IUPUI Receives New Fulbright-Hays Group Projects Abroad Program Grant for "Understanding Kenya Through Partnership and Service: Focus on Curriculum Development"

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The Fulbright-Hays Group Projects Abroad (GPA) Program in the U.S. Department of Education has awarded an $85,180 grant to IUPUI’s Office of International Affairs for a curriculum internationalization project titled “Understanding Kenya through Partnership and Service: Focus on Curriculum Development.”

The grant will support a small group of IUPUI faculty and students as well as several IPS teachers in a month-long program of workshops and lectures taught by faculty at Moi University in Kenya, one of IUPUI’s strategic partners. This seminar will take place in Kenya during summer 2009. It aims at establishing a sustainable network of key constituencies in central Indiana and their counterparts in Kenya that carries forward a collaborative approach to teaching on Africa, long after the seminar is over. The seminar will foster an understanding of Africa that comes from direct experience, dialogue with Africans, and collaborative service activities. It will advance teaching on Africa, Kenya, and Swahili for the two major public educational systems of Indiana’s largest city and build an interdisciplinary platform for undergraduate study abroad at Moi.

Building upon the remarkable Indiana–Kenya Partnership in HIV/AIDS prevention, treatment, and recovery, the project will engage the serious issues now facing the continent, while simultaneously recognizing the significant social and cultural resources Africans are bringing to bear on these issues. Participants will produce faculty development materials, enhance existing courses, and establish new ones—including a college-level study abroad program and introductory Swahili. The fourteen participants have been selected from IUPUI and IPS with an eye toward those best able to multiply the effect of what they have learned by spreading it to others, in the best position to incorporate teaching on Africa into programs or courses, and with greatest potential for continuing to network with each other and with Kenyans after the seminar is over.

This project furthers IUPUI’s strategic partnership with Moi University. IUPUI was awarded the 2009 Andrew Heiskell Award for Innovation in International Education for developing sustainable partnerships to unite faculty across disciplines.

Seventy-five percent of the total program costs will be funded by GPA with the remaining twenty-five percent to come from non-federal government sources. Dawn Michele Whitehead, director of curriculum internationalization, is the project director. Stephanie Leslie, director of study abroad, is assistant director. The group will travel to Kenya from July 6, 2009 through August 6, 2009.

http://www.iupui.edu/~oia/IA/