A pair of educators at the State University of New York at Fredonia has landed a prestigious federal grant to lead a contingent of roughly a dozen American Language Arts and Social Studies teachers to the North African nation of Morocco this summer.
 
A $66,000 grant from The Fulbright-Hayes Group Projects Abroad (GPA) Program is funding a Moroccan seminar proposed by Education Professor Barbara Mallette and History Professor Najia Aarim-Heriot of the SUNY Fredonia faculty. It is one of several GPA projects that focus on the humanities, social sciences and language studies within the context of Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Central and South America, Mexico, the Caribbean, Eastern Europe or Eurasia. Fulbright-Hayes grants in recent years have supported programs at such major educational centers as the University of Utah, the University of Colorado, Michigan State University and Brigham Young University.
 
The GPA funding provided to SUNY Fredonia will be used for a short-term seminar that will start with the recruitment of 12 teachers from school districts throughout the eastern United States who will then participate in an online seminar facilitated through SUNY Fredonia that will focus on the culture, government, history and languages of Morocco.
 
A four-week visit to Morocco in late June with Dr. Mallette and Dr. Aarim-Heriot from SUNY Fredonia will follow. Through collaboration with Moulay Ismail University in Meknes – an institution where Dr. Aarim-Heriot served as a professor for nine years – the participants will study the art, history, religion and culture of Morocco. Topics such as governmental transition to a constitutional monarchy, the Moroccan economy, the influence of the nation’s geographic location and introductory Arabic and Berber (a language spoken by indigenous people of the county) will be studied.
 
A post-trip online seminar that will assist the participants in their efforts to bring the lessons learned abroad back to their respective classrooms.
 
"I am thrilled about this opportunity," said Dr. Mallette, a professor in the SUNY Fredonia College of Education. "I am very excited that we have a chance to improve curriculum in classrooms throughout the country. The teachers who participate in this project will take back artifacts from Morocco that will change how they discuss other cultures in the classroom, and, in turn, pass that knowledge along to their own students. That is what I find most exciting, that there is the opportunity for an ongoing ripple effect."