Tech professor is Fulbright winner—again

-- BLACKSBURG -- Virginia Tech professor Mary Alice Barksdale has been awarded a Fulbright Scholar grant again, this time for educational research in South Africa.

Barksdale, an associate professor in Tech's College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences' Department of Teaching and Learning, will spend the spring semester conducting research in a primary school in Port Elizabeth while affiliated with Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University. Barksdale will implement a literacy program in which children will write, illustrate and informally publish their own stories.

The resulting publications will serve as texts to provide reading practice and to support literacy achievement.

Since most schools in Sub-Saharan Africa lack sufficient quantities of culturally relevant text materials for reading practice and instruction, this project has been designed as a model of how schools can create some of their own texts to support literacy learning.

A repeat Fulbright recipient, Barksdale partnered with the Hertzen Pedagogical Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1995, where she participated in a lecturing Fulbright rather than a research Fulbright. Her work for that Fulbright centered on teacher education reform and improvement.

Recipients of Fulbright awards are selected on the basis of academic or professional achievement and because they have demonstrated extraordinary leadership potential in their fields.

Established in 1946, the Fulbright program is America's flagship international education exchange activity and is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State.