This academic year, the Fulbright Program has given three of its Community College Faculty Awards to American scholars to teach or do research in Russia.
Next spring a group of community-college administrators will travel to Moscow as part of a new Fulbright project to discuss work-force development, adult education, and other issues central to their missions.
These two programs, while distinct, represent one way in which Fulbright is developing strategic partnerships abroad. In this case, community-college representatives and U.S. government officials are working together to share information with Russia as it reforms its vocational education system.
Russian leaders are interested in what community colleges can teach them about forming partnerships with local industry, tailoring programs to economic needs, and strengthening teaching.
These conversations began last year, when a high-level community-college delegation spent several days in Moscow and nearby cities talking to administrators, faculty members, and students at a handful of institutions.
Russian academics were curious about the American model, says Joe D. May, president of the Louisiana Community & Technical College system, who was part of that delegation.
But he is clear that American representatives were not interested in imposing their ideas on their Russian counterparts.
“We weren’t talking about going over there and starting a community college,” he says. “We were talking about taking some ideas and working with them, a cross-pollination.”
The trip was fruitful enough that Fulbright plans to send another delegation to Russia next April, through the new Community College Administrators Seminar. Anthony Koliha, director of the Fulbright Program in Russia, says he has received a number of applications from high-level administrators.
Scholarly Work
In the meantime, several community-college scholars are already working in Russia or headed there soon. One is Louis Pinkett, an adjunct professor in English at Camden County College, in New Jersey, who teaches composition primarily to students for whom English is a second language.
Mr. Pinkett arrived at Pyatigorsk State Linguistic University, in the southwestern part of the country, a few weeks ago to offer a course on using American film to teach writing.
But Mr. Pinkett, who spent a year as a State Department-sponsored English Language Fellow in Belarus, knows that his role will probably be much more fluid, and broader, than that.
“You sort of try to work with everybody on all these different things,” he says, adding that he could see projects developing on topics as varied as phonetics and political discourse.
Brian Donnelly, who also received a Community College Faculty Award, will be spending four months at Kazan State Pedagogical Institution, east of Moscow.
A visiting scholar at the University of Texas at Austin under its Community College Leadership Program, Mr. Donnelly will be examining the potential for the development of the community-college model in Russia.
Mr. Donnelly says Kazan, a city with 1.3 million people, has a number of colleges akin to vocational schools. His goal is to get a handle on what government officials and educators would like to see develop, particularly in terms of adult and continuing education.
Some of the relationships that are taken for granted in the United States, such as industry’s role in the development of academic programs, are novel concepts in Russia, he says: “There are processes that aren’t being used and haven’t been used that we may be able to help with.”
While his Fulbright was designed independently of the higher-level meetings between American and Russian administrators, Mr. Donnelly says he hopes his research can aid them in future discussions.
Meanwhile, Mr. Pinkett encourages his fellow community-college professors to apply for Fulbright fellowships or otherwise get involved in teaching abroad.
“In this sometimes difficult world, friends are important,” he writes in a follow-up e-mail message. “Russia and the U.S. have many common needs, which are sometimes forgotten in government-level relations and the politicking involved. … I value the contribution I am able to make.”