Spanish Professor Named Senior Fulbright Specialist
Contact: Kathleen March, 581-2088
Kathleen March, professor of Spanish, has been named a Senior Fulbright Specialist, a designation that places her on a list of specialists selected to receive financial assistance for special teaching projects, typically in a foreign country.
The award requires a rigorous application and selection process. Though the five-year designation period does not include an immediate assignment, it positions a candidate for one, usually of two to six weeks. Specialists can propose a consulting project or they can be contacted by a foreign institution interested in a specialist’s area of expertise.
Fulbright Senior Specialist projects are designed to provide U.S. faculty and professionals with opportunities to collaborate with professional counterparts at non-U.S. post-secondary academic institutions on curriculum and faculty development, institutional planning and a variety of other activities. The program, according to the Fulbright Scholar Program website, seeks to increase the participation of leading U.S. scholars and professionals by enabling new activities that go beyond the traditional Fulbright activities of lecturing and research, and to promote increased connections between U.S. and non-U.S. post-secondary academic institutions.
March anticipates using her expertise to assist in the creation or improvement of language-teaching programs in a Spanish-speaking country. Many countries can benefit from the adaptation of traditional language-teaching techniques to more interactive communicative learning, and by utilizing newer technologies that deliver the most effective instructional material, March says.
March has taught at UMaine since 1984, was a Fulbright scholar in Spain in 1977-1978 as a graduate student at State University of New York in Buffalo, and routinely leads UMaine students in service-learning or volunteer visits to Central American towns and villages.