A Brooklyn educator selected for a Fulbright fellowship is now in Peru, collaborating with educators across the country to explore how art and place-based learning can transform a child's experience in school.
Michael Peterson, known throughout the community as “Coach Mike,” has spent the last decade teaching physical education at P.S. 297, a Bed-Stuy elementary school and Peterson’s own alma mater. He was selected to take part in the 2025-2026 Fulbright Teachers for Global Classrooms program, a federal initiative that prepares teachers to bring international perspectives into their schools through short-term exchange and a semester of study.
Currently stationed in Peru, Peterson is collaborating with educators across the country to explore how art and community can intersect to help elevate learning.
Throughout his career, art and place have been touchstones in Peterson’s approach to building community. Before he began working as an educator, he founded YUME YUME, an artistic practice in Crown Heights focused on socially engaged public art. His most recent project, ONE NYC, was funded by city grants and encouraged New Yorkers to examine their shared identities and histories through collaborative art.
Peterson hopes that his time in Peru—which will be followed by a stint in Berlin funded by another fellowship—will prepare him to bring that creativity into the classroom.
“What has struck me most is the way creativity and artistic thinking are integrated throughout the educational experience,” Peterson said of the schools he’s visited in Peru. “Art isn't treated as a separate subject or an occasional enrichment activity. Instead, creative expression is woven into how students learn.”
As a Bed-Stuy native, Peterson also hopes to return ready to help his students appreciate their neighborhood’s stature as a center for art and culture, both within New York and globally.
“Our pyramids just so happen to be our project buildings and the Pfizer building,” Peterson said of Bed-Stuy.
Peterson spent the first half of his childhood in Marcy Houses, a public housing complex. When he was 12, his family moved to Park Slope and Prospect Heights, neighborhoods he remembers as close-knit and multicultural.
As a high schooler, Peterson decided to transfer to John Dewey High School in Gravesend, known at the time for encouraging students to build a curriculum shaped to their own passions. Peterson said he was inspired by teachers there who "lived what they taught," including a ceramics teacher who was a world-renowned artist and a history teacher who was a published author.
Although his career has taken him through finance, music, technology and gaming, Peterson always worked with children, starting with a job at the Salvation Army when he was a teenager. It was a passion he never lost sight of. He ran a music-and-technology lab in South Africa built around DJing, and later worked as a life coach at South Shore High School. There, he found himself asking, "What if every school had a magician?"
At South Shore, Peterson frequently threw “full-blown block parties” for his students at six in the morning. He remembers being asked by his colleagues how he was able to rally so many students to come to school so early. Now, his answer is simple: “It's because you know you're sparking their dreams.”
When he finally decided to become a full-time educator, it seemed to him like a stroke of fate: He was accepted into a selective program called Pathways to P.E., lost 160 pounds, and took over the job his own elementary gym teacher still held. His grandmother still lived in Marcy Houses, just a few blocks from the school; when he told her the news, she said she’d seen it all happen in a dream.
Peterson will cap his fellowship with the completion of a global education guide that is intended to make his learnings from abroad accessible to other educators.
Come September, he plans to go back to teaching at his old elementary school—a job he says he "never wants to leave."
