WEB NEWS RELEASE
COLLEGE PARK, MD (May 2011) Each year, the US Department of State awards 1,500 students Fulbright grants to conduct research in over 140 countries worldwide. This year, the College of Education at the University of Maryland is pleased to announce that Department of Education Leadership, Higher Education and International Education (EDHI) doctoral students Meredith McCormac and D. Brent Edwards have received grants for 2011–2012 academic year.
McCormac and Edwards will both spend up to ten months overseas conducting research in international education for their dissertations. In January of 2012, McCormac will travel to Ethiopia to study their education system. "My research project focuses on studying Ethiopias large national educational improvement program," comments McCormac. "For the past ten years theres been this global focus on improving access to educationand whats suffering when we improve this access is the quality of education being offered." She chose Ethiopia because not only was she familiar with the country after working on international education projects for NGOs like World Learning and the American Institutes for Research she was also curious about how a country can assess quality improvement in education. "This is essentially a case study; I want to study the type of aid the World Bank is giving to this program as well as how you can effectively assess quality improvement within an education system." McCormac plans to travel with her husband to Ethiopia.
While McCormac travels to Africa, Edwards will be in Central America. From November 2011 to the summer of 2012, Edwards will be collecting data for his dissertation in El Salvador. "Ive been doing research on the processes of education policy formation in El Salvador," says Edwards. "These processes involve a range of actors from the local to the global levelvarying from representatives from the countrys ministry of education to the World Bank, the United States Agency for International Development and even Harvard University." Edwards is returning to El Salvador to research how the three major instances of education policy formation occurred that have taken place since the end of the civil war in 1991. "Decentralization of education management has been a major issue in El Salvador since the early 1990s and has been at the center of educational change in that country." In addition to the Fulbright Grant, Edwards has received a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship and the Golden Key Honor Society Graduate Scholarship.
In 2010, the Fulbright Program awarded approximately six thousand grants, at a cost of more than $327.3 million, to U.S. students, teachers, professionals, and scholars to study, teach, lecture, and conduct research in more than 155 countries, and to their foreign counterparts to engage in similar activities in the United States.
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For more information on the College of Education, visit: www.education.umd.edu
or contact
Halima Cherif, Assistant Director for Communications, at: hcherif@umd.edu
