GHC Gets Foreign Language Teacher Grant

and Southern Polytechnic State University have received a Foreign Language Teaching Assistant grant from the Fulbright program and the Institute for International Education. Thanks to a collaborative effort between the two institutions, GHC and SPSU will jointly host Ignacio Lau, a faculty member of the National University of Tucuman in northern Argentina, for the 2011-2012 academic year.

As a foreign language teaching assistant, he will work with GHC Spanish faculty Amanda Nichols at the Marietta campus and Kathryn Garcia at the Cartersville campus. Lau will serve as a native assistant in the classroom, a tutor, guest speaker and cultural ambassador.  He will also take courses in American literature and history at GHC and SPSU and will assist Bernice Nuhfer-Halten, who is a Spanish professor at SPSU, with her courses.

GHC and SPSU received the Fulbright FLTA grant through the efforts of Bronson Long, director of the Global Initiatives and Study Abroad program at GHC and Raj Sashti, director of International Program Development at SPSU. While SPSU has hosted Fulbright scholars in the past, this is the first FLTA grant for both institutions.

Bronson Long, who is also an assistant professor of history at GHC, sees a greater knowledge of global cultures and economies as crucial to navigating successfully in the 21st Century. 

"While Fulbright grants are very competitive and prestigious, the FLTA award is especially useful to Georgia Highlands College as a teaching-focused institution," he said. "The presence of a native-speaking Spanish assistant from Argentina in our classrooms will provide a boost to the Spanish program and will allow students to interact with someone from an important Latin American nation that many of them know little about."