GV ties five schools for second most Fulbright scholars
Courtesy Photo / gvsu.edu Erik Nordman, assistant professor of natural resources management, will teach for a full academic year at Kenyatta University in Nairobi, Kenya.
Nov 4, 2012
Three Grand Valley State University faculty members within colleges offering Master’s programs were awarded the universally competitive Fulbright Scholarship. The list of all the scholars was composed by the Chronicle of Higher Education, and GVSU tied with five other Master’s institutions for having the second most award recipients in the country.
Ashok Kumar, professor of management in the Seidman College of Business; John Bender, associate professor of chemistry; and Erik Nordman, assistant professor of natural resources management, were the recipients for the 2011-2012 Fulbright Scholarships.
The Fulbright Scholarships give faculty members the chance to teach abroad at a different university. Kumar will teach in Delhi, India, during the fall semester, Bender will be at Babes-Bolanyi University in Cluj, Romania, and Nordman will spend an academic year with Kenyatta University in Nairobi, Kenya.
The competitive program started the U.S. International Educational Exchange Program, offering various grants to both individual faculty and institutions to give educators the chance to research, study and teach overseas.
Mark Schaub of GVSU’s Padnos International Center, is the campus representative for the Fulbright organization and was a previous recipient of the scholarship in 2006. Schaub said teaching classes of non-Americans in a non-American setting challenges the instructor.
“The instructor (has) to think far more broadly than he or she otherwise might,” Schaub said.
“In my case, I taught a course about the U.S. and its business communication and culture for a class of students from 12 different countries, none of them American. I had to stretch my thinking.”
Since the beginning of the program, over 85,000 U.S. scholars have become Fulbright scholars and traveled abroad to participate in university lecturing, research and various other educational activities.
“It is a chance for them to gain experience in teaching and researching in a new environment, learn about higher education in a new cultural context, and provide them an opportunity to be a representative of the USA in a positive way – through education,” Schaub said.
