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OSWEGO, NY – The J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board and its partners recently awarded Dr. Alfred Frederick, a professor of curriculum and instruction at SUNY Oswego, the sixth Fulbright grant of his career.
Frederick will spend six weeks next fall as a Fulbright senior specialist in education at the University of Abomey-Calavi in Benin.
Since 1990, he has received three traditional Fulbright awards and three senior specialist grants to teach, conduct research and consult in Benin and Brazil.
His trip to Benin next fall will be his third in 2008, he said. He plans to travel to the West African nation to work with educators there in January and again in June at his own expense.
Under the Fulbright grant, Frederick’s hosts will be two units of the University of Abomey-Calavi, the teacher training school and the physical education and sports institute.
Frederick will conduct workshops for students and faculty there on curriculum development and evaluation, multicultural education, teaching methods, and assessing student performance.
The workshops will promote the effective implementation of the curriculum reform proposals that were the focus of Frederick’s first two stays in Benin under the Fulbright Scholar Program.
He coordinated a research team that produced an evaluation of the schooling process in
Benin.
Last year, Benin’s Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education published the result of that work, “The Integration of Language, School and Community: Bridging the Gap Between Home and School (A Paradigm for Monitoring, Assessing and Improving the Schooling Process),” in both French and English.
The book has been distributed to 7,500 teachers in Benin.
Frederick has attracted many educators to the cause of developing Benin’s educational system, both in that country and in the United States.
At SUNY Oswego, Project CLIMB (Collaborative Link for Instructor Mentoring in Benin) sent six School of Education faculty members to Benin in 2006 and brought 10 school inspectors from Benin to Oswego for professional development last summer.
The latest spinoff of his work is a study-abroad course for students at SUNY Oswego.
They will travel to France and Benin to study and experience those countries’ educational systems in January.
Frederick’s credentials include having taught at the primary, secondary and university levels in English, French and Portuguese; having conducted research on culturally relevant teaching in the United States, Belgium, France, Brazil, Nigeria and Benin; and having published two books on his findings.
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