Ryan Maxwell, Marquette law student, has been awarded a Fulbright Specialist Program award from the U.S. Department of State and the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board. The award is allowing Maxwell to conduct a variety of educational and training activities within the field of Education at the Varkey Foundation in Argentina.
The Varkey Foundation is a non-profit based in the United Kingdom and dedicated to improving education globally. Maxwell and the Varkey Foundation are collaborating to bring “deeper learning”—project-based, character-focused education—to local schools.
As part of the Fulbright, Maxwell spent roughly two weeks in Argentina and found himself quite busy.
“Just my first week included working inside the Palacio Sarmiento at the Secretary of Education’s office on strategic planning with a local education organization,” Maxwell said via email. “(We also presented) on character education and project-based learning at a TED-style public event; visited schools with the Varkey Foundation team as they debrief early implementation of a character-education initiative; and delivered a three-hour workshop on deeper learning and project-based learning at Universidad Católica Argentina.”
Maxwell is the founder of Exceptionally Good Leadership, LLC, an education leadership consulting practice working with schools, districts, and nonprofits on leadership development and organizational design — mostly in under-resourced urban communities. It’s this work that inspired his path to Marquette Law School.
“I came to law school part-time because I kept running into the same pattern in my education work,” Maxwell said. “So many of the challenges educators and school leaders face aren’t instructional problems or school/district leadership issues — they are system and policy problems. I wanted the tools to understand and eventually help shape the legal and policy structures that enable positive educational efforts. As a case like Brown v. Board of Education shows, law can certainly be used as a means for making change in that system.”
Prior to launching Exceptionally Good Leadership, Maxwell spent 25 years as a teacher, school leader, and senior leader for a national nonprofit education organization.
While abroad, he is grateful for the support from Marquette Law School.
“I’d also like to say thank you to all the professors and classmates at the law school who were very supportive for this experience during the semester,” Maxwell added. “Cura personalis is not just a slogan at Marquette, it’s an ethos that I’ve felt from afar.”
Maxwell is one of more than 400 U.S. citizens who share their expertise with institutions abroad through the Fulbright Specialist Program each year. The Fulbright Specialist Program sends U.S. faculty, administrators, and professionals to serve as short-term experts at institutions around the world, where they address critical global issues while building relationships, expertise, and leadership in support of the long-term interests of the United States. Recipients are selected based on their academic and professional achievements, demonstrated leadership in their field, and their potential to foster long-term cooperation between institutions in the United States and abroad.
For 80 years, the Fulbright Program has given more than 400,000 exceptional Americans and participants from 160 countries opportunities to study, teach, conduct cutting-edge research, advance critical industries, and develop solutions to shared international concerns. Fulbright alumni have achieved distinction in many fields, including 60 Nobel laureates, 93 Pulitzer Prize winners, 83 MacArthur fellows, 46 heads of state or government, and countless leaders in all sectors and industries across the United States and around the world. For further information about the Fulbright Program, please visit https://fulbrightspecialist.worldlearning.org/.
