Last modified: Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Indiana University awarded grant for IU-Russia project on language study, health care
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
NOV. 27, 2007
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Indiana University has been awarded a two-year, $400,000 federal grant for a project in which faculty and students from two IU campuses will work with a Russian university on language learning and the study of public health and health policy.
The grant, from the U.S. Department of Education's Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, will provide $199,093 in the first year and is expected to provide a similar amount the second year. It was awarded to the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Indiana University Bloomington in partnership with the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. Indiana University will collaborate on the project with Southern Federal University, Rostov-on-Don, Russia.
"I think that this is a wonderful opportunity for the Indiana University Department of Slavic languages and Literatures to build bridges both with our Russian partners at the Southern Federal University in Rostov-on-Don, as well as our IUPUI SPEA partner," said Ronald Feldstein, professor and chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and the principal investigator for the grant. "This is a new and exciting direction for our Russian language teaching program -- training in specific language skills and connecting our students to real issues of global health care in its American and Russian contexts."
Also involved with the project from IU are Olena Chernishenko and Steven Franks from the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Markus Dickinson from the Department of Linguistics, Denise Gardiner from the College of Arts and Sciences office, and Natalia Rekhter from IUPUI SPEA.
This is the first year for the competitive grant program, administered by the U.S. Department of Education FIPSE program and the Russian Ministry of Education and Science, and established under a 2006 agreement signed by Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings and Russian Education and Science Minister Andrei Fursenko. Grants were also awarded to consortia led by the universities of Iowa and Maryland.
The IU-Southern Federal University partnership will include:
- A "Global Health Dialogue" course taught at IUPUI and available through video conferencing to students in Bloomington and Russia, featuring collaborative student research projects and dissemination on the Web of curriculum, best practices and joint research results.
- A two-week summer field experience course on public health, in which IU students will travel to Russia and students from Southern Federal University will travel to Indiana for a similar course of visits and study.
- New IUB Slavic department courses in "survival" Russian and "specialized content" Russian related to the study of health care, with development of intelligent computer-assisted language learning (ICALL) materials for Russian. Students at IUPUI may take the courses via distance learning.
- An Indiana University degree certificate in international health care policy.
- Faculty collaboration in fields related to public health.
- Student-faculty working groups and grants for internships, field experiences and language study.
The federal grant will help pay costs for some IU students who travel to Rostov-on-Don, Russia, for the summer study abroad program. For more information on the project and the IU courses, see https://www.indiana.edu/~iuslavic/USRussiaHCProgram.shtml.
The Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, part of the College of Arts and Sciences at IU Bloomington, awards doctoral, master's, and bachelor's degrees and offers a full array of language, literature, culture, and linguistics courses for students interested in the study of Russian, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, Czech, Macedonian, Polish, Romanian and Ukrainian. Its Summer Workshop in Slavic, East European and Central Asian Languages (SWSEEL), in which students complete a full year of college language instruction during a single eight-week summer session, is the largest such program in the United States.
The Indiana University School of Public and Environmental Affairs at IUPUI awards master's degrees in health administration and public affairs and bachelor's degrees in criminal justice, health services management, public affairs, and public health. SPEA IUPUI offers the only Master of Health Administration program in Indiana accredited by the Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Management Education
