new to me to teach some complete beginners, but I think the big difference was they’ve chosen to do it and they’re paying extortionate fees, so they want to learn it.”

Eimear also got to take some classes without sitting exams, including a class on psychology, nutrition, American pop music and ethnobotany, where she got to tap maple trees for sap and boil the sap down into maple syrup, which she really enjoyed.

The American college lifestyle is “very different” to the Irish one. Where Irish students might get an assignment at the end of the semester to determine their results, students in America tend to get homework every week that is often made up of multiple choice questions.

“There’s so many opportunities to bring up your grade if you’re not doing well,” Eimear explains, adding that you can attend an event for extra credit or be sent to a teaching assistant for help.

“It’s a lot more of a laidback approach,” the secondary school teacher feels. “They really are rooting for you. They set you up for success, they want you to do well.”

In her experience, the college community is “closer” in America than in Ireland as they are all “very supportive” of each other.

After spending five years studying in Sligo, Eimear spent a year teaching in Monaghan before she moved to Milwaukee, a big city with “everything on your doorstep”.

Moving to America in recent turbulent times was “definitely nervewracking” but she assures that the people on the ground are “very different” to what you might see in the media.

“What you see in headlines is the extremes of it all but day to day, they’re just people,” she observes, adding that she did avoid talking about politics just in case.

Eimear believes she “hit the jackpot” getting placed in Milwaukee as it was the “perfect place” for her.

Travelling was her “main goal” and she “definitely achieved” it over the course of the year.

While there weren’t many Fulbright teaching assistants on her campus, she occasionally met up with other Irish teachers placed in other universities, visiting nearby Chicago and going to see Luke Combs perform in Indiana.

She went on weekend trips to places like San Francisco, got paid to volunteer at a “mighty” over 40s hurling tournament in Las Vegas and was given the opportunity to present at a conference in Honolulu in Hawaii, where she ended up stuck on a beach as there was a storm on another part of the island.

She was involved with the Shamrock Club, an Irish American club that meets once per month and gives scholarships to the students Eimear taught to attend the Gaeltacht in Ireland.

She also joined ‘Purls and Pints’, a knitting group in an Irish pub, where members would get together and knit for two hours on a Monday evening.

“The entire experience was a dream,” Eimear enthuses.

Back in Ireland, Eimear is now on the job hunt for next year, and her time spent teaching adults has encouraged her to maybe get involved in adult education in future.

As to her love of Irish, that stems from her teenage years of being sent to the Gaeltacht in Coláiste na bhFiann in Drumree, Co Meath, where she worked as a cúntóir cistine, helping out in the kitchen. She now works as a Bean an Tí for them every summer.

Summers spent there working in the kitchen and using the Irish language encouraged her to look into teaching Home Ec and Irish.

“I owe a lot to them,” Eimear says. “I definitely found my grá for the Gaeilge there.”