Chris Adduci has won the Lilly Teacher Creativity Fellowship Scholarship.
The Lilly Teacher Creativity Fellowship Scholarship Program (TCFP) provided Adduci with an all-expense paid summer trip to Italy. In 2024, there were 104 recipients of the award in Indiana, with each recipient receiving $15,000.
TCFP is a program where public school teachers renew their teaching commitments through experiences and exploration. Full-time education professionals such as K-12 classroom teachers of all subjects, principals and assistant principals, librarians and media specialists, school counselors, school social workers, and instructional coaches who work in Indiana are eligible to apply.
Adduci is currently an English teacher and was formerly an assistant principal at Bloomington South. Although she grew up in Chicago, her family is originally from Italy, which is where she will use her scholarship money.
“I will be taking cooking classes and learning some of the recipes for some of the techniques my grandparents brought over,” Adduci said. She described that she has “a recipe box with recipes written from [her] great grandparents who lived in Italy” and is planning to create a cookbook once she can make sense of the specific ingredients and substitutions that were translated from Italian to English.
“It was a natural trip that I’ve always wanted to take,” Adduci said. “I thought it would be a great way to honor them and to see the towns where [my family] immigrated from.”
On this Italian vacation, Adduci explained how her, her husband, her oldest daughter, her sister, her niece, and her aunt will also be joining her on the trip. She explained how this trip is something “that [she] hopes [her] children will learn from [her],” and how she is “super excited.”
Previous South teacher winners have traveled throughout the Midwest, trekked trails in the American West, and visited Argentina, Israel, the UK, and Brazil.
