IUPUI, IUB collaborating with Russian university on language acquisition, global public health issues

Published December 07, 2007

Feldstein
Feldstein

IU has been awarded a two-year, $400,000 federal grant for a project in which faculty and students from two IU campuses will work with a Russian university on language learning and the study of public health and health policy.

The grant, from the U.S. Department of Education's Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, will provide $199,093 in the first year and is expected to provide a similar amount the second year. It was awarded to the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at IU Bloomington in partnership with the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at IUPUI. IU will collaborate on the project with Southern Federal University, Rostov-on-Don, Russia.

"I think that this is a wonderful opportunity for the IU Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures to build bridges, both with our Russian partners at the Southern Federal University in Rostov-on-Don as well as our IUPUI SPEA partner," said Ronald Feldstein, professor and chair of the IUB Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and the principal investigator for the grant. "This is a new and exciting direction for our Russian language teaching program--training in specific language skills and connecting our students to real issues of global health care in its American and Russian contexts."

Also involved with the project from IU are Olena Chernishenko and Steven Franks from the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures; Markus Dickinson from the IUB Department of Linguistics, Denise Gardiner from the College of Arts and Sciences in Bloomington, and Natalia Rekhter from IUPUI SPEA.

This is the first year for the competitive grant program, administered by the U.S. Department of Education FIPSE program and the Russian Ministry of Education and Science, and established under a 2006 agreement signed by Margaret Spellings, U.S. secretary of education, and Andrei Fursenko, Russian minister of education and science. Grants were also awarded to consortia led by the universities of Iowa and Maryland.

The IU-Southern Federal University partnership will include:

•A Global Health Dialogue course taught at IUPUI and available through video conferencing to students in Bloomington and Russia, featuring collaborative student research projects and dissemination on the Web of curriculum, best practices and joint research results.

•A two-week summer field experience course on public health, in which IU students will travel to Russia and students from Southern Federal University will travel to Indiana for a similar course of visits and study.

•New IUB Slavic department courses in "survival" Russian and "specialized content" Russian related to the study of health care, with development of intelligent computer-assisted language learning (ICALL) materials for Russian. Students at IUPUI may take the courses via distance learning.

•An IU degree certificate in international health-care policy.

•Faculty collaboration in fields related to public health.

•Student-faculty working groups and grants for internships, field experiences and language study.

The federal grant will help pay costs for some IU students who travel to Rostov-on-Don, Russia, for the summer study abroad program. For more information on the project and the IU courses, go to this web site: http://www.indiana.edu/~iuslavic/USRussiaHCProgram.shtml

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