posted December 1, 2008
International Travel Fund Grants Awarded
Four faculty members have been awarded International Travel Fund grants by the College of Education’s Office of International Initiatives. Both the Office of International Initiatives and the International Travel Fund were created in fall 2008 to support new and ongoing international initiatives by members of the College of Education.
Lea Ann Christenson (PDS Coordinator, Human Development) will participate in Dr. Paula Beckman’s (EDSP) winter term study abroad course, El Salvador’s Children: Risk, Poverty and Education, January 8-23. 2009. She recently defended her dissertation in the area of emergent literacy in kindergarten. Prior to completing her doctoral studies focusing on emergent literacy in kindergarten, she worked for 18 years as a kindergarten and first grade teacher, ESOL teacher as well as an Assistant Principal in California public schools with high numbers of ELL students. As a participant in the El Salvador study tour she will lend her expertise in efforts to assist the schools and/or with ESOL classes for the people in the village that the program will be serving.
Upon her return, Dr. Christenson plans to offer professional development to in-service teachers in our partner schools which have high numbers of ELL students, many from Central America. Presentations stemming from her participation in this course will help local teachers understand more about their students’ experiences before they arrived in U.S. classrooms and in turn inform practice.
Kathryn Amey Degnan (Assistant Professor, Human Development) received funds to attend a collaborative meeting with the research team on the Bucharest Early Intervention Project (BEIP) in Bucharest, Romania. The BEIP project has followed children raised in institutions in Romania from early in life (6-32 months) to 54 months of age. Some of these children were placed into foster care and some have remained in the institution for the majority of their childhood. The visit will allow her to observe the research site as well as train and supervise the behavioral coding of peer interactive behavior from the 8-year follow-up assessment.
During the past few months, Dr. Degnan has been collaborating over the internet with the research assistant for the project in Bucharest. This trip to Bucharest will allow her to meet with the other coders in person and formally train them on coding for reliability. Moreover, being a part of this collaborative initiative and visiting the research site in Bucharest, Romania will assist her in developing a more global perspective by enhancing her understanding of child development throughout Romanian history and the present culture as well as gain a better understanding of what life in a Romanian institution was like for these children.
Steven Selden (Professor, Education Policy Studies) received funds to deliver an invited, peer-reviewed paper at the 2008 International Conference on Tradition and Innovation on Curriculum and Instruction for 21st Century, Beijing China: “Tradition and Innovation in 21st Century Education: The Challenge to Character/Moral Education in the Curriculum.”
While in China, Dr. Selden will meet with the president of Beijing Normal University to discuss possible collaborative projects with the University of Maryland such as study abroad programs, targeted Fulbright exchanges, and an elementary school-to-school friendship exchange program with nearby Paint Branch Elementary School. Dr. Selden also plans to discuss joint research with Chinese faculty on each respective country’s representations as presented in the Chinese and the U.S. school curriculum as well as collaborative research related to closing the achievement gap in U.S. and Chinese schools.
Min Wang (Associate Professor, Human Development) plans to spend two months in spring 2009 at the Max Plank Institute (MPI) for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, one of the top institutes in the world for the study of language and cognition. She will work with the research group, “The Dynamics of Multilingual Processing” and be hosted by Dr. Marianne Gullberg, one of the PIs leading the group.
While visiting the MPI, Dr. Wang will develop a grant proposal which will focus on bilingual children’s processing of morphologically complex words and its relation to reading achievements. Her research will continue to focus on Chinese and Korean children and will contribute to our understanding of how young children acquire complex words in their two languages, as well as how children’s ability to process complex words facilitates their word level reading and text comprehension.
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