Grant Funds Cultural Exchange for Teachers

Thanks to a newly funded 3-year $210,000 grant from the Borchardt/Triangle Community Foundation, the College of Education continues to internationalize teacher education. The project, led by CED faculty members Kevin Oliver, Angela Wiseman and Ruie Pritchard is entitled, “Preparing Teachers for Cultural Connections, Collections, and Reflections through Technology.”

The project, focused on Finland, begins this spring and is designed to provide teachers educational and international experiences that engage them in technology-enabled strategies in support of their own cultural understanding and future classroom applications. Fifteen teachers will be selected each of three years to participate in the program that includes Saturday classes at NC State preceding a two-week immersion experience in Finland. The project not only involves sending teachers to Finland, but includes more in depth exchange by funding travel for Finnish teacher educators to come to NC State every spring to meet with teachers and discuss Finland’s teacher preparation and education systems. Finland was chosen to give participants exposure to a different, highly regarded education system.

According to Oliver, “teachers will learn strategies for connecting with global classrooms and each will carry out a global collaborative project with a Scandinavian classroom before we travel abroad.” The PI’s also plan to include instruction in technology such as Google Maps, History Pin and Voicethread to teach strategies for crowd curating cultural collections in addition to cultural reflections through writing.